Fatally Flaky

Fatally Flaky

Diane Mott Davidson

TO CAROLYN MARINO

with deep gratitude for excellent editing

and for possessing a kind heart and a light touch

Life does not cease to be funny when people die

any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

—GEORGE

BERNARD

SHAW

About the Publisher

BRIDEZILLA

BILLIE’S

WEDDING

RECEPTION

MENU

Aspen Meadow, Colorado

For her wedding on June 8, no, July 15, no, August 22

Grilled Artichoke Skewers with Rémoulade

Deviled Eggs with Caviar

Crab Cakes with Sauce Gribiche

New-Potato Salad with Fresh Dill and Crème Fraîche

Chilled Haricots Verts Vinaigrette

Baguettes and Butter

Chocolate and Vanilla Ice Creams

Wedding Cake

1

Cynics say getting married is a death wish.

Now, I’m no Pollyanna, but I try to ignore cynics. Anyway, what I usually say is that catering weddings is a death wish. My assistant, twenty-two-year-old Julian Teller, and I laugh at that. Yucking it up provides a bit of comic relief within the stress of serving trays of appetizers with drinks, then lunch or dinner with wine, followed by cake with champagne or Asti Spumante—and doing it all quickly—to a hundred guests. Trust me: if there’s one thing caterers need at weddings, it’s comic relief.

Unfortunately, the events surrounding Bridezilla Billie Attenborough’s wedding proved the truth of the original axiom. Still, it wasn’t a death wish that proved troublesome. It was death itself. And as the bodies piled up around the Attenborough nuptials, I began to think someone was gunning for me, too.

Turned out, I was right.

I’M ALWAYS TELLING my husband, Tom, an investigator with the Furman County Sheriff’s Department, that I should adore weddings. The reason? I love being married—to him, that is. With his mountain-man build, handsome face, jauntily parted cider-colored hair, and eyes as green as a faraway sea, he’s not only kind and loving—he’s gorgeous.

“You’re prejudiced,” he says.

“So what?” I reply. “You’re still the greatest.”

“There are any number of criminals in our state penal system who would take issue with that assessment.”

“I’m not married to one of them.”

“Uh-huh.”

Actually, having Tom for a husband means I can watch brides and grooms kiss, laugh, and embrace, and I can smile to myself, knowing I’m going home to a great man. So when there are wedding glitches, I remind myself: I’m helping people get married. And by and large, this is a good thing.

Here in Aspen Meadow, Colorado, if someone is going to have a hundred or fewer guests at their ceremony and reception, I’m the caterer of choice, by which I mean, I’m the only caterer you can choose. Our town also has but one florist, one photographer, one printing press—for invitations and the like—and a few bands. But these days, most couples choose a DJ.

Aspen Meadow has one of those, too.

If the bride, groom, or either family wants a bigger celebration, she, he, or they usually do all their own arrangements, and have their wedding down in Denver, forty miles to the east. There, you can hire a wedding planner, book a fancy venue, and have your pick of caterers, stationers, florists, even chocolatiers. If you go that route, though, you’re going to pay. What with the gown, limos, and all the rest, you’re probably looking at about a hundred grand.

I can remember when a hundred grand used to buy a house. And a nice one, too.

But for a hundred or fewer guests, I can do all the arranging. Once I’m given a bud get and specifics as to menu, flowers, photographer, music, you name it, I draw up a detailed contract, then get signatures, along with a down payment. After that, I call the vendors, set the schedule, and arrange deliveries. Any changes to the contract mean big bucks, so generally, people are content to leave well enough alone.

But Bridezilla Billie, as I’d come to call her, was never content. Billie’s long-suffering mother, Charlotte, was footing the bill—Attenborough père having died of a bleeding ulcer long ago—and Billie seemed not to care that every single new arrangement she was demanding was costing hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

“It won’t be a problem,” Billie would say breezily, each time she called in April, then May, then June, to say we absolutely had to have lunch so she could talk about new things she wanted. “We can just put all this on my tab.”

And then I would arrive at the appointed time, at what ever place she’d said she wanted to have lunch. And she would be late, usually more than an hour late. The reason? She’d say she’d gotten lost, never mind that she’d lived in Aspen Meadow all her life. Or her Mercedes wouldn’t start. Or she’d thought we were meeting an hour after when she’d originally said. One time, when she didn’t show up at all and I called her house, she said she thought we were meeting the following week.

Billie was, in short, a flake.

Like most of the weddings I cater, Billie’s ceremony was taking place in the summer. Let the weather cheer you up, I told myself as I typed up contract change after contract change and faxed them through to Charlotte Attenborough.

And so I planned and ordered food, and waited for spring, which at eight thousand feet above sea level, generally doesn’t arrive until June. By then, the thick crust of ice on our town’s lake has melted. The fresh scent of pollinating pines and newly leafy aspens fills the air. With snow still blanketing the Continental Divide—visible in the distance—the setting is particularly idyllic.

But this summer was different.

“Maybe I should quit doing weddings,” I told Tom when Bridezilla Billie stopped insisting we have lunch, and instead started phoning me an average of seventeen times a day. She’d already moved her wedding date twice. The reason? She said she wanted to lose twenty pounds to fit into a new dress she’d just bought. She claimed she was working with Victor Lane out at Gold Gulch Spa to get into tip-top shape. Getting into tip-top shape was the euphemism Billie used for trying to sweat off some of her rolls, the kind that had nothing to do with Parker House.

Did I know Victor Lane? Billie asked. Yes, I began, but she tossed her highlighted blond hair over her shoulder, helped herself to the Key Lime Pie I’d left on the counter, and cut me off just as she placed an enormous piece of pie on a plate in front of herself. Once she’d forked up a mouthful, she was eager to provide me with an update on embroidery that was being added to the waist of the new dress. Then I heard about the seed pearls that were being sewn into the train, and the lace now edging the veil.

Aside from myself, I’ll tell you who I had sympathy for: her dressmaker.

“Why do you put up with her?” asked Jack Carmichael, my godfather, who had moved to Aspen Meadow from New Jersey in February. “I mean, I’m going out with Charlotte, and I can barely stand to listen to Billie for a New York minute.”

“I feel sorry for Billie,” I said.

Jack raised his gray eyebrows and did one of his energetic little waltzes around my kitchen. “You want to feel sorry for someone, make it her poor mother. You’re too kind, Gertie Girl.”

Gertie Girl was the nickname Jack had always used for me. It was short for Gertrude, my real name. Jack didn’t like the name Goldy, he’d told me when I was very small. It had been one of the times he’d shown up without warning at our house, laden with gift bags full of books, puzzles, and games. He always loved to pose riddles to me, too. “What word appeared when So met Imes?” he asked when I was five. After a moment, I shrieked, “Sometimes!” which had caused him to erupt in gales of laughter.

“I learned kindness from you,” I replied, when he stopped dancing around my kitchen. In addition to all the goodies Jack had always bestowed on me, he’d written me letters when I was away at school. And he’d sympathized with me when I was trying to get out of my first marriage, to an abusive doctor, now deceased, thank God.

To me, Jack was the model of the perfect godfather, which I told him often.

In my kitchen now, he hugged me, and I handed him a batch of the salty fried pecans I’d made for him and his new drinking buddy, a recently retired, much-loved local physician named Harold Finn. They relished the pecans with their scotch. I invited them over often, but they seldom came. Sometimes I worried that the nuts were the only food the two of them ate.

Well. No matter how many contract changes I was forced to make for Billie Attenborough, I kept telling myself to be patient. At age thirty-six, Billie was getting married for the first time, after two broken engagements. Unfortunately, Billie held an intense dislike for my godfather’s pal, Doc Finn, and never tired of telling me how awful he was. According to Billie, Doc Finn had told both of her ex-fiancés—one with gastritis, the other with migraines—that they needed to break off their engagements to her. Since this didn’t sound like any medical advice I’d ever heard, I asked Doc Finn about it. The kindly, white-haired general practitioner had rubbed his goatee thoughtfully, then looked at me over his half-glasses. He’d said that while he couldn’t comment on any particular patient, he was in favor of everyone lowering levels of stress.

Now I knew what Doc Finn was talking about. Stress? Stress? I’d gotten to dreaming that I was throwing Billie off the nearest mountaintop. Too bad Doc Finn had hung up his stethoscope: I needed him to treat me for Billie-induced insanity. As I kneaded bread for the small baguettes Billie had insisted be served at her reception—instead of the croissants she’d demanded initially, or the corn bread muffins she’d wanted the second time around—I wondered how difficult it would be to dial 911 with a tray in my hand once I began to have the symptoms of a heart attack.

At least Billie was happy in love, I reflected. In fact, by her account, she was ecstatic, head over heels, and had found her true soul mate with her intended, a man eight years her junior, a newly minted general-practitioner named Craig Miller.

Miller, quiet, good looking, with round horn-rimmed specs and an easy smile, had recently joined Spruce Medical Group to replace Doc Finn. Once, during a particularly excruciating lunch, Billie was again critical of Doc Finn, saying everyone knew he was senile and incompetent, and it was long past time for him to be replaced. Craig had joined us for this meal, and he calmly told Billie that Doc Finn had been a great asset to the community. Back when Spruce Medical Group was a small practice located in an old office building on Upper Cottonwood Creek Road, Finn had spent hours listening to, and talking to, patients who adored him. She should be kinder toward him. Billie had immediately shut up, and I wanted to ask Craig if he could come to all our lunches.

I kept telling myself, Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. Eons ago, I’d majored in psychology, which had its uses in the catering biz. Billie just hadn’t learned how to get along with people, I told myself. Even though she graduated from college, she’d never held a regular job. She’d been jilted by two fiancés; maybe she’d imagined them critiquing everything about her, and that was why her chief occupation in life was criticizing people. But I couldn’t find a reason for what to me was Billie’s main problem: the flakiness. Yes, she got lost; yes, she couldn’t keep track of her calendar. But she’d also completely changed her menu six times.

Each time she changed the menu, she gave oddball reasons such as, “Oh, I tasted shrimp cocktail at the Pardee wedding, and knew we couldn’t have it, too, because some of the guests would be the same. So I want calamari.” When I told Billie’s mother what that would cost, the menu was quietly changed to include deviled eggs topped with a spoonful of caviar. But then there was, “Last night Craig and I had a chicken satay at a Thai restaurant in Denver; could you make us a satay, but with duck?” Duck satay? Charlotte vetoed that one, too. But finally, Billie whined, “C’mon, it wouldn’t be that much trouble for you to roast three or four suckling pigs, would it? You could dig the roasting pit outside your house.” Right. Charlotte also vetoed the roasting pit, thank God.

“I’m giving up weddings,” I told Tom, when I came home from that particular lunch.

Tom sagely commented, “Then you’d go nuts.”

“I’m there, Tom. I’m totally bonkers. First I waited for her for two hours while she was lost trying to find the restaurant, and then she hit me with the roast suckling porkers.”

Tom said, “Uh-oh.”

“Billie Attenborough’s wedding is killing me.”

“Aw, you always say that.”

“This time I mean it.”

2

The morning of August the twentieth dawned with rain, again, the same as we’d had since the month began. It was two days before Billie’s twice-postponed nuptials. From our bedroom window, I looked out ruefully at the downpour. I had another wedding to cater today, Cecelia, aka Ceci, O’Neal’s. Rain meant that the guests wouldn’t be able to mingle outside, and we’d have the added problem of sixty raincoats to store.

I shook my head. It was a perplexing summer, weather wise. Even if the Colorado forecasters call July and sometimes August “monsoon season,” the rain usually arrives in the late afternoon. And anyway, the term “monsoon season” is a laugh in itself, since we generally get an annual average of thirteen inches of rain. (Ten inches of snow equals one inch of rain, and we’d already had a winter featuring twelve total feet of snow. “You do the math,” my sixteen-year-old son Arch had commented. To which I’d replied, “No, thanks.”)

Still, three weeks of unremitting, incessant downpour was uncharacteristic. The New Age people over in Boulder would have said that all of Billie Attenborough’s nutty behavior had brought on the bad weather. When I told Tom that interpretation, he pulled me in for a hug and whispered, “At least we know who to blame.”

The Friday morning of Ceci’s wedding, I decided that the first order of business was to take a freshly made sweet bread, richly studded with dried apricots, dried cranberries, and toasted pecans, across the street to my godfather. At fifty-eight, Jack was, by his own admission, a “recovering lawyer.” Retiring from his practice, he said, and suffering through two heart attacks, had made him want to be closer to his son, Lucas, who had lived for over a decade on the other side of Aspen Meadow. But really, Jack had confided to me, he missed being a part of my life.

“And anyway,” Jack admitted, “it’s best for Lucas and me if we take each other in small doses. I know he’s my son, but I’m telling the truth. I mean, after he got divorced, I paid for him to go to physician’s assistant school. And when he graduated, what did he do? Told me to stop smoking and drinking. That’s gratitude for you.”

“You should stop drinking and smoking,” I immediately countered.

Jack snorted. “You, too?”

To Lucas Carmichael’s further dismay, Jack had not moved close to him when he’d moved to our town. Instead, Jack had bought a dilapidated mansion across the street from us. The house was a sixty-year-old Victorian-style monstrosity that had served as an inn, a restaurant, and a bar, all pretty much unsuccessfully. Now the old Painted Lady was in something of a state of disrepair, and Jack, a multimillionaire who confessed to knowing next to nothing about remodeling, was cheerfully bending his staccato energies to hiring people to fix up the place.

“Hey, Gertie Girl.” Jack opened his newly sculpted oak door—one of the things he’d actually managed to get subcontracted and completed since he’d been here. “It’s good to see you so early.”

“I brought you something, Jack.”

“You’re wonderful.”

“I just worry about you eating right.”

“Don’t you start.” He peered out at the mailbox at the end of his driveway. “You bring me my mail from yesterday? I was a bit too trashed last night to get it.”

“No, but I can—”

“Oh, Goldy, are you here again?” whined Lucas, who was standing behind his father. Lucas, who was about thirty, had a face like an inverted triangle—a broad, pale forehead, wide-set blue eyes, and a pointed chin—and that face reminded me, as it usually did, of a mouse having just recovered from a near drowning. He frowned at me. “Jack said you were catering a wedding today.”

Jack said gently, “Goldy can bring me bread if she wants to, Lucas.”

Lucas brushed back his blond bangs, then shoved his hands into the pockets of his rumpled jeans. “Well, I hope that it’s not filled with ingredients that are bad for you.” Lucas and I had always had an uneasy relationship. To me, he’d always seemed somewhat wretched, and no matter how many times I’d tried to be nice to him, he’d always held me at arm’s length. I worried that Lucas was jealous of my relationship with Jack, and Jack moving in across the street from us hadn’t eased that apprehension.

“Thanks for the bread.” Jack took the proffered loaf from my hand. “I’ll see you at Ceci’s wedding. When does it start?”

“You’re coming?” I asked, surprised.

“She adores Doc Finn, and he’s an honored guest. I’m riding Finn’s coattails to the party.”

“Great.”

I waved to Lucas and hightailed it out of there, unwilling to deal with Lucas’s complaining or desperate-rodent appearance. The old anxiety about Lucas’s competitive feelings toward me bloomed as I scampered back across the street. For it wasn’t just the puzzles, games, toys, books, and fantastic birthday presents Jack had always given me that made me worry. In a moment of too-much-booze weakness, Jack had confessed to Lucas that I was in a terrible marriage—the one to my first husband, aka the Jerk—and that he, Jack, wanted to help me. Without warning, Jack had given me a large sum of money to get away from the Jerk. When Jack told his son about this, hoping to be congratulated for his generosity, Three Mile Island hadn’t had a meltdown to match Lucas’s.

Since then, Jack had told me not to tell Lucas about any gifts that came my way. I promised not to, but I still felt uncomfortable.

I ducked through the rain and into our house. In the kitchen, I was surprised to see Tom consulting my printed schedule for Cecelia O’Neal’s wedding. Cecelia was due to get married at my conference center at noon.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Tom raised an eyebrow in my direction, then shuffled to the walk-in, pulled out a box, and brought it to the counter.

“Helping you,” he supplied. Tom was ever the master of laconic communication.

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

“Got somebody filling in for me.”

“Tom, what is going on?”

“Ceci’s mother just called.” Tom cocked an eyebrow at me. “Her name’s Dodie O’Neal?” When I nodded, Tom went on, “It seems her ex-husband is threatening to show up at the wedding. Dodie’s hired some security guards. And so I’m going to help you and Julian in the kitchen. When we get over there, I’ll explain the situation.”

Great, I thought, as Tom and I loaded my van. Two days before the twice-delayed wedding of Bridezilla Billie, and I had been doing all in my power to put everything dealing with those worrisome nuptials out of my mind. What was it about nature, something about it abhorring a vacuum? Now we had a threatened disruption to what had promised to be a fairly straightforward wedding.

“Stay calm.” I found myself whispering my new mantra to myself as I piloted my van through the downpour to my event center. Tom, behind me, was driving his own vehicle, in case he was called away by the department. “Stay calm, stay calm,” I said again. “See?” I said to no one but myself, since I was alone in the van. “Talking aloud with no one there? I am going nuts.”

Okay, well, security guards or no, I needed to concentrate on Ceci O’Neal’s wedding. Cecelia, unlike Billie, had been easy to deal with. A tall, twenty-five-year-old woman who had a cap of short, black curls, Cecelia was unfailingly kind and gracious. She was also a selfless single mother. When she’d heard about an orphanage in Romania that needed adoptive parents, off she went on a discount flight to Eastern Europe, which was more than I would have done, and brought home little bawling Lissa, then an infant. Ceci doted on Lissa.

More than once, I’d thought of sending Ceci over to where Billie Attenborough lived with her mother in Flicker Ridge, an upscale development not far from Aspen Meadow Country Club. My idea was that Ceci would give Billie a class in Basic Civility.

But I frowned at the thought of security guards. I already knew that Cecelia’s biological father, Norman O’Neal, had decamped soon after Cecelia was born. This was right after Dodie had finished putting Norman through law school, which established good old Norm in the Jerk category. After a brief internship at a large firm, Norman had established a flourishing practice right here in Aspen Meadow. When we were doing the contracts, Dodie had related how Norman had wangled his way out of paying much in the way of child support. Still, for twenty years Dodie had proudly worked as a secretary—no euphemistic “administrative assistant” for her—down at the University of Denver.

My cell rang, interrupting my reverie. It was Dodie O’Neal.

“Sorry about the security guards,” Dodie apologized.

“Tom told me. Don’t worry about it.”

Dodie said, “Last week, Norman announced to his firm that he would be giving his daughter away. And not only that, but he boasted that he’d been asked to give the first toast at the reception.”

“Oh, Lord.”

When I’d gently asked Dodie and Cecelia if there was a father in the picture, they had firmly replied that Norman O’Neal was having exactly no part in the wedding. Dodie would be giving her daughter away. And Doc Finn was doing the first toast. Period.

“Problem is,” Dodie said now, “Norman has a terrible temper. I’ve always wondered how lawyers could get away with being bullies. Now I know.”

I sighed, thinking of various scenarios, all of which ended in catastrophe. Before signing off, Dodie said she was confident everything would work out. She’d given an old photo of Norm to the security agency, and she believed the agency’s claim that all would be well.

After ten minutes of carefully driving through the rain, I pulled into my gravel parking lot. Tom was right behind me. I could hear his argument now: if armed guards were needed, so was he.

It was just before nine, three hours before the wedding was set to begin. The two guards, who were helping the valets, were already on duty. I told them we were the caterer and the caterer’s husband, and they let us right through, no identification requested. Some security.

My cell phone buzzed and I glanced at the caller ID. Oh, I should have expected it: Billie Attenborough. Sometimes I wished I were a lawyer, and could charge for calls. With the way Billie was always phoning, phoning, phoning—why, I could have retired.

I could just imagine Billie tossing her blond mane and complaining, bitterly and loudly, that I was refusing to talk to her. I knew that losing weight could make people grouchy, but in Billie’s case, it was making her certifiable.

I ignored the cell and parked as near the event center’s side entrance as I could get. Tom was still behind me. Then I flipped up the hood on my rain jacket and hopped out of the van.

“Forget it,” Tom called through the downpour. “You’re not unloading the van in this weather. I’ll do it.”

“Oh no you won’t!” I replied.

I’d been single for a long time before marrying Tom, and he’d been unattached even longer. This had made us, as the saying goes, set in our ways, which is French for stubborn.

As Tom was sliding open the van’s side door, my cell phone beeped again. Could it be Arch? My son was enjoying the last of his summer vacation by spending night after night either at the home of his half brother, Gus—the product of one of the Jerk’s flings, whom I had embraced after his mother died—or at Arch’s best friend Todd Druckman’s house. Sometimes the three of them stayed at Todd’s before decamping back to Gus’s, or vice versa. There was no way Arch and his pals would be up this early, but I always worried. As I checked the caller ID again, I thought if it was Billie, I would disconnect the phone. Arch could call Tom if he was in a real jam.

It was not Arch. It was Julian. Even if most twenty-two-year-olds had trouble rousing themselves from bed to get to work, Julian’s ambition of becoming a vegetarian chef meant he was always up early, scouring Boulder’s farmers’ markets, and then taking off to help me, or showing up to toil long hours in a vegetarian bistro near the University of Colorado.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he began, and I thought if his inherited Range Rover had broken down on the way over from Boulder, I would throw myself into the lake.

“Is what ever you’re about to tell me going to upset me?” I asked as Tom heaved up a stack of plastic-wrapped trays.

“Hi, Billie!” Tom yelled into the cell phone before schlepping his load toward the kitchen door.

“What is Billie Attenborough doing at Ceci’s wedding?” Julian asked in disbelief. “Was that Tom talking to her?”

“No, Julian, that was Tom trying to be funny. He thought I was on the phone with Bridezilla. Now, what am I not going to believe?”

“Billie just called me.”

“What?”

“She’s very pissed off that you’re not answering your phone. She says she needs to talk to you, and if you don’t start answering, she’s going to come find you. She sounded as if she meant it.”

“I hope you didn’t tell her where I was going to be.”

“Nope. But you know how she is.”

I did indeed. Once when I’d refused to answer our home phone or my cell, Billie had driven over to our house and started knocking on the front door. I was busy cooking for a party, so instead of answering, I’d nipped into the bathroom. Billie traipsed around back and started tapping on the windows that Tom had installed to face our backyard. Still getting no response, Billie returned to her Mercedes convertible and leaned on the horn. I came out of the bathroom and watched through our partially closed blinds as Billie continued to honk. Finally, Jack came out of his house and yelled that he was calling the cops. His pal Doc Finn, who had preceded Jack out the front door to watch the action, had shaken his head.

Jack hollered, “They’ll throw you in jail for disturbing the peace, Billie!”

Of course, Jack would never have reported Billie. But his years as a practicing lawyer always made him sound convincing. Billie had roared away in her convertible, but not before proffering an obscene gesture in my godfather’s direction.

Yes, I said to Julian, as my call-waiting began to beep, I did indeed know how Billie was. I ignored the beeping.

Julian said he didn’t want to worry me, just give me a heads-up. Then he asked how things were going. I told him about the security guards, and he wanted to know if there was anything he should say to them so he could be let into the parking lot.

“Just tell them you’re with the caterer. They seem pretty bored.”

Before signing off, Julian said that the rain was making everyone on the highway slow down, but he should be at our event center in less than an hour. I stepped into the chilly deluge, heaved up the last box of food, and splashed through the mud to the kitchen door.

There, Tom was already unpacking.

“Father Pete just called,” Tom informed me. Father Pete was our parish priest at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and was doing the O’Neal ceremony. “He couldn’t get through to you. Anyway, he’ll be here early.”

“Great. I was on the phone with Julian. Billie called him, looking for me.”

Tom shook his head. I thanked him for bringing in the lion’s share of the boxes and said I would be right back, just after I checked on the dining room.

There, all was lovely. Rows of chairs had been custom fit by Dodie in a luscious pink sateen; she’d sewn the slipcovers, and made Cecelia’s wedding dress, herself. For the twelve-top tables, now pushed to one side and hidden behind a curtain, Aspen Meadow Florist had done a phenomenal job. Centerpieces of pale pink carnations, baby’s breath, and ivy had been Dodie O’Neal’s low-cost choice. Pink faux-linen napkins, also sewn by Dodie, looked exquisite next to the snowy white tablecloths.

As if to reassure myself, I said aloud, “Everything’s going to be great.”

If only.

3

Swathed in an apron, my handsome husband was refrigerating the trays of hors d’oeuvres that we would start to heat once the bridal procession began. Together, Tom and I finished unpacking and setting things in order. From time to time we consulted the printed schedule I had taped on the kitchen island. Julian arrived with the cake, a frothy pink and white three-layer confection that he had triple wrapped in plastic. Tom and I ooh’d and aah’d appropriately. Blushing with pride, Julian thanked us. With his wavy brown hair, clean-cut face, and compact swimmer’s body, Julian would be sure to attract a few ooh’s and aah’s himself, especially from the unattached twenty-something females who would be in attendance.

The three of us worked for the next hour and a half finishing our setup. Julian set the cake on its own special table behind the curtain with the twelve tops. Tom laid out row upon row of martini glasses. When the guests began to filter into the main dining room, Tom methodically filled each glass with shredded lettuce, then moved on to arranging poached shrimp on top. Just the sight of Tom bent so intently over his work warmed my heart. My good mood lasted until my cell phone tooted and I checked the caller ID again: Billie Attenborough. Aw, gee, why should I have been surprised?

Tom saw me make a face. “Now what?”

“Bridezilla Billie has some new demand.”

“Remind me when her wedding is.”

“Day after tomorrow.” I set the phone to Vibrate and put it in my apron pocket. “I’m still not taking her call.”

“Good idea,” Julian interjected.

“She’s nervous.” Tom’s tone was sympathetic. “Maybe she’ll find somebody else to bother. Don’t be too hard on her, Miss G.”

I shook my head. What ever reservoir of compassion I’d had for Billie Attenborough had dried up long ago.

When I was checking the temperature of the champagne Doc Finn would use for his toast, my cell phone buzzed against my skin. If it was Billie Attenborough again, I was going to turn it off. But it wasn’t Billie. It was Jack Carmichael. I checked my watch: 11:30. He and Doc Finn couldn’t have already started drinking, could they?

“Uncle Jack,” I said, glad for the break. “I thought you were coming to Cecelia’s wedding.”

“Gertie Girl.” He sounded a bit worried. “Is Finn there?”

“Doc Finn?”

“Yeah, yeah, Doc Finn, the old coot. He was supposed to pick me up, and he never came. Maybe he forgot. He does do that sometimes.”

“Let me check.”

I ducked into the dining room. About fifty guests had already taken their seats. They looked at me expectantly: Food already?

“I don’t see him, Jack. Did you try his cell?”

“He’s not answering. I’ll just drive over to your center. Maybe he’s in the parking lot visiting with somebody.”

“Okeydoke. When you get here, come and say hi to us. We’ll be in the kitchen.”

He hung up, but before I could return to the kitchen, I saw a weaving figure duck into the dressing room, which was right next to the dining area. He was not a member of the wedding party. I was guessing it was Norman O’Neal, the difficult father of the bride. So much for the security guards.

Tom was ferrying the shrimp cocktails to the small refrigerator in the curtained-off dining area.

“It looks as if Norman O’Neal is here,” I warned. “There could be trouble. He just walked in a very unsteady fashion right into the dressing area, where Ceci is supposed to be.”

Tom bobbed swiftly behind the curtain to the dining area, and I followed, unsure of what to do. But Tom showed no signs of uncertainty. He slid his tray into the small refrigerator that we’d set up next to the cake stand, and headed to his left, right into the makeshift dressing room.

Behind him, I murmured, “Maybe you should be careful. This guy’s an attorney.”

“All the better,” Tom replied without breaking stride.

There was no way I was going to stand by while my husband, who lifted weights and was in spectacular shape, flattened the father of the bride.

“You’re my ex-dad,” the bride was whispering angrily at the tottering male figure in a rumpled suit. The loveliness of Cecelia O’Neal, whose white dress fit her stunningly, was ruined by the flaming spots on her cheeks and her furious expression. “Please leave,” Cecelia hissed when Norman O’Neal didn’t move. “I don’t want to see you.”

“Where’s your mother?” Norman demanded, pulling himself up straight. He was under six feet tall, and had a gray bottlebrush mustache and a puff of gray hair just above his forehead. He positively reeked of alcohol.

“Sir,” Tom said calmly, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m asking you nicely. And I want you to leave nicely.”

“Who the hell are you?” asked Norman O’Neal.

“I’m police,” announced Tom, one eyebrow raised.

Norman O’Neal’s rheumy blue eyes took in Tom, who was still wearing his apron. “I don’t think so.”

Lissa O’Neal, who was now an adorable eighteen-month-old with wisps of blond hair framing her face, clung to her mother’s dress and began to whimper. In the main dining room, the hum of voices from more waves of arriving guests rose. I couldn’t imagine that this little conflict—between Tom and an inebriated attorney, no less—was going to end well.

“Where’s Harold Finn?” Norman O’Neal demanded querulously. With his index finger, he scratched his mustache. “If Doc Finn’s in this wedding, then I’m going to be, too.”

“Sir—,” Tom began again, still patient.

The curtain swished open, and everyone except Tom jumped. It was not the first time I’d thought he had better hearing than I did, not to mention a sixth sense as to who was approaching.

“Dear me,” said Father Pete, our short, corpulent priest. He cleared his throat and took in the anxious faces of our little tableau. All anxious, that is, except for Tom, whose eyes had never left Norman O’Neal.

“Who’re you?” demanded Norman O’Neal, reeling unsteadily toward Father Pete.

Father Pete was as kind and pastoral as the midsummer days were long, but he didn’t suffer fools gladly. “Where is your mother?” Father Pete asked Ceci, who had picked up the now-crying Lissa. Father Pete looked around the small makeshift room. “Cecelia? Where is Doc Finn? I thought he and your mother were walking you down the aisle.”

“I don’t know where any of them are,” Cecelia wailed suddenly. She began to cry, too, which brought a fresh onslaught of tears from Lissa. As mother and daughter clung to each other, I thought, There go the hair and makeup. Two bridesmaids, both clothed in their floaty pink dresses, appeared at the curtain, widened their eyes at the scene, and whisked themselves away. “This is my ex-dad,” Cecelia said, sobbing, to Father Pete. “He’s insisting he’s going to be part of the ceremony! Plus, he’s wasted! He’s going to ruin everything!”

There was a sudden hush in the large dining room on the other side of the curtains. All ears were apparently now attuned to the dressing room drama. Luckily, the DJ must have sensed something was amiss, as he started playing some Led Zeppelin a bit too loudly.

“He’s not going to ruin anything,” Father Pete was saying soothingly. “That’s because he is going to get out of here right now. Off you go, ex-dad.” At that point, Father Pete, who was wearing his robes and surplice, took hold of Norman O’Neal’s elbow and began pulling him back toward the curtain.

Norman O’Neal hollered, “I’m not going to allow a cop in an apron and a priest in a dress to tell me what I am or am not going to do!” At that point, he took a wild swing at Father Pete. Tom moved swiftly to plant himself between the two men, but Father Pete was too fast even for Tom. Our priest caught Norman O’Neal’s arm with one hand and delivered an uppercut to his chin with the other. Norman O’Neal flailed awkwardly, grasped bunches of the curtain to the area with the dining tables, and crashed backward, landing in Julian’s perfect wedding cake.

“Oh, Christ,” said Father Pete. “I didn’t think I hit him that hard.”

Norman O’Neal, his backside covered with frosting, didn’t move. Tom bent down to feel his pulse.

“I’m going to call an ambulance,” Tom announced quietly.

“You’re not going to charge me with assault, are you?” Father Pete asked, his eyes filled with worry.

“Absolutely not,” said Tom as he punched numbers into his cell phone. “That was textbook self-defense, Father.” Tom asked me to send someone to find Julian, which I did. Father Pete, meanwhile, had moved to soothe Ceci and Lissa.

Two seconds later, Tom was giving quick directions to emergency services. He then hung up his cell and hoisted a still-unconscious, frosting-and-cake-covered Norman O’Neal.

“Any way I can get to the kitchen from here without going through the main dining room?” Tom asked me.

“Yes, I’ll show you,” I said quickly. I was trying to suppress a wave of nausea.

“Say, Father Pete,” Tom said as he heaved Norman O’Neal toward the kitchen. “Where’d you learn to box like that?”

Father Pete stopped comforting Ceci and smiled shyly. “In my former life, I mean, before I was called to the ministry, I won the Golden Gloves.” He beamed. “Twice.”

Once Tom, a lolling, closed-eyed Norman O’Neal, and I were in the kitchen, there was a knock at the back door. Two uniformed security guards had heard they were needed.

“You are,” Tom announced as he handed off a still-unconscious Norman O’Neal. “Lay this guy out on the gravel, and when the ambulance arrives, get him in there. I told the ambo guys no sirens or lights.”

“But it’s raining,” one of the guards protested. “You put this guy on the ground, he’s going to get wet.”

“The rain will help clean him up,” Tom said before turning back to the kitchen.

The guards obligingly took hold of Norman O’Neal and dragged him across the gravel outside the kitchen’s back door. Once he was laid on the ground, Norman woke up enough to begin puking. Julian, meanwhile, had reappeared in the kitchen.

“What the hell happened to my cake?” he demanded.

“Norman O’Neal happened to it,” I said. “Sorry. Can you do anything to make it look like…I don’t know, a ski slope?”

Julian rolled his eyes and said he would try.

Tom, meanwhile, was concentrating on preheating the ovens. Out in the main dining room, the strains of the wedding march began.

“Okay, folks, here we go,” I said.

We crowded together to watch the ceremony through the one-way mirrored panels I’d had put at eye level in the kitchen doors. The bridesmaids swarmed around Ceci, powdering her nose and cheeks with new makeup and patting her hair back into place. Then we only got to see Ceci coming down the aisle with Dodie, and Lissa in a lacy white flower girl outfit, before the back door to the kitchen was flung open, not by the security guards, or even Norman O’Neal, but by someone I dreaded even more: Billie Attenborough.

She swept in wearing a voluminous, silky-sounding black trench coat. Her blond-brown hair was soaked. Tall and bulky, she put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot. “Why can’t any of you people answer your phones?”

“I’m doing another wedding today, Billie,” I said evenly. “I’ll be home to night, when you are welcome to call me. Now, would you please leave?”

Billie lifted her small, dimpled chin. “I can’t leave until I tell you the changes we’re making to the wedding arrangements.”

Tom groaned and lined another tray with rows of martini glasses filled with shrimp cocktail. Julian disappeared through the swinging doors.

“What’s that?” Billie demanded as she peered over Tom’s shoulder.

“Shrimp cocktail—what does it look like?” Tom replied.

Tom could move fast, but not as fast as Billie, who scooped one of the martini glasses off the chilled tray and began eating the shrimp with her fingers.

“Hey!” Tom yelled. He grabbed Billie by the wrist. She promptly dropped the martini glass on the floor, where it shattered. Noisily. I prayed the music in the dining room was somehow, somehow louder than Billie Attenborough.

“What is going on back here?” asked Jack Carmichael as he preceded Julian into the kitchen. Looking as dapper as ever in a custom-made dark gray suit, Jack’s presence made me smile. “Sounds like either a food fight or a party.” Jack glanced all around the kitchen. Julian started sweeping up the glass, while Tom quickly left the kitchen with his tray of shrimp cocktail. “Ah,” Jack said in recognition. “If it isn’t Bilious Billie. No wonder there was crashing and banging out here.” Jack watched Billie push the shrimp she’d been eating into her mouth and shook his head.

“Don’t say a word, you drunken old coot,” Billie replied, once she’d swallowed. She wiped her hands on a kitchen towel.

“Nice talk,” commented Julian as he dumped the broken glass into the trash.

I ignored all of them and put the first tray of hot appetizers into the oven.

“Gertie Girl,” Jack said affectionately, “I’m here on an errand from Dodie. She says she hasn’t seen Doc Finn. She wanted to know if I had, because they’re going to want to start with the toasts once everybody’s seated. I told her I’d already called you and asked if you’d seen him, but she wanted me to ask you again anyway.”

Before I could answer that I still hadn’t, Billie cried, “Doc Finn! That miserable old man. We could have a miserable-old-men convention right here.”

“I have not seen him,” I said quickly. I checked my watch: 12:15. “How far along are they?”

“About halfway,” Jack replied. “I came in through the side dining room, so as not to disturb things any more than, say, Billie here breaking a glass.”

“Shut up,” said Billie.

There was a knock at the back door into the kitchen. Mentally, I cursed.

“Who is it?” I called through the heavy wood. If it was Norman O’Neal, he could just stay out in the rain.

“Craig Miller, Goldy. Is Billie in there?”

I shook my head and opened the door to Billie Attenborough’s fiancé, Craig Miller. Wait, I forgot to think of him as Dr. Craig Miller. Important title, that. Before Billie and Craig were engaged, my best friend, Marla, had told me that Billie had told her that her next fiancé was going to be a doc. Marla had told Billie she might want to find someone with whom she shared mutual love. But Billie had dreamily countered that she’d always wanted to be introduced at Aspen Meadow Country Club as “Dr. and Mrs.” So much for love, Marla had remarked, but Billie had ignored her. I’d said that I sincerely hoped the doc would be a psychiatrist.

“Billie, dear,” Craig Miller pleaded now, running his short fingers through his brown hair as if he might tear it out, “please come back to your mother’s house. Please don’t bother Goldy now.”

“I can’t leave,” Billie snapped. “She won’t let me talk to her about what I came here to talk to her about.”

“She hasn’t been herself lately,” Craig said to the group, his pale blue eyes wide with apology. “She’s been trying to lose this weight—”

“Would everyone who is not a caterer please leave this kitchen?” I asked.

“Goldy,” Billie said, “if you would just listen to me, I could tell you we’ve added fifty people to my guest list.”

She finally had my full and undivided attention. “You’ve done what?”

Billie blithely closed her eyes. “My mother was supposed to tell you, and in all the rush of things, she forgot.”

“I can’t handle fifty more people here. Fire department regulations.”

“Why do you think I’ve been trying to reach you and your assistant all day?” Billie asked. “We’re having to move the wedding and reception to the Gold Gulch Spa.”

“You’re doing what?”

“Billie,” Craig Miller tried again. “This can wait.”

“It cannot wait,” Billie announced. “Mother’s calling everyone now, to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anyone else.”

Norman O’Neal may have lost his lunch already, but I was quite sure I would be next. Fifty extra people. A different venue. More food than I had ordered or had time to prepare.

When Tom returned to the kitchen, there was yet another knock at the back door. This was turning into one of the worst catering days of my entire career. Julian moved quickly across the kitchen floor to answer it.

“It’s probably the ambo for Norman O’Neal,” Tom said.

“Ambulance?” Craig Miller said softly. “Oh, I wish I had known. I just thought the fellow outside had had too much to drink—”

I shook my head while Julian conversed in quiet tones with whoever was at the back door.

“They want you, Tom,” Julian said quietly.

Oh, God, I thought. Arch. Something’s wrong. I glanced at my cell. My son had not tried to call. Nor had anyone else since the last time Billie had phoned.

Tom left, then stuck his head back into the kitchen. He looked very grave. He signaled me and I went out into the rain with him.

“I have to go, Miss G. They just found Doc Finn’s Cayenne at the bottom of a canyon.”

“And Doc Finn?”

“Inside the Cayenne. Dead.”

4

Somehow, I don’t know how, Julian managed to get rid of Billie Attenborough and Craig Miller. Meanwhile, I pulled Jack aside and told him the terrible news. He turned ashen.

“Doc Finn?” His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard. “My friend? That’s not possible. They must be wrong.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. Can I get someone here to be with you?”

“How did it happen?” Jack asked.

I told him what I knew.

Jack rubbed his forehead. “I…we’d been talking a lot lately, Finn and I…” He broke off, and I signaled Julian for a chair. He rushed out, and returned with two.

“Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry,” I said.

“My friend,” Jack was mumbling. “Doc Finn. I can’t believe it. I just—I don’t believe it. How could this have happened?” His pale blue eyes beseeched me, all his energy drained.

“I don’t know, Jack.”

“And, oh my God, this endless rain.” Jack’s non sequitur took me by surprise. When I didn’t respond, he said, “It’s just that Finn was a great driver, and that SUV of his was excellent. A ravine? I don’t understand.”

I did not know what to do. Finn had been Jack’s only friend in Aspen Meadow. But now I was worried about Jack. Maybe his son, Lucas, would be able to come be with him, and take him home.

“Can we go outside?” Jack asked me.

He was my godfather. He had brought me games and puzzles and endless days of joy when I was a child. I loved him unconditionally, totally, and forever. Now his best friend had died, and he was a mess. He had helped me when I desperately needed it. I simply could not abandon him.

I looked around helplessly for Julian. He understood the situation in an instant and brought me an umbrella.

“Tom told me what’s going on.” Julian’s voice was low. “He didn’t know what to do about Dodie and Ceci. But he thought the wedding shouldn’t be more ruined than it already has been. They’ve got a couple of deputies stationed outside your French doors to tell Dodie when the ceremony’s over—”

“Wait. As soon as the bride and groom say I do, pull Father Pete aside and clue him in. He’ll know how to handle things.”

“Good idea. How’s Jack?”

I shook my head. Julian turned on his heel and moved quickly through the kitchen, intent on making this already-messed-up wedding seem as normal as possible.

When Jack and I stepped outside under the umbrella, the ambulance was just pulling away, presumably with Norman O’Neal inside. Jack wrinkled his face in puzzlement, and I murmured that a wedding guest had gotten sick.

One of the sheriff’s department deputies had given Tom a windbreaker. Tom and two more investigators were deep in discussion. Tom’s discarded apron lay, sodden and forgotten, on the ground.

Investigators? Julian had said two uniformed cops were outside the French doors, for when the time came to notify Dodie. So what was going on? It was as if I’d been in a mental fog, and now I grasped a situation that I hoped Jack did not. Beside me, he’d tilted his head forward and was rubbing his hand through his sparse gray hair.

I stared at Tom with his underlings. The Furman County Sheriff’s Department did not handle car accidents. No Colorado county did, and that was because the state patrol was in charge of automobile accidents. The sheriff’s department was only called in if there were other issues.

Criminal issues.

“Where’s Lucas now?” I asked Jack. “Let me call him for you.”

Jack gave me his son’s number, and I punched it into my cell. When I got voice mail, I identified myself and told Lucas his father needed him, as in, right now. I told Lucas where I was, and hoped his resentful attitude of that morning didn’t mean he’d ignore my message.

Without thinking twice, I punched in Marla’s number. Like me, she’d been unhappily married to the Jerk. Unlike me, she had inherited wealth and had no physical fear whatsover. Those two attributes had allowed her to clean his clock, financially and physically, when he’d come after her. We’d been fast friends ever since she divorced him. She had a wonderful heart, and although she might not particularly want to come take care of Jack, she’d do it anyway.

“Just a sec, Jack, take the umbrella, okay?” While he protested, I moved out into the rain. Marla’s home phone rang and rang. “Pick up,” I said to Marla’s voice mail. “I know you’re there and I need your help. This is an emergency, and I do mean a genuine bona fide emergency.”

On the other end, the phone crashed and clicked.

“For God’s sake, Goldy,” Marla said dramatically. “Now what?”

“Marla—”

“I mean honestly, Goldy, tell me one time your life hasn’t been a crisis. I have to get lots of sleep, just so I can deal with all the energy I have to expend—”

“Doc Finn’s dead,” I said quietly. Oh, why hadn’t I brought two umbrellas outside? Jack had moved off to talk to Tom, which was not something I wanted. And I was getting soaked.

“Dead?” Marla echoed. “Doc Finn? What happened?”

“A car accident. Marla, please listen, I’m under a time crunch here. I’m at my event center, trying to do Cecelia O’Neal’s wedding. But—” Oh, really, how could I summarize the events of the last two hours? I couldn’t. “—I need you to come over and be with Jack, my godfather. Take him to your place, take him to his place, do what ever. Just be with him. He’s a wreck, and I can’t get hold of Lucas. Please?”

“All right, all right, why didn’t you say so? I’ll be there in ten minutes. Wait—did you try to reach Charlotte Attenborough? She and Jack have been going out for the last two months.”

Oh, Lord, in the confusion I’d forgotten about Charlotte. She and Jack were indeed an item, maybe more in her mind than his, I’d gathered. Charlotte could be imperious and was used to getting what she wanted, but compared to her daughter, she was Mother Teresa. Still, I simply couldn’t face any more Attenboroughs today, and I doubted Jack could either.

“No, I didn’t call Charlotte, and I don’t want to. It’s a long story. Look, Marla, I’m outside and I’m totally sopping wet. Could you just please come over and get Jack? We’ll be in the kitchen. I’ll give him a drink or something.”

“Do you even keep scotch in that event center of yours, or are you strictly a wine type of gal?”

“Marla, please?”

She groaned and signed off. I quick-stepped over to Jack, who was trying to elicit information from Tom.

“My friend Marla’s coming to get you,” I announced. “Please, Jack, could you come into the kitchen?”

Tom looked me up and down. “You have a dry outfit inside?”

I told him I did. Then I shepherded Jack back into the kitchen, where Julian was giving two of the servers instructions on how to serve the egg rolls.

“I shouldn’t be bothering you,” Jack announced suddenly. He looked around the kitchen, his eyes wild. “You’ve got other things to do here. And where’s Dodie? I should be helping her. I should, I don’t know, be doing the first toast or something.” His face became even more agitated. “Do you know anything I could say about Ceci?” He rubbed his forehead. “I think Dodie just invited me because she wanted Finn to have company during the reception.”

“Jack,” I remonstrated, “you’re in no condition to do any such thing.” I reached into the cupboard behind the dry vermouth and drew out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. I poured Jack a hefty drink, plopped in some ice cubes, and drizzled in a bit—a very little bit—of water. Then I asked him please to sit down in one of the chairs Julian had brought.

Julian then wondered aloud if he should send Dodie outside to talk to the two uniforms, as she kept asking him if he’d seen Doc Finn.

“No,” Jack said suddenly, draining his drink and setting the empty glass on the counter. “Don’t ruin her special day with her daughter. Let me go talk to Dodie, tell her Finn was unaccountably delayed because of some…medical thing, I don’t know what, and does she want me to make the toast. Now, Goldy, don’t go getting stubborn on me, because I’m much more stubborn than you are, and I’ve been at it a lot longer. Dodie can learn what actually happened once the reception is over. And, godchild,” he said tenderly, “you need to get into some dry clothes, take care of yourself for a change instead of everyone else.”

Julian and Jack disappeared through the swinging doors. Two of the servers came back and said the guests had moved to the far end of the dining room for picture-taking, and all the tables had been moved back into the main dining room. Could they take out the shrimp cocktails, to start putting them on the plates? I gratefully said that would be super, then headed off to retrieve the clean uniform I kept in the restroom closet.

Somehow, we got through the next two hours. Jack did a wonderful toast, holding little Lissa with one arm and his glass with the other. Marla showed up as lunch was being served, and told Jack he was going home with her, no argument permitted. Besides, she added, she had a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, which he needed to open with her. Jack even managed a smile. He hugged me and said we’d talk later.

The lunch, a chilled curried chicken salad recipe I had been working on for a while, was served on a bed of baby lettuce alongside cold raisin-rice salad, and was a big success. The cake—which Julian had miraculously frosted with our back-up supplies into a replica of Keystone Mountain—was enjoyed by all. By the time the DJ started playing the music, I was ready to collapse with relief.

Guests at wedding receptions don’t like to hear the sound of dishes being clanked around as they’re washed. But I had asked the servers I had hired for the event to bring all the dinnerware and flatware to the kitchen as soon as the guests were done. I gave them their pay, told them I needed them to come to Gold Gulch Spa, and not my event center, for Billie Attenborough’s wedding the day after next, and hustled them on their way. Julian and I then used our patented ability to clean silently, and washed, rinsed, dried, and packed up all the dishes, serving platters, trays, and flatware. By the time Dodie O’Neal appeared in the kitchen and handed me an envelope stuffed with bills, the cooking space was sparkling.

“Dodie, please, you’ve already given us the gratuity. It was part of your contract.” I looked inside the envelope and realized the number of twenties she’d given us amounted to nearly a thousand dollars. “This is way, way too much extra money.”

“Goldy, don’t protest.” Like some other women her age, Dodie managed to look older than her forty-five years. Her thin face was perpetually lined with wrinkles of worry, and she dyed her short blond hair at home. I didn’t know if the cops had talked to her yet, but I doubted it. “I feel as if I ignored you throughout the proceedings,” she went on, frowning.

“Have you, I mean, did you—,” I faltered.

“Yes. After Ceci threw the bouquet, I finally asked the two policemen why they were guarding the French doors, since I’d hired security guards. They told me. What a disaster, and so sad.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the times Doc Finn had treated me for bruises and cuts, all caused by my horrible ex-husband. Doc Finn had tried, in vain, to get me to report John Richard to the police, but I’d been too afraid. This had all taken place before doctors were required to inform law enforcement of suspected abuse, and I knew in my heart that Doc Finn never would have had any fear of the Jerk. A rock seemed to be forming in my chest. Poor, poor Doc Finn.

“Well,” Dodie said now, “I want you to take the tip. Both of you. Give a good extra chunk to your servers, too. God knows you all deserve a big gratuity, since I understand Norman did show up, and caused a ruckus. And where were the security guards, I’d like to know? I didn’t give them an extra tip.”

“Please, Dodie, don’t worry. Norman was just a nuisance. He created a temporary disturbance.” I kept my tone nonchalant. Behind Dodie, Julian opened his eyes wide and cocked his head at me, as in, You’re kidding, right?

“Where is Norman now?” Dodie asked nervously. She licked her lips and glanced around the kitchen as if Norman were going to jump out of the walk-in refrigerator. “Did he leave?”

“Yeah, he’s gone,” I said with a dismissive wave.

“But…where did he go?” Dodie pressed. “I suppose I should have checked on him before, but what with Cecelia being so upset, and Lissa starting to cry, I just didn’t have the heart to come out and look for him.”

“Your ex-husband, ah, became ill,” I told Dodie. “He’s on his way down to, oh, one of the area hospitals, I think.”

“He’ll probably try to sue somebody.” Dodie’s voice was resigned. She pinched the bridge of her nose, sighed, then brushed the pleats of her beige dress. “That’s what he always does when things don’t go his way.”

I thought of Tom’s imposing presence, not at all diminished by the fact that he was wearing an apron as he towered over Norman O’Neal. I thought of Father Pete, the priest with the deadly swing. Norman was going to sue somebody? Who would that be, exactly?

“Well, he can try to sue people,” I said. “But considering the forces arrayed against him, I don’t think he’d have much chance of winning.”

“LISSA STARTED CRYING? Remind me who Lissa is?” Julian queried once we’d packed up the dishes—I’d given the leftovers to Dodie—and were walking through the rain back to my van. The precipitation had diminished to a whispering drizzle, which blended with the tumble of water over rocks in Upper Cottonwood Creek. The gray light made everything seem like dusk, even though it was not quite four in the afternoon, and the sun would not set until after eight.

I gave Julian an abbreviated version of Ceci’s trip to Romania. He was impressed, and said he hoped to be that good-hearted one of these days.

“You already are,” I said.

Julian pushed his boxes into the back of my van, and the two of us walked through the light rain to the kitchen door. When we arrived, Julian unlocked our storage door and brought out a shovel and a bag of sawdust. He dug into the bag and sprinkled it over the area where Norman O’Neal had hurled. We’d learned from unfortunate past experiences that the sawdust and shovel were necessary accoutrements for any catering venue where guests might be tempted to overindulge.

Julian stopped to lean on the shovel. “And, boss, what are you going to do about Billie Attenborough changing the venue for her wedding? She’ll have to pay a cancellation fee for renting your space, too, right?”

“Absolutely. Charlotte knows that.”

“Looks like you don’t want to discuss it at the moment,” Julian said with a kind grin.

“You’re right.” I really did not want to think about Billie Attenborough and her latest crisis. I could envision my entire evening—when I had wanted just to go home and cook for Tom—going down the proverbial tubes as I called the florist and all the other vendors. Of course, if Tom was involved in an investigation of Doc Finn’s death, the evening was already shot. My heart squeezed again. Poor Doc Finn.

After a moment, I said to Julian, “Gold Gulch Spa is located at the old Creek Ranch Hotel.”

“Yeah, the one with the hot spring. Way out Upper Cottonwood Creek. Near the Spruce Medical Group’s building, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but Spruce Medical has relocated to town, and their old building is up for lease.”

Julian shook his head. “This town is changing too fast.”

“You know, with Gold Gulch Spa as the venue for Billie’s wedding, we’re going to have to deal with Victor Lane.”

“That guy’s an asshole,” Julian remarked. “I wish somebody would dump him into a ravine.”

“Now, now, Julian. Stiff upper lip.”

“He thinks he knows about food and he doesn’t know jack.”

“He’s going to know Jack, because Jack’s coming to the wedding.”

“Oh, super. Your godfather, the smoker who’s had two heart attacks, coming face-to-face with the guy who thinks he knows all there is to know about healthful eating. I did a party where he was a guest. He tried to tell me what I should have served. I’m like, Welcome to the Vegetarian Revolution, Victor! You wanna cook, go ahead. But someone else is paying me to do it, so back off.”

“I know the guy’s a creep, but give him a break.”

“No.”

Great. I had to say, though, Julian was right. And in fact, I had as much, if not more, reason to dislike Victor Lane and his vaunted Gold Gulch Spa than Julian did. But I kept mum. After all, a job was just a job, right?

As Julian had said, No.

5

As I headed home, tatters of dark cloud hung in front of a lighter sky. Gray drizzle continued to fall. Once I’d unpacked the boxes, I fixed myself what I called my Summertime Special: two to four shots of espresso—depending on how badly I needed the caffeine—with whipping cream and ice cubes, and sat at our oak kitchen table to collect myself. With some trepidation, I checked our blinking answering machine.

There was no message from Billie Attenborough—she probably figured she’d done enough damage for one day—nor was there one from Southwest Hospital, the place to which the ambulance had hauled away Norman O’Neal. Tom’s deep, reassuring voice sounded strained when he said he hoped to be home by seven; the medical examiner was making a special trip in to night.

That didn’t sound good.

Arch was up next, announcing gleefully that he’d been invited to spend another night at Gus’s place, and was that okay? Todd was there with them, too, and Todd’s mother had already said he could stay.

Charlotte Attenborough’s voice greeted me next. She said she wanted to talk to me about the new arrangements for the reception, which Billie was supposed to tell me about, but had forgotten. I rolled my eyes. The daughter blamed the mother, and vice versa. Personally, I accepted Charlotte’s version. I shook my head. If Arch had ever been as flaky as Billie Attenborough, he never would have made it through elementary school.

Did I, Charlotte went on, know where my godfather, Jack, was? There was no answer at his house. Could she come to my place this evening to talk?

“I sure don’t want to see you,” I said aloud to the empty kitchen. “But I suppose we’re going to have to go over some things.”

Adding fifty people and changing the venue of the reception? Letting me know a mere forty-eight hours in advance? I poured myself a small glass of sherry.

Finally, there was Marla. She and my godfather were getting comprehensively inebriated, and could they please come over? Not to worry, Marla had already called a Denver car service to do the chauffering.

“Call me as soon as you get this message, will you?” Marla demanded. “I’ll have to tell the car service what time.” She stopped to give Jack directions to her garage, where he’d find more scotch. “I know you live less than a mile from me, Goldy. But you can’t be too careful with cops waiting around every corner, just dying to hand everyone DUI citations. I don’t mean Tom, of course. Yeah, sure, bring the bourbon, too!” she shrieked at Jack. “Now listen”—here she lowered her voice—“I’ve got the churchwomen coming to night for a fund-raising discussion. Remember that dessert you promised to make for me? I still need it. And I won’t be able to stay at your place long, okay? So you need to take care of your godfather once I get there. What, Jack?” she called. “You can find more ice in the refrigerator in the garage—”

She hung up.

So. At this point, I was left to worry about how much booze two former heart attack patients—Marla and Jack—were downing, whether I could come up with realistic contract changes for Charlotte Attenborough, and making a dessert that I’d completely forgotten about. I wondered how the Episcopal churchwomen would feel about vanilla ice cream in a graham cracker crust. Probably not very good.

But I always had backup plans, so our walk-in or freezer should yield something.

I called Marla and told her to contact the car service. She replied that they’d be along as soon as humanly possible. How was Jack doing? I asked.

“About what you’d expect,” was her cryptic reply. He must have been sitting right there.

Next I phoned Arch and said it was fine for him to stay with Gus. He thanked me profusely and promised they’d be over the next night. I told him not to worry about it.

I called Charlotte Attenborough, got her voice mail, and said sure, she could come over this evening, as long as it was before ten.

I opened the walk-in and looked around for dessert ingredients for Marla. My eyes lit on a coeur à la crème that I’d drained overnight, with the intention of serving it to Tom to celebrate our love, it being wedding season and all. I could fix Tom another one, and the churchwomen would be more likely to open up their checkbooks if they were actually served something that Marla said was “incomparably rich.”

It was just past five. Marla was due to come over with Jack, but what with a car service having to make it up the mountain, that was probably at least an hour away. I drank my sherry, and thought about Doc Finn.

He had been a wonderful man, absolutely dedicated to healing. When Arch had been running a high fever during one of our periodic blizzards, his pediatrician’s office had not been answering their phone. Nor had Arch’s father, the Jerk, chosen to come home. He’d said he was staying in Denver—although I knew he was with his girlfriend. In desperation, I’d called Spruce Medical, and Doc Finn had jumped into his Jeep and driven out to us that night. I’d told him I didn’t know doctors still made house calls. Doc Finn had tried to touch my swollen cheek—another gift from the Jerk—and I’d shied away from him. I’d said Arch was in bed, and didn’t he want to see him?

Doc Finn had been kind and gentle with Arch. He’d taken my son’s temperature, listened to his chest, and checked his ears. Doc Finn’s verdict: Arch had pneumonia. But Doc Finn had brought a bag of meds, including antibiotics, and we had weathered the storm, literally and figuratively.

As Doc Finn was leaving that night, he turned to me thoughtfully and said, “Doctors are supposed to heal, not hurt.” I’d burst out crying, and taken the card Doc Finn had proffered. It hadn’t been his card; it had belonged to a divorce lawyer.

I finished the sherry and traipsed upstairs, where I peeled off my catering clothes and decided on a shower. Doc Finn had been such a wonderful man, so thorough in his diagnoses, so good with patients young and old—the town would miss him terribly. As would Jack Carmichael. My heart was wrenched, thinking of my godfather and his dear friend. What would Jack do without Doc Finn?

While the hot water soothed my body, I tried to put the image of Doc Finn at the bottom of a ravine out of my mind. But when I did, the vision of today’s wedding crashers—Norman O’Neal, plus Billie Attenborough with her fiancé, Craig Miller, in tow—came up. Better to dispense with them, too.

Instead, I pondered Marla’s pie. I had pecans in the walk-in, and could make a nut-and-butter crust. This I would pack with the chilled coeur filling. On top I’d put concentric circles of blueberries and raspberries, and I’d give Marla a bowl of whipped cream to place on the side. All this would go over well with the churchwomen, I had no doubt.

With the least of my problems solved, I dried off and donned jeans and a sweatshirt. It was still cool and drizzly outside, so a hot dinner for Tom and me, and Jack if I could convince him to stay, would work well. I always wanted Jack to feel welcome to eat with us, but he seldom did. Said he’d been a bachelor for so long, he resisted mothering.

I opened the freezer side of the walk-in and surveyed the contents. In February, I’d made and frozen a pork ragout. With penne pasta and a Romaine salad with vinaigrette, it would be perfect.

Once I’d mixed up Marla’s butter crust with toasted pecans, I patted the crumbly mixture into a pie pan, then put it into the oven to bake. I set the table for three and thawed the ragout. It looked luscious. Finally, I located the penne, washed and dried the Romaine leaves, and whisked together a Dijon vinaigrette.

I pulled the hot pie plate out of the oven, set it aside to cool, and booted up my kitchen computer. Reluctantly, I pulled up Billie Attenborough’s menu. I had my basic moneymaking formulas for different recipes. They all allowed for some overage, because you had to, but not for an extra fifty people. I was a true believer in love and all that, but if you were a caterer, weddings were the last place you should be feeling charitable.

I stared at the menu. On such short notice, how in the hell was I supposed to come up with fifty extra guests’ worth of crab cakes with sauce gribiche, labor-intensive deviled eggs with caviar, artichoke skewers, and the two salads? Plus, would the wedding cake Julian was making even be big enough? And what about having enough servers? Well, Billie had said Victor Lane’s staff would be willing to help, and doggone it, help they were going to have to.

I printed out a list of extra foodstuffs we would need, plus the recipes that would go with those ingredients. I knew the chef at Gold Gulch Spa. Yolanda was actually an old friend who had trained with my mentor, André. She had a prickly exterior, but once you got to know her, Yolanda was a generous soul. Still, I knew she would not be happy to add more duties to all she had to do in the spa kitchen. I shook my head. What ailed Billie Attenborough anyway?

The phone rang and I checked the caller ID. It was Julian.

“Are you all right?” I immediately demanded.

“Of course I’m all right, why wouldn’t I be? A drunk crashed into the cake I’d spent zillions of hours making for his daughter’s wedding, and why? Because apparently the priest flattened him. And then while I was trying to fix the cake, the bitch whose wedding we’re doing the day after tomorrow showed up in the kitchen with a whole new set of demands, which include adding fifty people to her guest list. What about that strikes you as not all right?”

“Oh, Julian, I’m sorry. I just was worried about you.”

“And I’m worried about you, boss. I was just sitting here thinking of all that extra work Billie’s dumped on you, and wondering how you’re going to manage casing a new venue while buying more supplies while doing a kick-ass new amount of new cooking. So…are you staring at your computer now, or what?”

I sighed. “You’ve got it.”

“All right, e-mail me your shopping list and recipes, and I’ll get it done tomorrow. Plus, I know, I’ll have to make an extra layer or two for the wedding cake. I always leave the assembly to the last thing, so that’ll work. And I’ve already asked for the day off from the bistro.”

“But Saturday is your busy day there! And you can’t possibly do all this in one day!”

“Don’t worry, okay? You’ve got enough on your plate. Speaking of which, boss, have you eaten anything?”

“I’m heating up dinner now. Jack’s with Marla, and she’s going to bring him over. Tom will be home late, and Arch is with Gus and Todd.”

“Okay.” He sounded relieved. “Now tell me you’re not sweating seeing that prick of a spa owner Victor Lane too much.”

“I’m not sweating it,” I lied.

“You don’t sound convinced.” When I said nothing, he said, “All right, just e-mail that stuff over, and I’ll get cracking. I know a fancy-food store here that carries caviar by the case, and they have organic free-range eggs, too. I can get some fresh new potatoes, dill, artichokes, and haricots verts at the farmers’ market first thing in the morning.”

“Okay, listen, I’ve got plenty of pasteurized crab to do an extra hundred crab cakes, plus sauce. That should be way more than enough. You’re welcome to do all the rest. Please know I’m grateful. I’m so glad we don’t have to dump all the extra work on Yolanda out at the spa.”

“Wouldn’t she just love that?”

“No, she wouldn’t. And by the way, you’re the best.”

“Oh, and don’t I know it,” he said. But he didn’t. Julian was the most humble twenty-something I’d ever met. “Now be sure to get plenty of rest to night. Any word from the Attenborough coven?”

“Charlotte called. She’s going to have to come over to night so we can do the extra contract. But my big worry is Jack. I have to try to comfort him. I mean, he’s just lost his best friend. I’m going to try to convince him to eat here.”

“Yeah, good plan. Did they ever find out exactly what happened to Doc Finn?”

“Car accident is all I know. Tom should be able to tell me more later.”

He signed off after again urging me not to worry about the Attenborough wedding. “Just think,” he said, trying to sound jovial, “in just forty-eight hours, it’ll be over!” When I didn’t say anything, Julian concluded, “And don’t worry about Victor Lane either.”

Right, I thought as I checked the pecan-butter crust. It was cool enough to fill, so I set about picking over and carefully washing the raspberries and blueberries Julian had brought from the same Boulder farmers’ market where he’d be going tomorrow.

Don’t worry about Victor Lane, Julian had said. But how could I not worry about the obstreperous owner of Gold Gulch Spa? Victor Lane had stabbed me in the back once. Figuratively speaking, of course. Still, what was to prevent him from doing it again?

I spooned the luscious coeur filling into the cooled crust, and carefully dried enough berries to make the top of Marla’s pie both gorgeous and appetizing. Then I told myself, Don’t think about Billie Attenborough, don’t think about Doc Finn, don’t think about Victor Lane. Yeah, especially that.

But as I dropped the berries into precise place, I reflected, trying not to, on Victor Lane. When I’d finished my Denver apprenticeship to André Hibbard, I applied to work at the only catering business serving the mountain area, an enterprise with the ridiculously unappetizing name Victor’s Vittles, owned and operated by Victor Lane. As far as I knew, Victor had gotten into the food business because he’d seen the need the wealthy of Aspen Meadow had for giving parties. He’d seen an easy way to make money, and he’d taken it.

I thought back to those difficult years right after I’d divorced the Jerk. I’d gotten the house, in the parlance of divorced people, and I wanted to be able to do food service when Arch was in school or with babysitters, without subjecting him to the grueling routine of restaurant work. I thought I’d have a perfect fit with Victor’s Vittles.

Boy, was I wrong.

Victor did not like to work with food—far from it. His idea of catering a summer party was to go down to one of the ware house clubs in Denver, buy corn chips and cheese dip, several tubs of prepared potato salad, a variety of packages of hot dogs, hamburgers, steaks, and/or chicken legs, all of which he slathered with bottled barbecue sauce and threw onto the grill while he tossed packaged salads with ranch dressing made from a mix. For dessert, he ordered either the ware house chocolate cake, carrot cake, or cheesecake.

I’d learned from one of the young men who worked for Victor that he tripled the cost of his “ingredients,” as he called the processed foods he bought…and he made out like the kind of bandito who’d once populated Aspen Meadow.

So I’d made an appointment to see Victor, and promised him—modestly? immodestly? I still didn’t know—some new taste sensations. I showed up at his door with platters of homemade new-potato salad with handpicked dill and crème fraîche—the same recipe we were going to have at Billie’s reception—marinated grilled chicken breasts, a flawless baby spinach salad, a loaf of homemade Cuban Bread, and a flourless chocolate cake. He’d tasted everything and curled his lip. Then he’d leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and turned me away with a curt, “Women don’t know how to cook.”

Pushing the memories away, I put the pie in the walk-in, pulled out a case of crab, and printed out my recipe for crab cakes. Then I checked that I had plenty of fresh celery, my only concern, and began mixing up the ingredients for all the extra crab cakes I would need for Billie Attenborough’s reception.

Women don’t know how to cook. How Victor Lane’s cruel assessment had rung in my ears all the way home that day. As my van had chugged away from his house, I berated myself for allowing tears to sting my eyes, and slapped them away when they rolled down my cheeks. Still, self-pity ruled only until I swung my van into our gravel driveway. Don’t know how to cook, huh? We would just see about that.

Oddly, my own beloved godfather featured in this story early on. Jack happened to call me after I had stomped back into my kitchen with the remains of my offerings for Victor Lane. Jack had been saying for months how worried he was about me since I’d kicked out the Jerk. He repeatedly asked if there was anything he could do for me. Would I consider moving back to New Jersey? Did I need money? Could he at least pay for house keeping help for me? No, no, no thank you, I’d always said.

When Jack had called this particular time, I was still so upset I ended up giving him a blow by blow of my interview—a euphemism for rejection, if ever there was one—with Victor Lane, although I didn’t use his name. I think I was too afraid Jack might fly out and shoot him—Jack was a crack shot. But Jack had made no threats. He had only said quietly, “I think you should open your own catering business. And I’m going to send you the money to do it.”

I protested, of course, the way I always did. I wanted to make it on my own. Jack had said, “Gertie Girl? You got merit scholarships to go to prep school and college. You had a child while that creep treated you like dirt. You dumped the creep, you worked your way through an apprenticeship at a restaurant to learn the food business, and you think you haven’t already made it on your own?”

“Jack, don’t.” And then I burst out crying again.

“Gertie Girl! Don’t say another word. And stop crying. I’m sending you a check. No loan, mind you. A gift, and I’m paying the gift tax. I’ve made more money in the lawyering business than I know what to do with. Now get used to receiving a gift, dammit, and make this catering business work so you can show this new creep just who knows how to cook and who doesn’t.”

The next day, FedEx delivered a check for fifty thousand dollars. Aghast, I called Jack. I simply couldn’t accept a gift that large. Or maybe I could, I didn’t know…but I needed to thank my godfather, or do something. But Jack’s secretary said he was in court. He’d told his secretary to say he didn’t want to hear from me until I’d driven “some stupid creep,” as she gleefully put it, “into the poor house.”

It had taken only six months. I’d bought equipment and had my kitchen retrofitted to pass the vulture’s eye of the county health inspector. I’d found Alicia, my supplier; I’d had cards and brochures made up; I’d given clients who referred me to new clients a 10 percent discount. And I’d cooked. Madly, insanely, with all the energy of a woman scorned. Victor’s Vittles had quietly closed its doors.

But Victor Lane had not allowed me to take the processed cheese out of his mouth so quickly. He’d wormed his way into the affections of two food critics—one at a Denver newspaper, the other at a glossy magazine, Front Range Quarterly. He’d made sure that both critics skewered my business, Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! The critics said my food was unoriginal, boring, and left them hungry. Since André had taught me to have photos posted in my kitchen of every food critic working in the greater Denver metropolitan area, I’d been quite sure that neither of the poseurs had ever tasted my food or even attended one of my parties.

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you this behind-your-back stuff isn’t personal,” Jack had told me. “It’s as personal as it can be. But if you keep doing the work you were hired to do by clients who love you, then this new creep can blow his despair over you driving him out of business out his ass.”

Like most lawyers, Jack did have a way with words. I’d refused to give up my catering business, which had continued to thrive, thank you very much. And Victor Lane had bought the Creek Ranch Hotel…and turned it into Gold Gulch Spa. The most delicious irony of all was that he’d hired a woman to run his kitchen. Yolanda, my friend, had confided that Victor was an absolute pain in the behind, but the spa clients, 99 percent of whom were women, were as addicted to Gold Gulch Spa as crack smokers were to their pipes. Even though Victor never, but ever, gave her any credit, she knew she deserved it…and, she said, the women who slipped hundred-dollar bills into her apron pocket at the end of their stays seemed to agree.

What ever, as Arch would say. I didn’t wish Victor Lane harm. I just wanted him to stay out of my way. Over the last four years, we’d been successful at dodging each other. But with Billie Attenborough scheduling her wedding and reception at Gold Gulch Spa, my carefully crafted avoidance of Victor Lane was about to come to an abrupt halt.

I finished molding the last crab cake, and counted them. I figured Billie could invite an extra seventy-five people to her guest list and we’d still be in good shape. I covered the platter and placed it in the walk-in, just in the nick of time, as it turned out. The doorbell rang: Jack and Marla.

Through the peephole, Marla waved at me with crazed, teen-type enthusiasm. I wondered how much of that scotch and bourbon they’d had time to ingest.

“Finally, finally!” Marla shrieked when I let her inside. The two of them stomped inside in a cloud of whiskey scent. “We’re starving, do you have anything cooking?”

“Crab cakes or pork ragout? I’ve got plenty of extra crab cakes for the Attenborough reception, and the pork ragout is yummy—”

“Both, then!” Marla replied.

I took their coats while they ushered themselves into the kitchen. Marla’s joviality was forced, while Jack, who had tightness around his eyes and wore a strained expression, looked as if he’d just lost his best friend. Which, of course, he had.

What, oh what, could I do to help my dear, sweet godfather recover? He had been uncompromisingly generous and kind to me my entire life, and I had no idea—none—how to help him.

6

I thought you were having the churchwomen over for dinner,” I said to Marla as she dug into a crab cake I’d sautéed for her.

“Dessert. You made my pie, didn’t you?” When I nodded, Marla lifted her chin in Jack’s direction. He was rubbing his forehead. He’d refused any food. Marla caught my eye and shook her head.

“Jack,” I said gently, “let me call Craig Miller for you. He’s a doctor, maybe you should have a tranquilizer or something.” When Jack grunted, I went on, “Look, maybe Craig knows a psychologist or a psychiatrist or someone professional, anyway, someone who could come out to the house to talk to you. Will you let me, please?”

“Absolutely not,” said Jack. He took a deep breath. “No doctors, please. I’m a big boy. I can handle this.”

“Jack!” I exclaimed as Marla shrugged. “How about Father Pete?” I persisted. “Or Lucas? I know either one of them would want to be with you, if that would somehow make you feel better—”

Jack managed a wan smile. “Gertie Girl. I’m fine. Just tired.” He frowned and looked around the kitchen, as if noticing for the first time that it was only the three of us there. “Where’s Tom? Arch?”

“Arch is at his half brother’s house. Tom’s coming home late.” I checked the clock: almost 6. “When are the churchwomen arriving, Marla?”

“Seven, but I have to be back home by half past six. The car-service guy is coming back for me. Do you have any more crab cakes? And how about a bowl of that ragout?”

I fixed her both. Since Marla had had her heart attack, I automatically prepared most of my main dishes with low-fat this, low-carbohydrate that, or reduced-calorie the other thing. If she ate dessert, I figured that was her problem. Jack, who’d had two heart attacks, had no desire to have me lecture him about anything, as he said he already got plenty of “that kind of tripe,” as he called it, from his son, Lucas.

I didn’t want to bring up Doc Finn’s death, and it was clear that neither Marla nor Jack did either. But since Jack’s conversations with me usually centered on the issues he was having adjusting to life in the West, or where he and Finn had just gone fishing, we suddenly had a cavernous space in our conversation. When Marla hopped up to heat another crab cake, I finally grabbed at a conversational straw.

“You’re going to get sick of those before Billie Attenborough’s wedding,” I commented. “It’s day after tomorrow, remember?”

Marla and Jack groaned in unison.

Marla said, “I got a call today from a secretarial service that Charlotte is using. All the guests are being notified of the new venue for the wedding. Gold Gulch Spa? Please. What are we supposed to do, stuff ourselves silly at the reception, then go work out, then relax in the hot springs pool?”

“How ’bout,” Jack interjected, “we just pig out, then go rest in the hot pool?” After asking that question, though, he went back into the daze that had enveloped him since he’d arrived at the house.

“Sounds good to me,” replied Marla. “But get this—directions are being e-mailed, faxed, or delivered by messenger to each and every wedding guest, depending on how technologically current you are. Changing where the festivities are being held must mess up your plans somewhat, eh, Goldy?”

“I don’t even want to go there,” I replied. “I mean, I’ll go to the spa, but I sure don’t want to talk about how Billie’s addition of fifty more guests is screwing up my life. Charlotte’s coming over to night so we can hammer out the details. I have to drive to Gold Gulch tomorrow morning, to see what our flow is going to be, where the tables will be set up, all that jazz.”

“And then there’s the dreaded Victor Lane to deal with,” Marla added. She knew all about my dealings with the man who thought women couldn’t cook.

“Victor Lane?” Jack suddenly seemed to come out of his stupor, and his gray eyebrows knit in puzzlement. “Victor Lane? Why does that name sound depressingly familiar?”

Oh, dear. I found it hard to believe that Jack, the man who’d been going out with Charlotte Attenborough virtually since he arrived in town, would not have heard of Victor Lane and his vaunted Gold Gulch Spa. Charlotte was well known as a Gold Gulch fixture. To forestall discussion of a subject that could upset Jack even more, I offered Jack and Marla something else to drink. When they declined, I poured myself another glass of sherry.

But Marla didn’t take to forestallment. “Don’t tell me Goldy hasn’t told you about Victor Lane of Victor’s Vittles. Victor Lane told Goldy that women don’t know how to cook!”

Jack nodded at me appraisingly. “That son of a bitch? That same guy from all those years ago?”

I nodded and took a large slug of sherry.

“All those years ago?” Marla asked in puzzlement. “This is the guy from all what years ago?” Marla shook a bejeweled finger at me accusingly. “Goldy, did you have a fling with Victor Lane and not tell me?”

I laughed so hard sherry shot out of my nose and I started to cough. Marla took that as confirmation that I had not rolled in the hay with Victor.

“I wonder why he would ever say that women don’t know how to cook,” Jack said. “Tell that to all the women across America who find themselves standing over a stove for much of their lives.”

“Look, Jack,” I said soothingly, “if you hadn’t helped me see that Victor was as full of crap as he was of himself, there might well be no Goldilocks’ Catering here in Aspen Meadow.”

The doorbell rang, and Marla groaned.

“Just as I’m about to get some truly juicy gossip about Aspen Meadow’s renowned asshole spa owner,” she said, “my car-service guy arrives. Dammit! Now you two need to hold that thought, because I want to hear all about Victor Lane when we get together next.” She eyed the platter. “May I take a couple of crab cakes, Goldy? I’m so hungry.”

“Yeah, sure. I made lots extra for Billie Attenborough’s shindig. And don’t forget your pie.”

I loaded her down with goodies, and she took off for the front door, where whoever was there was persistently knocking.

“Oops, it’s not my guy,” said Marla, as she checked the peephole. “It’s an Attenborough,” she singsonged, “incoming!” She put her platters of food down on the hall table.

“Already?” I asked.

“Yes yes,” Marla singsonged again.

“I haven’t called her all day. She’s going to be angry,” Jack said dejectedly.

“Charlotte, darling!” Marla swept the front door open. “Don’t tell me you’re not coming to the dessert fund-raiser to night at my place? Don’t break my heart.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Charlotte trilled. “What are you doing here, Marla? Don’t you have guests to get ready for? You smell like liquor. Where’s Goldy?”

Jack uttered a swear word under his breath.

“In the kitchen!” Marla sang. “Oops, there’s my car service!” She picked up her food platters and sashayed out. “See you later, everybody!”

I knew I should have been more ready for Charlotte, but I wasn’t. The thought occurred to me that maybe she should tend to Jack. Charlotte Attenborough had been a nurse in her previous life, before her well-insured husband died of his bleeding ulcer. According to Marla, Charlotte had used the insurance money to buy a struggling local magazine with the uninspiring name Aspen Meadow Monthly. She’d transformed the publication into a glossy, widely read and admired lifestyle rag, Mountain Homes. Charlotte herself was owner, editor, and chief pooh-bah, and as such was greatly admired around town. She’d offered me free monthly full-page advertising for a year as an added incentive for doing her daughter’s wedding. I’d joyously accepted…but that had all been nine months ago, and since then, I’d had second, third, fourth, ad infinitum thoughts telling me that no advertising was worth getting a bleeding ulcer myself.

“Goldy, do you have my new contract?”

“No. Sorry, Charlotte,” I said. I didn’t offer any excuses, such as having my godfather’s best friend found dead in a ravine, dealing with a combative biological father at a wedding, or even actually having had another wedding reception to cater today. “I’ll get right on it.” I turned to my computer, booted it up, and began typing changes to our contract that would reflect additional guests and a change of venue. “Would you like a drink, or some food?” I asked as I pressed Print. “We have lots of everything.”

“Jack,” Charlotte said, surprised, “what are you doing here?”

I stopped what I was doing to turn back to them. I’d told Tom that Charlotte was perfectly preserved. Like jam? he’d asked. I’d merely shaken my head.

I knew Billie was thirty-six, and Charlotte had made a point of telling me she’d given birth to her only child when she was twenty. But there was no way Charlotte Attenborough was in her midfifties; she was sixty-five if she was a day. She wore her short gray-blond hair swept up in what boys from the fifties would have called a ducktail. She was at least five feet eight inches tall, but the ramrod-straight way she held her slender self, shoulders back, abs tight, made her look more like six feet. This night, she wore a midcalf, dark gray sheath-style dress. Despite its fashionable draping, her attire gave her the look of a drill sergeant.

“Well?” she said to Jack.

As if on cue, both of our family’s animals—a big, floppy, exceptionally affectionate bloodhound named Jake, and a long-haired feline named Scout—made their presence known at our back door. I’d called them to come in when I’d first arrived home, but neither had been interested then.

“I’ll let in the pets.” Jack leaped up from his chair and went to the back door before I could say, Careful, they’re going to be muddy!

Which, in retrospect, would have been a very good idea, but not nearly as much fun. Charlotte, who clearly did not like dogs, flinched when Jake came bounding in. She screamed when he jumped up on her and muddied her impeccable sheath. The thick mud on his paws might not have done so much damage to Charlotte’s dress if she hadn’t then shrieked, “Stop, you!” and tried to whack Jake away. Even though I called him and tried to snag his collar, Charlotte’s recoiling move made Jake want to be friends even more, so that he sprang up again on Charlotte, who tried to bat him away. “You stupid dog!” she cried. “Go away!”

Jake, who didn’t like to be called stupid, began whimpering, and again vaulted up on Charlotte, who had turned her backside on him, which meant Jake’s paws landed on the reverse side of the sheath, which I figured was now pretty much ruined.

“I’m so sorry, Charlotte, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” I kept repeating. My godfather, who had tried less successfully than I had to contain Jake, slumped in defeat on a kitchen chair.

When I finally managed to snag Jake’s leash, I led him out of the kitchen. Scout the cat, who was much better at figuring out when he wasn’t wanted, had already slunk away. I managed to corral the two of them in the pet-containment area, where I gave them a perfunctory drying off with fresh towels that I kept in their little home for just this purpose.

Oh, Lord, but I wished Tom would come home.

“Well, Charlotte,” I said in my conciliatory voice when I returned to the kitchen, “again, I’m sorry. Would you like to see the contract?”

She was at our sink, where she was rubbing her muddied dress with a wet paper towel. When she faced me, her eyes were slits. “This is a disaster,” she said, and a cold finger of guilt ran down my spine.

“Dogs do get muddy when it rains,” Jack said, attempting mournfulness. “It’s, what do you call it? A force of nature.”

“Stop it,” Charlotte retorted. “I’ve been trying to phone you all day, too, but you won’t return my calls.”

Now Jack’s voice was genuinely mournful. “My best friend was found dead in a ravine, Charlotte.”

She turned to him, startled. “Who, Finn? What was he doing in a ravine?” Her tone implied that death could be avoided if one could but stay out of ravines. Jack just shook his head.

“It was a car accident, Charlotte,” I said in a low voice.

“Was anyone else hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“This is a tragedy,” she said to Jack. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” said Jack disconsolately.

Nobody said anything for a few minutes, and so I took a deep breath. “Now, Charlotte, here are the contract changes.” I handed her the sheet.

She perused the paper. “This looks fine.”

Charlotte kept glancing at Jack, who would not meet her gaze. I reflected once more on how much beyond me it was to know how or why these two had managed to keep a relationship going for a day, much less four months. Charlotte was elegant, perfectionistic, and expected to get her way, even if she had to pay for it. Her house in Flicker Ridge looked like a furniture showcase. Jack was generous, openhearted, and a slob, and the house he was renovating looked like a tornado had blown off the roof and thoroughly jumbled the interior…and no one had bothered to clean up since.

From the beginning of their odd relationship, I’d suspected that there was more desire to keep things going on Charlotte’s side than there was on Jack’s. He told me he’d been gentle, but firm, when she said she wanted him to stop spending so much time with Doc Finn. Doc Finn was his friend, and Jack wanted to go fishing and do…well, what ever his friend wanted. Charlotte had said he should want to spend more time with her.

Jack had demurred. But Charlotte had persevered. In fact, the previous month, she had confided to me that she expected to become engaged to Jack very soon. After a couple of weeks had gone by, I’d gently hinted around to Jack about this, as in, “Do you think you’d ever be wanting me to do your wedding reception?” He’d shaken his head at the suggestion, and told me he had no plans to get married again. His first wife had died of cancer before I’d known her. All this made me think that there were no nuptial festivities for Jack and Charlotte in the foreseeable future.

“I suppose that’s the cleanest I’m going to get it.” Charlotte had put the contract down and was working on her dress again. Now she turned away from the sink and gave me a forlorn look, as if the dog, and Jack’s unhelpfulness, had hurt her deeply, and I was supposed to do something about it.

But I didn’t know what to do. “So, Charlotte, what do you think of the figures?” I tried again.

“They’re fine.” But she’d spent only a moment looking at them. She pulled out her checkbook and wrote me a check. “Goldy?” she asked. “Can you be out at Gold Gulch Spa at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, so we can do the walk-through, and you can figure out how to use their kitchen?”

“Sure,” I replied, although I didn’t feel too sure of it, frankly.

“Yes,” said Jack, “I’ll bring her.”

“That’s not necessary, Jack,” I said.

“Jack,” said Charlotte, attempting to be mollifying, “you don’t need to be there. I want to spend time with you, but not there, not tomorrow. If you need to grieve for your friend, then you should do that. Out at the spa, you’ll just get in the way, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart?

When nobody said anything, Charlotte said, “Will you call me tonight, Jack, if you need me?” He looked up at her hopefully and nodded. “Well then,” she went on, “I guess I need to go home and change before the fund-raiser.”

When the door had closed, I turned to my godfather. “Jack, you don’t have to take me out to Gold Gulch tomorrow. I can manage.”

Jack made his face blank, a practice I’d seen him do before. “No, but I want to go. To protect you from this Victor Lane character.”

“I don’t need protecting, thanks.”

“Uh-huh. Last time I looked, your first husband disproved that particular theorem.”

“Oh, Jack, don’t—”

“Now,” he interrupted, “tell me why Tom is investigating the death of my best friend.”

“I have no idea that that’s what he’s doing.”

“Bull. When I had too much to drink and hit a tree with the seventy-one Mercedes I had before I got the seventy-three, the whole thing was handled by state patrol. That’s how they do accidents in this state. I know, ’cuz I asked.”

“Jack, I don’t know—”

“Yeah, yeah, you said that already.” He stood up. “All right, I’m walking across the street to my own house.”

“Jack? You’re not angry, are you?” I asked anxiously as I walked him to the door. “I really don’t know what Tom is doing now. But I want to help with…with you feeling better about Doc Finn.”

“Uh-huh.” He heaved on his jacket and opened the front door. “Let me tell you something I learned in the years before I became a recovering lawyer.”

“Jack—,” I began, but he held up his hand.

“I always know when a witness is lying.”

DOGGONE IT, I thought, as I cleaned up Marla’s dishes. I wasn’t lying. Okay, I did suspect that Tom’s disappearance from the O’Neal wedding was related to the discovery of Doc Finn’s body. But I knew no more about the situation than Jack did.

When Tom finally came home, it was almost nine o’clock. I’d kept the ragout going on a low simmer, just in case.

“Miss G. You should have gone to bed. I’m sorry I’m so late.”

“Did you eat?”

“No. I’ll fix myself a plate.”

“Sit,” I commanded. Tom washed his hands and slumped at the table. He shut his eyes tight, either from exhaustion or to block out what he’d seen that evening. When I put a dish of cooked penne, steamed broccoli, and ragout in front of him, you’d have thought it was steak on the QE2.

“Oh my,” he said. “This looks wonderful.”

While he ate, I gave him an animated account of the rest of the day after he’d left, the reception, packing up with Julian, the visits from Marla, Jack, and Charlotte Attenborough. He shook his head and smiled briefly. But then the smile vanished.

“Can you tell me what kept you down at the department?” I asked.

“I can, but you can’t mention a word of it to anyone, especially that nosy lawyer godfather of yours.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Last night, a driver going west up the canyon spotted a reflection in the rain. Called in that she thought a vehicle might have gone off the road and landed down in that deep ravine where folks dump trash sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know the spot.” Despite the no dumping sign, people didn’t chuck their unwanted furniture and garbage down that hillside sometimes; they did it as a matter of routine.

“Last night, state patrol had their hands full with accidents in the rain, but they finally got around to checking that ravine. And there was Doc Finn’s Porsche Cayenne, on its side.”

“Did he slide off the road?”

“The mud has made it impossible to tell exactly what happened. But state patrol called us after they’d spent about an hour down in the ravine.”

The taste of acid filled my mouth.

“Somebody,” Tom continued as he pushed his plate away, “came down into the ravine and used a rock to break the driver’s-side window. It looks as if whoever the person was then used another rock, or something, to smash in Doc Finn’s skull.”

“The rocks couldn’t have come loose somehow, when the Porsche slid into the ravine?”

“No, Miss G. That’s why state patrol is good at what they do.” He shook his head. “Doc Finn was murdered.”

7

I slumped into the kitchen chair closest to Tom. My feet and hands were suddenly freezing. “So, what are they up to now, down at the department?”

“The ME’s been called. They’ll try to do the autopsy as soon as they can. And our department is analyzing the contents of Finn’s car, to see if that will give us any leads. There are only a couple of houses nearby, and our guys have canvassed the whole area. But nobody saw anything.”

“Do they have any idea where Doc Finn was going?”

“Yeah. He had his cell in the car. According to the Received Calls on there, he got a call from your godfather last night, but that went straight to voice mail. Before that, there was a longer call. It came around half past seven Wednesday night, from Southwest Hospital, from inside a patient’s room. He saw a neighbor as he was backing his car out of his driveway, and he said he was off to see an old patient. Only problem is, that room is on the maternity ward, and the patient in that room was out with her husband looking at their baby at the time. And she’s never been a patient of Doc Finn’s. She’s never even heard of him.”

“No security cameras recording the goings in and out of the patient’s room, I take it.”

“Nope. My gut tells me we’re talking about a clever killer here. Of course, during visiting hours there are all kinds of people in the hospital, so basically it could have been anyone.”

“Did Doc Finn even have any patients in Southwest Hospital at the time?”

“That’s something we’re checking on.”

I hugged my shoulders, but that couldn’t dispel the chill I was feeling. “You know Jack’s going to be devastated that his pal was murdered.”

Tom nodded. “I figured.”

“He really wanted to talk to you to night. He waited here a long time, wondering where you were, asking questions. Said when he hit a tree, remember, not long after he got here? State patrol handled the whole thing. He kept asking me why you were down at the department. It was almost as if he knew something was wrong with Doc Finn’s accident.”

Tom pulled out his small notebook. “Almost as if he knew something was wrong, huh?”

“Oh, Tom, for heaven’s sake. Doc Finn was Jack’s best friend.” My tone grew hot and defensive. “And anyway, Jack wanted to talk to you.”

Tom pushed his chair back from the table. “Well then, maybe we should oblige him. Care to take a walk across the street?”

“You’re going to interrogate my godfather?”

“I’m just going to ask him a few questions.”

“Tom!”

“Trust me, Goldy, your godfather is a wily old coot. He can read people the way preachers recite Bible verses. If he even sniffs this is an interrogation, he’ll lawyer up faster than you can say, Glory Be.”

I gritted my teeth and reached for my trench coat in the hall closet. While Tom waited for me on the porch, I felt a pang of guilt that we were going over to Jack’s with the intention of…well, what ever it was we were intending to do. I dashed back into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Sauternes, a little seventy-five-dollar-a-bottle number that a grateful client had given me. So far, I hadn’t had the heart to open it.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Tom asked me when I appeared on the porch with the wine.

“I’m taking Jack this bottle—”

“Put it back.”

“Can’t I just—?”

“Absolutely not. Y’ever hear of the old saying, ‘Beware the gift giver’?”

“I can give Jack something if I want to!” I retorted. “I just brought him bread this morning!”

“He sees us coming? With you holding that? He’ll think, Here comes Tom the cop with his wife, my godchild, and she’s holding a bottle of wine that she thinks she’s going to pimp me with, so I’ll tell them all the dirt on Doc Finn.”

“Tom!”

“You trust me on this, or not?”

Well, of couse I did. I put the bottle back. But I felt my nerves becoming even more frayed…and they’d been unraveling ever since Tom had arrived home.

“Tom, Gertie Girl, come in.” Jack’s tone was grateful as he opened his massive door, a large sculpted oak number that he had picked up at a salvage yard.

And so we entered Jack’s Jumble, as Arch called it. My godfather kept saying he was renovating, but as yet, there were few visible signs of improvement, either on the exterior or the interior. I could see why the persistently rainy weather would have prevented him from putting up new cedar-shake shingle siding, which was what he claimed he intended to do. But on the inside, he had no excuse that I could see. Fishing and carousing tended to derail motivation, in my view.

As we stepped into the gray-walled foyer that still showed the rectangular outlines of the previous owner’s pictures, it was clear Jack hadn’t made much progress. He’d gutted the first floor, so that instead of having a parlor, dining room, and who-knew-what-all Victorian-type rooms, he now had a big, open space. In the far-left corner, he’d put state-of-the-art appliances into what was going to be an open-plan kitchen…but he still had no cabinets or countertops. My feet gritted across the hardwood floors that Jack had uncovered when he’d torn up the old green-and-brown shag carpeting. As far as I knew, Jack had not made a move to refinish the floors, or even to call someone to get an estimate to have them done.

“Thanks for coming over.” He was trying to sound cheerful, but his voice was as forlorn as the long, high-ceilinged room that, he’d told me, would eventually double as both living and dining room. The whole area contained only a few pieces of furniture that Jack had bought from the local secondhand store, while his “good furniture,” as he called it, stayed in storage.

“Sit,” Jack invited us, sweeping his hand toward a threadbare, Victorian-style maroon velvet couch that had seen better days, I guessed, in a brothel. On each side of the couch, and in front of it, stood out-of-context teak Danish-modern tables that, more than the couch, had seen much better days. And then there were the two director’s chairs that looked as if they’d been fished out of a well, back when Orson Welles had been a director.

Tom sat in one of the director’s chairs, while I took my place at the far end of what I affectionately thought of as the johns’ couch.

Tom grinned. “I can see you’ve been keeping your nose to the remodeling grindstone.” He liked Jack, and the feeling was mutual.

“Can’t rush these things,” Jack commented. He gestured to an open bottle of scotch on the table, where there were also, I noted, three glasses, a carafe of water, and an ice bucket. Next to these cocktail fixings was a yellow legal pad and a pen, two lawyerly accoutrements that Jack had never been able to give up. “Drink?”

To my astonishment, Tom replied, “Sure.” I blinked, and tried to catch Tom’s eye. I had never once witnessed him take a drink from someone he wanted to question. He was always circumspect, if not downright wary.

“Gertie Girl?” Jack asked. “Same as usual?”

“With a lot of water, please, Jack. I’ve already had some sherry.”

“Tom?”

“Straight with a bit of ice, thanks, Jack.”

“Well, Tom-boy.” Jack shook his head. “You must really suspect me of doing something.” So, Tom was drinking and Jack was acting suspicious, and I was left to wonder what was going on. Muttering unintelligibly to himself, Jack poured us each a couple of fingers of scotch, added some water and ice to both, and handed them across. “Trying to throw me off guard, eh, Tom? Drink my scotch, see if you can get me to drink more than you do, loosen up my tongue, find out what I know about Doc Finn. Is that it?”

“Hey, neighbor, back off a bit,” Tom replied. He took a long swig of the proffered drink. “I know you were friends with Finn, and I’m sorry he’s gone.” Tom paused. “Goldy said you wanted to talk to me, that’s all.”

“I do.”

When no one said anything, Tom sipped his drink again and said finally, “So, you know anyone who wanted to hurt Doc Finn? Did he have any enemies?”

Jack surprised me again, this time by putting his head in his hands and starting to sob.

“Jack, Jack,” I said. I moved over next to him and put my arms around his heaving shoulders.

“This is my fault,” he howled. “It’s all my fault.”

I looked at Tom helplessly. Tom, in turn, gave me a warning glance that I knew meant—Say nothing, do nothing. But Jack was my godfather, I’d always loved him. For crying out loud, I’d known him before I’d even met Tom. So there was no way I was going to follow Tom’s directive.

“It’s not your fault, Jack,” I protested. “It’s the fault of the person who—”

“Goldy!” Tom shouted.

“Person who what?” Jack asked. He didn’t seem to be crying anymore, and he’d picked up the pen he’d put by the legal pad.

I took a deep breath and settled back into the lumpy couch. In front of the couch was a large picture window that had been put in by a previous owner, so Jack had a perfect view of our house. I resolved to look at our house and say not a word. If Tom and Jack were playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game, I didn’t have a rule book.

“Why is Doc Finn dying all your fault?” Tom asked gently.

“He was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Tom replied. “Is that your fault?”

Jack shook his head. “It’s too complicated,” he said, his somber mood reasserting itself. He threw down the pen.

“I work all day at complicated,” Tom commented.

“Can you tell me how he was killed?” Jack asked.

“No can do, you know that, Counselor.”

“Gertie Girl?” Jack’s large eyes implored me.

“Don’t start with her, Jack,” Tom said sharply. “Or else we’re going to have to leave. Now tell me why it’s all your fault, okay? Or else tell me who Doc Finn’s enemies were.”

Jack considered. Time stretched out for so long that I finally looked around for a clock. Big problem: this was Jack’s mostly empty house, and there was no clock. He wore a Rolex, so he probably figured he didn’t need another timepiece.

“All right,” Jack said finally. “But if I talk to you, will you tell me what you know?”

Tom said, “Nope.”

“Did someone run him off the road? Shoot him while he was driving?”

Tom shrugged.

Jack exhaled and stared at the legal pad. “I don’t know too much about Finn’s enemies. There were a few women who wanted to get married, and he didn’t.” Jack stopped talking and considered. “You know Finn had retired. But recently, he had a few patients. There…were problems, I don’t know what.”

“What kind of problems?” Tom asked sharply. “Medical problems? Financial problems?”

“I don’t know,” Jack replied, still disconsolate, still staring at the legal pad. “Finn just told me there were problems, and that he was doing some research. But then before I could find out what kind of research, exactly, he stopped answering his home phone and his cell. I went over to his house and banged on the door. No answer there either.”

Tom grunted and refilled his drink. I wondered if he meant to rattle Jack by doing this. Ordinarily he’d have taken out his notebook to write down what Jack was saying; I knew that much about my husband.

“How recently was all this, Jack?” Tom asked. “Today’s Friday. When, exactly, did Finn stop answering his home phone and his cell?”

“Why?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what you’re telling me, how it fits with our timeline.”

“What’s your timeline?”

“I’m very tired, Jack,” Tom replied. “Goldy’s even more tired, and she and I both have to get up early tomorrow morning, even though it’s a Saturday.”

“Okay,” Jack said. He set his glass down on the table. “Today’s Friday.” He cast his eyes up to his ceiling. “I was supposed to meet with Finn, let’s see, last night. I didn’t see him or hear from him after yesterday afternoon. I went to his place real late last night, but he wasn’t there. Then this morning, he was supposed to pick me up for the O’Neal wedding, but he didn’t show.”

Tom pondered this. “So you were supposed to meet with Finn last night to find out what kind of research he was doing, and he didn’t show. You called him on both his home phone and his cell, and then you went over to his place. Did you call anybody else, another friend, say, to see where he might be?”

“Nope.”

“After Finn said he was doing some research, he suddenly disappeared and didn’t call. Did you suspect foul play?”

Jack shook his head in frustration. “I didn’t know what to think. Now could you please tell me what is going on?”

“I can’t,” said Tom.

AND SO TOM and I went home. I hugged Jack before we left, and he hugged me back and muttered something about seeing me in the morning.

“Where’re you going with him in the morning?” Tom asked me, once we’d come into our house and put the animals back outside.

“Gold Gulch Spa. Jack’s insisting on coming. Why? You don’t think I’m in danger when I’m with him, do you?”

“No,” Tom said thoughtfully. “I’m just trying to figure out what he’s not telling us. There’s something, I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“He’s secretive, you know that. He…loves puzzles. He used to give me all kinds of different ones when I was growing up. Plus, he’s a risk junkie. Maybe he’s sure he can figure out what happened to Doc Finn…on his own.”

“Oh, man, that’s all we need. Another amateur sleuth mucking things up. What do you mean, he’s secretive?”

We moved into the kitchen and sat down.

I said, “I didn’t even know until a week before he got here that he was moving to Aspen Meadow from New Jersey. And that he’d bought that decrepit old place across the street.”

“You didn’t know anything?”

“Nope. And that was only six months ago, as you know. Plus, I think the only reason he told me about the move was that he had told his son, Lucas, what he was doing, and Lucas had had a fit that Jack wasn’t moving across the street from him. So to avert Lucas showing up on our porch and accusing me of trying to steal Jack’s affections, which he’d done before, mind you, Jack calmly called and told me his plans.”

“Huh.” Tom looked around our kitchen and insisted on tidying up. “It’ll give me a chance to think.”

While he was washing dishes, I said, “Listen, Tom, you’ve probably already heard this from six different people—”

Tom turned off the water, wiped his hands, and gave me his full attention. “Go ahead.”

“Well, just some of those questions you were asking Jack…” Tom waited. Finally, I said, “Enemies Doc Finn had? Billie Attenborough didn’t like Doc Finn.”

“Stop while I get my notebook.”

“You know,” I went on, “she always blamed him for losing her first two fiancés. She blamed him loudly.”

“Billie does everything loudly. And,” he added thoughtfully, “you know how nothing is ever her fault? She doesn’t take responsibility for a thing. Everything is always your fault.” When I looked stricken, he said, “No, not you, Miss G. At least, not all the time.” When I frowned, he went on, laughing, “Don’t go getting paranoid on me. Guys down at the department are always saying women are just too sensitive.” This time I narrowed my eyes. “Okay,” Tom concluded, his tone apologetic, “for Billie, everything is always somebody else’s fault.” He closed his notebook. “We’ll check this out, thanks. Now, let me finish these dishes.”

I thanked him and put my feet up on a chair. When the phone rang, it startled me. Quarter after ten? Jack calling to try to get information out of Tom? Billie Attenborough phoning with a new demand?

It was neither. The caller ID said merely, southwest hospital.

“Looks like somebody might be trying to set up one of us,” I commented, and told Tom about the call’s provenance.

“I’ll deal with it.” With wet hands, Tom took the phone. After a moment, he said, “Actually, you want my wife.”

I shot him a murderous glance, but only sang into the phone, “Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! Whoever this is, I usually don’t do business this late in the evening!”

“Is this Goldy?” a tentative male voice asked.

“It is.” I wracked my brain to figure out who I knew in Southwest Hospital at the moment. Someone from church? Someone I was supposed to do a party for?

“This is, uh, Norman O’Neal.”

I shook my head. Cecelia O’Neal’s didn’t-want-to-be-irresponsible-anymore ex-dad. “Norman. Last time I saw you, you didn’t look too good.”

“Okay, yeah, sorry. It’s just that I can’t remember today very well. I’m down here in the hospital, and I can’t figure out what I did to get here. I’m not sick, or at least, I don’t think I am. One of the nurses told me I busted up my daughter’s wedding, and I’m really hoping that isn’t true.”

“Well—”

“Oh, God, I did bust up Cecelia’s wedding, didn’t I?”

“Not really. You just busted up the cake. I am curious, though. Why are you calling me? Why not call Cecelia if you want to apologize?”

“She’s on her honeymoon, I guess, and her mother isn’t answering. I, I’m desperate. I looked in the yellow pages for caterers and churches in Aspen Meadow, and your name sort of sounded familiar, so I called you.”

“But why—”

“Oh, right, right. Well, to make a long story short, I want to get back into my daughter Cecelia’s life.”

I’d majored in psychology, and I knew Carl Rogers would have wanted me to spit that right back at him. And anyway, I didn’t know what else to do. “You want to get back into your daughter’s life,” I said slowly.

Tom raised his eyebrow and gave me a quizzical look. I shook my head: You don’t want to know.

Norman O’Neal’s voice rose hopefully. “Do you think I have a chance? Of getting back into Ceci’s life?”

I licked my lips and tried to think of what to say. “Let’s put it this way, Norman,” I said, finally. “I’d say you’re going about it in the wrong way. You could start by apologizing to Cecelia and Dodie, and sending them a big check.”

“Please, Goldy, help me.” Norman O’Neal took an unsteady breath. “Have you ever had a close brush with death, Mrs. Schulz? You’re married, aren’t you? Should I call you Mrs. Schulz?”

“Mrs. Schulz is fine. And yes, I’ve had a close brush with death.”

“Doesn’t it make you reorder your priorities?”

“Mr. O’Neal. Norman. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Look, I have a granddaughter I’ve never seen. I know she’s just adopted, I mean, not Cecelia’s by blood, oh, that didn’t come out right. But still, I want to be part of Cecelia’s life, sort of start over, you know? I want to get to know this granddaughter, even if she is just adopted, you know.”

“Just adopted?” I thought of Julian, who was “just adopted,” and had turned out just fine, thank you very so much. “You might want to rethink your diction when it comes to referring to your granddaughter, Norm. And where does the brush with death part come in?”

“I heard my granddaughter almost died! So I wanted to reorder my priorities. Please, won’t you help me? Wait, wait a second—”

“Almost died? What do you mean?”

There was no reply, just some gargling from the other end.

“Norm,” I said, “really, I’d love to help you—,” but was interrupted by the sound of Norman O’Neal once again puking his guts out, this time on the hospital floor.

8

I hung up rather than listen to those horrible noises. I then told Tom about the remorseful, confused, and oh-so-sick Norman O’Neal.

“Sounds like your typical alcoholic after a blackout,” Tom said. “He wants like hell to make amends, at least he likes the idea of making amends. Only thing is, he wants somebody else to make them for him.”

“Maybe I should go see him in the hospital,” I replied. “He did sound pretty awful. Plus, he said Cecelia’s daughter almost died! Have you heard anything about that?”

“No, I haven’t. And you’re kidding about visiting Norman O’Neal in the hospital, right? As if you don’t have enough on your plate already.”

“Never tell a caterer she has too much on her plate.”

“Miss G., please. You want to go see Norman O’Neal, I’ll go with you. But at least wait until you’ve done Billie Attenborough’s wedding,” Tom advised. “By then the dust and/or mush may have settled in Norman O’Neal’s brain, and the three of us might be able to have a civilized conversation. Although I doubt it.”

“By then he’ll have gone home from the hospital.”

“I’m sure Dodie O’Neal will tell you where he lives.”

“Or maybe he’ll be in rehab,” I said. “Then I’d never be able to reach him, or at least, not for thirty days, or what ever it is. Now I’m all worried about Cecelia’s daughter. I’m going to call her.”

“It’s almost eleven.”

But I dialed Dodie O’Neal anyway.

“Hey, Goldy,” she said. “Saw your name on the caller ID. I gave you the right amount of money, didn’t I?”

“Of course, Dodie. But Norman just called me from the hospital.”

“Oh, is that what the calls have been about from Southwest? Please tell me he’s dying.”

I cleared my throat. “He said Cecelia’s daughter had a brush with death. I just wanted to make sure she was okay.”

“She’s in bed, fast asleep. Was Norman still drunk?”

“He was pretty sick. But he sounded as if he wants to make amends, or to have a relationship, or something.”

Dodie snorted. “He calls you again, tell him to contact my lawyer.”

“I felt sorry for him,” I said lamely.

“Goldy, don’t fall for his act. He’s a son of a bitch. He manipulates women into bed with him, he gets women to do his work for him, he gets women who are going through divorces to pay him more money than is sane. He would manipulate the boulders in my front yard, if he could.”

“I just wanted to let you know about his call.” I told her again what a lovely wedding Cecelia had had—even though I’d missed most of it, of course—and signed off.

Tom was emptying his pockets, carefully placing his keys, badge, notebook, and wallet on the counter. He stopped for a moment to give his words their full effect. “I don’t get you, Goldy. A drunk—a lawyer, no less—comes and almost screws up the wedding of one of your favorite clients. He makes said client—the bride, no less—cry. He makes his granddaughter cry. The lawyer takes a swing at our priest. Our priest pops him one, and the offending father-of-the-bride, who, let us not forget, was entirely in absentia as his daughter was growing up, passes out. The drunk lawyer gets hauled off to the hospital, where, when he wakes up, he probably begins preparing his papers to sue Father Pete. But he takes a break from preparing those papers, and calls you to blubber. And you feel sorry for this asshole?”

“Oh, Tom, he just wants to have a relationship with Cecelia and her daughter. And you make it sound so—”

“You want to do something for a few drunks? Make cookies for the AA meetings we have down at the jail. Trust me, drunks who are drying out love sweets. But do nothing for that SOB Norman O’Neal. You do anything? Visit him, send him flowers? He’ll say in court, ‘See, even the caterer felt remorse over what happened, she brought me roses.’”

I shook my head. “I married a cynic.”

“No, you married a realist.” He leaned over and gave me a kiss. “Not meaning to bring up the past. I mean, with the Jerk and all. But you’ve already felt sorry enough for one asshole to last an entire lifetime.”

“That’s hitting below the belt, Tom.”

“My dear sweet wife,” Tom said as he gathered me into his arms, “first of all, I would never hit you. Second, there are any number of fun things I would love to do with you that involve activities below the belt.”

And so we went to bed, although we didn’t actually go to sleep for a while. Tom had a number of those activities in mind, and I was more than willing to try them out.

As I was drifting off to dreamland, I realized that unlike many of the people I worked for, I hadn’t thought getting married was any big deal. It was being married—to Tom, that is—that, along with having Arch, had been the very biggest deal of my life.

SATURDAY MORNING DAWNED with weak sunshine and birdsong. I lay in bed thinking how much better the night before, with Tom, had been than the day I was about to have was probably going to be. The prospect of spending my Saturday with Charlotte Attenborough and the dreaded Victor Lane at Gold Gulch Spa did not fill me with joy. Even the leavening presence of my godfather wouldn’t help. I wished fervently for rain, lots of it, and a cancellation of all plans.

“Come on, Miss G.” Tom leaned over and kissed my cheek. I luxuriated in his scent of aftershave and soap. He placed an iced espresso with cream on the night table. “I have to go meet with the medical examiner.”

“The medical examiner? Do you really think he’ll get to Doc Finn so soon?”

“Yup. Our guy was an old friend of Finn’s.”

“And he wants to perform that procedure on his old friend?” I shivered as I stood up and eased into black pants and a white shirt. “That’s awful.”

“He called me early on my cell. Said he doesn’t want anybody else to do it, and that he was coming in early and wanted me there. Finn was going to the top of his list.”

We were interrupted by the sound of Jack’s horn, a custom contraption he’d had installed in the old sedan. Tweep-tweep-twoop-tweep declared his presence out front. I glanced at the clock: not quite 6:30? If the neighbors didn’t love me because of my godfather habitually rolling in noisily after a night of carousing with Doc Finn, they sure as heck didn’t love me now, with him beeping to indicate he was ready to go.

“Guy lives across the street,” Tom commented, “and he can’t phone or come over when he’s ready to go? He has to honk the horn on that dad-blasted car of his?”

“He’s from New Jersey. They honk there. And you know how he loves that horn.”

“It may be after eight o’clock on the East Coast, but it isn’t here. Six months ought to be long enough for someone to get used to changing over from Eastern Standard to Mountain Daylight Time, don’t you think?”

“Tom.”

“That secretive slob of a godfather of yours isn’t always as loving as you think he is, that’s all I’m saying. All right. Let me go and talk to him.”

“Please be nice.”

“I’m always nice.”

While Tom went out front, I slipped down to the kitchen and looked around frantically. What did I need for the trip out to Gold Gulch Spa? What ever it was, I needed to gather it up quickly, because Jack was not a patient man. I booted up my kitchen computer, brought up Billie Attenborough’s revised menu, numbers, and table settings, inserted a new flash drive, and backed up the files for Yolanda. Bless Yolanda’s heart, I knew she would be out there this early, as the overnight guests had to have breakfast.

I also quickly opened a morning e-mail from Charlotte. She said she was bringing extra place cards, linens, candles, centerpieces, china, and flatware to the spa. Maybe she should be leaving all this up to Billie, since Her Flakiness, Bridezilla, was the one screwing up this whole thing.

Except for the crab cakes, at least dear Julian was making all the extra food. Bless his heart.

I pressed the button on my espresso maker to make myself another Summertime Special. When I’d poured the espresso and cream into a thermal mug with a lid and showered it with ice, I grabbed my purse, the flash drive, and a raincoat, and raced out the door.

Tom and Jack were engaged in amicable conversation as they leaned against Jack’s shiny red Mercedes. How someone could keep his house such a mess and be so careful to keep his classic car so meticulously clean was one of the mysteries of the universe, at least to my way of thinking.

Jack, looking dapper in a white Brooks Brothers shirt, navy blazer, and navy trousers, held the passenger door open for me. “Gertie Girl! Tom says you weren’t quite ready to go. Sorry if I bothered you.”

I shook my head at Tom, who was grinning widely. “I’m ready, Jack. I just don’t understand why we have to leave so early. The spa’s only twenty, twenty-five minutes away, and I don’t think they serve breakfast to the overnight guests until seven or so.”

“We have to get Charlotte. She called me at six and asked if we would pick her up. I felt bad for…not doing better with her last night.”

“But your best friend had died!”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “My little Gertie Girl. Always making excuses for me. Well, let me warn you. Trying to pry Charlotte out of that house of hers is like trying to chip cement off a brick. Plus, you probably want to talk to Billie, don’t you?”

“Not particularly,” I replied.

Jack folded himself into the driver’s seat and gave me a devilish grin. “If you don’t want to talk to Billie, then that’s why we have to get there early. That lazy, unemployed thirty-six-year-old wouldn’t get out of bed before nine o’clock if her life depended on it.”

Jack fishtailed away from the curb.

“Jack!”

“Oops, sorry. Buckle up, would ya? Tom’s watching.”

I wrenched on my seat belt and checked the rearview mirror. Tom was indeed eyeing our departure…but he was grinning and shaking his head.

I glanced around the interior of the Mercedes. It was black leather accented with wood grain, not the easiest color combination to keep clean in the mountains, where the summer weather was often dry, dusty, and windy…unless you’d had a ton of rain, which we had. But then you’d expect mud on the outside and inside of a vehicle. I was always struggling with either dust or mud in the van. But Jack’s car was impeccable, as usual.

“Jack, I don’t understand why your house is…the way it is, and your car is, uh, the way it is.”

“I’m a study in contrasts.” He checked his Rolex. “What do you bet Charlotte will be completely dressed this early?”

“She’s already sent me an e-mail. I thought you said it would be harder to pry her out of her place than chipping cement off…what did you say?”

Jack chuckled. “Drink your coffee so you can wake up.” Jack pulled the Mercedes onto Main Street. “I didn’t say Charlotte wouldn’t be dressed, I said she wouldn’t be ready to leave.”

“Maybe she’s used to you showing up early.”

Jack shrugged. “That woman doesn’t like to be surprised. She is utterly predictable.”

“Not a study in contrasts, then.”

Jack laughed all the way to the Attenboroughs’ big place in Flicker Ridge.

“AH, JACK,” SAID Charlotte. “Thank you for coming.” She’d opened the door before we’d even mounted the steps. She wore a loosely draped pantsuit of an undoubtedly expensive silvery material, and matching silver-gray heels. She looked Jack over approvingly, and smiled at me.

Jack, though, pulled his face into a pained expression. I couldn’t read whether it was genuine or not. “Charlotte, dear. It’s my plea sure.”

Charlotte arched an eyebrow, as if she didn’t believe him. “Well, thank you. Would either of you like a cup of coffee? I still have a few things to pull together here.”

“No thanks,” said Jack.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d love some.”

Charlotte turned her attention back to Jack. “I have some pictures to show you of how you could decorate your living room. I think they’re wonderful, and would really tie the whole Victorian scheme together for you.”

“Thanks,” said Jack, “I like things untied.”

Charlotte drew her perfectly colored brown-pink lips together in a frown. “It will just take a minute.”

Jack ground his teeth, then said that of course he’d look at some pictures. He stepped across the threshold into the cavernous house and gestured for me to follow him, which I did.

Charlotte had done a spectacular job on her own place, I would give her that. It was one of those mountain homes that have been filled with lots of expensive furniture made out of elaborate handmade configurations of…twigs. I knew the sofas, tables, and chairs-from-twigs were extremely pricey, because I’d catered the opening of the twig-furniture shop. Oversize crimson and green cushions, table lamps made from iron-in-the-shape-of-twigs, and patterned green-and-red rugs and quilts completed the effect.

“Here you go,” said Charlotte, handing my godfather a folder marked jack. It was neatly stuffed with photographs cut from magazines. Jack gave me a knowing wink while Charlotte disappeared around a corner.

“She’s gone to check her makeup,” Jack said. “Now watch this.”

I followed him into the kitchen, a vision in periwinkle-blue-glazed tiles and pale hickory cabinets, complete with matching blue-glazed drawer and cabinet pulls. Jack pulled out a drawer beneath the counter, and pointed inside. It was not a drawer but a new-fangled, miniature trash compactor. In went the file marked jack. My godfather flipped a switch, and a terrifying grinding noise filled the kitchen.

“Jack!” I whispered. “She’ll hear you.”

“No, she won’t. It’s a big house, completely soundproofed, so neither Charlotte nor Billie can hear the elk bugling in mating season. It drives them nuts.”

Soundproofing or no soundproofing, I tiptoed back to the living room anyway. I hadn’t felt this guilty since I’d substituted homemade fudge sauce for some horrid low-calorie stuff a hostess had insisted I use at her daughter’s engagement party.

“God, I need a cigarette,” Jack said. “I think I’m going to step outside and have one. If she comes back, tell her I went to put the decorating file in my trunk, God forbid.”

“Better hurry up,” I warned.

“Will you calm down?” Jack winked again, and was gone.

I eyed a neat display of home-decorating magazines, afraid of mussing them up. Suddenly, I felt overwhelmingly tired. Where was the caffeine-delivery machine in that kitchen? I wondered. Charlotte had offered me some coffee, after all. Did I dare sneak back and look for it?

I did. A moment later I was frowning at an expensive wall-mounted unit with a computer and digital readout. After staring at it for a few moments, in which I was becoming increasingly nervous that Charlotte might reappear, I figured out that the thing ground the beans, then dripped the goods into a thermos. Damn, I thought. I didn’t dare mess with it without having a look at the manual.

The phone rang, and I looked around for it. Another wall-mounted unit held both the apparatus and a blackboard. The phone rang and rang. It wasn’t even seven o’clock in the morning. Should I answer the thing, I wondered, and take a message for Charlotte? I moved over to the blackboard just as someone picked up the phone—either a person or voice mail. I stared at the board, with its chalk hanging on a string. Then for some reason—probably lack of caffeine—I got the giggles. Did I dare write “Goldy was here” on the board? I did not.

There was a name that had been written in chalk, then erased. O’Neal. I wasn’t aware that the Attenboroughs knew the O’Neals. In fact, I couldn’t imagine them moving in the same, as the phrase went, social circles.

I looked over longingly at the coffee machine, but when I heard Charlotte’s heels clicking along the hardwood floor, I raced back into the living room and flopped onto the uncomfortable sofa.

When Charlotte reappeared, she looked as lovely as she had when she left.

“Where’s Jack?” she demanded.

“Outside.”

“Doing what, may I ask?” When I shrugged, she said, “Oh, for God’s sake, let’s hurry up. I don’t want to keep Victor waiting.”

What ever, I thought, we’re still an hour early. But I didn’t want to point this out to the client.

Out on the porch, Charlotte sniffed the air suspiciously, then squinted at Jack.

“You’ve been smoking.”

“Last time I checked, that wasn’t a crime.”

Charlotte turned to me. “Could you work on your godfather, try to get him to stop his unhealthy habit?”

I swallowed. Wasn’t there some law in this country called “I’m not in charge of what he does”? Jack shot me an apologetic glance. Just for good measure, he hit the doorbell. It donged mercilessly in the interior.

“Jack, what in the world are you doing?” Charlotte demanded.

“Trying to wake up that daughter of yours.” He hit the bell again.

“She’s getting married tomorrow! She needs her beauty sleep!” Charlotte protested.

“She needs something,” Jack admitted before opening the sedan’s back door so I could climb in.

Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to let Jack drive the two of us out to Gold Gulch Spa. Jack was teasing Charlotte, and it wasn’t going well. As Tom had pointed out, men teased each other and they thought it was fine. When men teased women, though, we took it as pure cruel aggression.

Well, anyway, while dealing with Charlotte and Jack, I was beginning to feel like one of those spots on the globe that’s set between warring factions. Alsace-Lorraine. Kuwait. Somebody always wants it, and the place ends up getting smashed in every conflict. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to visualize myself as Switzerland.

In the front seat, I could hear Charlotte Attenborough asking again about Finn. Was she trying to find out what had happened, or was she pumping Jack for information? I didn’t know, but it made me uncomfortable. Tom said my paranoia antennae were the best functioning he’d ever encountered.

“I am not controlling,” Charlotte was insisting now. “If anything, I’m too accommodating. I put up with that pigpen you call a house—”

“It’s being renovated,” Jack said calmly. “And no one is forcing you to come over. In fact, if you would call before you showed up one of these times, I’d have a chance to clean it up.”

Charlotte tsked. “I dial your number, but you don’t answer. And anyway, the only person I should be phoning is the county health inspector.”

“That’s going a bit far,” Jack murmured as he turned out of Flicker Ridge and headed back toward the lake. An icy silence descended in Jack’s Mercedes. When he turned, to head west on Upper Cottonwood Creek Road toward Gold Gulch Spa, Charlotte reopened…well, what were they? Negotiations? Hostilities?

“You know, Jack,” she said, “I’m acquainted with any number of contractors who could have had that place of yours completely done, cleaned up, and ready to be lived in a month ago.”

“I like to do things my own way,” Jack replied, his tone stubborn.

“And now who’s being controlling?” Charlotte retorted sharply. “If you just didn’t spend so much time with—” But here she stopped short, and what felt like the refrain of a practiced argument was left dangling. Jack’s face in the rearview mirror turned an ashen gray, and I realized Charlotte had finally gotten to him. Charlotte had meant to say, I was willing to bet, that Jack was spending too much time with Doc Finn. That’s why the house wasn’t getting renovated fast enough; why Jack didn’t answer when Charlotte called—he was fishing with Doc Finn; that’s why Charlotte felt she had to show up at Jack’s house unannounced, and I was willing to bet it was why there was this undercurrent of rancor in their relationship. Charlotte, I was also willing to bet, had only at the last moment remembered that Doc Finn was dead.

At the right-hand turnoff to the spa, I noticed on the left side of the street the forlorn-looking building that had formerly housed Spruce Medical Group. Most of the tenants had long since abandoned these digs for the posh new medical building on the north side of Aspen Meadow. But still. In a raging snowstorm, Doc Finn had set out from here, from this spot, when I’d called about Arch’s fever. He’d overlooked his own peril to bring kindness and healing into our house. I’d be forever grateful to him for it.

But Doc Finn was gone, the victim of foul play. My heart twisted in my chest.

9

Ah, the prodigal mother of the bride!” Victor Lane cried when we pulled up and disembarked. “I’m so happy to see you, Charlotte dearest!”

While Victor Lane ostentatiously kissed Charlotte Attenborough on both cheeks, Jack inverted his eyebrows, pointed to Victor with his thumb, and gave me his patented Who-the-hell-is-this-guy look. I shrugged and shook my head. Let Charlotte introduce them to each other; I knew I was invisible to Victor Lane, too. He just wanted to show me how unimportant I was.

Victor continued to fuss over Charlotte, who cooed back. Victor was a slender, unattractive man with pit-marked cheeks, a shaved head, and virtually no chin. His facial skin seemed to be pulled too tightly over the bones, giving him a skeletal appearance. In truth, I decided, he looked like a reject from the bowling ball factory.

This day, he was wearing a ridiculous-looking pale green sweat suit and black high-top sneakers, which gave him the appearance of being as innocuous as a lime lollipop. Still, I knew not to underestimate him.

In the distance, a bell gonged, and women emerged from the various dormitory doors and began to move along the dirt trails that led, according to signs, to the weeklong-spa check-in, the day-spa check-in, the living room, the dining room, the gym, the hiking trails, the regular pool, and the hot pool. I looked at my watch: seven forty-five. When had all these guests had breakfast, I wondered, and when was lunch? From the longing looks the gals were casting at the dining room, I had the feeling breakfast was in the distant past, and lunch was in the even more distant future.

“This is Jack Carmichael,” I said loudly to Victor Lane, once he’d disengaged from Charlotte. “My godfather.”

“Of course!” said Victor, extending a skinny hand. “The happily retired attorney. Charlotte has told me so much about you.”

“And you remember Goldy?” Jack rejoined, with a smile and exaggerated politeness. He bowed in my direction, then straightened up. “She’s the vastly successful caterer whom you believed couldn’t cook.”

So much for a peaceful visit. I smiled brightly, trying to envision Geneva, or Lake Lucerne, or some other sunny spot in neutral Switzerland.

“Yes, of course.” Victor’s smiling mouth full of yellow teeth and exaggerated enthusiasm made me cringe. “I knew your ex-husband, of course. Great doctor. And, ah, our chef, Yolanda? She’s looking forward to visiting with you.” He turned back to Charlotte. “We want everything to be perfect for our Billie!”

“Our Billie?” Jack asked, but I nudged him.

I interrupted the conversation to ask for directions to the ladies’ room. Victor said it was off the TV room, next to the dining room. He then invited the three of us to come inside. I hustled ahead of them to the TV room, a pine-paneled space with overstuffed faux–Early American sofas. I stared at the far wall: there were four unmarked doors hidden in the paneling. I knocked on one, heard no response, and opened the door, praying all the while that it wasn’t reserved for men, and that one was not lurking inside. Did men even come to this spa? I had no idea.

The restroom was unisex: a one-seater. I opened the window, an old-fashioned crank type, and inhaled fresh, moist, pine-scented air. I closed my eyes, did some yoga breathing, and listened to the sounds of women calling to one another about where they were going: massage? hot pool? aerobics?

Why, this might as well be camp, right?

I had loved camp. I’d gone to the same one on Cape Cod for four years, from age seven to twelve. I’d done swimming and boating, and when it rained, arts and crafts, where I’d made lanyards in every shade of the rainbow. There’d been lots of rib-sticking food, too, and with all the activity, you were always ravenous for it. This was like that, I said to myself, breathing deeply. And the wedding tomorrow evening? Why, I was just fixing a really big dinner for all the campers, who’d be dressed up in costumes.

With my new positive attitude firmly in place, I reached to close the window, and saw Jack hustling off toward the hiking trails, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Apparently he’d had enough of both Charlotte and Victor.

Okay, but I was being positive. I straightened my back and stepped out of the restroom, where I immediately came face-to-face with a thin, black-haired woman who’d had such a bad face-lift—tight skin, eyes pulled back—she looked like a cat who’d learned how to stand up.

“Didn’t you flush?” she demanded.

“Uh, I was just using the, uh, window.”

She tsked, pulled open the door of one of the other restrooms, and slammed it behind her. Guess she and I wouldn’t be sharing s’mores tonight!

I hustled into the dining room, where one of the staff members was giving a talk to a group of women. Charlotte and Victor were waiting for her to finish, and this appeared to make the speaker nervous.

“Gold Gulch Spa,” the tour-group leader said, flicking her eyes over to Victor, who made a circling motion with his hand to hurry her along, “was at various times a mining camp, a hot springs retreat for the wealthy from Denver, who would make the horse-and-buggy trek before there were roads—”

“All right, Isabelle,” Victor Lane interrupted. “Could you please take the ladies out to the hiking trail that leads up to Mount Red-tail Hawk? I’m sure they’d enjoy that. I mixed up a batch of smoothies about twenty minutes ago. Why don’t you pour them now so the ladies can have smoothies for their walk?” The ladies murmured their appreciation. “When you get halfway up the mountain, you can give them the background on the spa. Here’s the key to the Smoothie Cabin.”

“Yes, Mr. Lane,” Isabelle replied with alacrity. Thin, fine boned, and what my mother would have called “interesting looking” (which meant, not really pretty), Isabelle was about twenty, had thick bunches of curly red hair, and freckles everywhere. “This way, ladies, to the Smoothie Cabin. How do fruit smoothies sound?”

It sounded pretty darn good, apparently, because I wouldn’t have thought that many overweight women could move so quickly.

“We use less than half this space at any one time,” Victor began, sweeping his hands to indicate the huge dining room. “We give our clients lots of individual attention, so the spa accommodates no more than sixty-five weeklong clients at a time, plus staff. We average between ten and twelve day-spa clients, every day except Sunday. On Sunday, we clean the rooms and get ready for a new group of guests, who arrive on Monday morning. So a Sunday wedding is perfect.”

The room contained a collection of extremely large round tables, each of which was surrounded by eight chairs. “We’ll have ten of these moved out, with just enough set up for Billie’s guests. Then we’ll save this side of the dining room for the head table….”

And on and on he droned. He seemed to have thought this out fairly well for someone who had just been asked to have the wedding and reception at the spa. Maybe he’d done it before. I certainly hadn’t heard of Victor giving parties out here, but after all, he used to be a caterer, so maybe this kind of thing came easily.

“But, Victor,” Charlotte protested, “are you sure all these women will be completely gone by Sunday morning?”

I couldn’t help smiling. Maybe she’d noticed how quickly they’d all repaired to the kitchen in search of “smoothies,” which was the term health foodies used for “milk shakes.”

“I absolutely promise,” Victor reassured her. “And I’ve already lit a fire under our staff, saying they have to be done cleaning the whole place by lunchtime, otherwise they don’t eat!”

Great. Starving the staff didn’t usually work as a motivator. Maybe I should see if I could hire a couple of extra cleaning people—

“Oh, Victor,” Charlotte said flirtatiously. “You’re such a card.”

“Well,” Victor continued, all smiles now, “I suppose you have your servers lined up, Goldy?”

Oh my God, the extra servers! I’d forgotten. I said, “I have six servers lined up, Victor. But that was for a hundred people, and Billie has invited an extra fifty—”

“Oh, dear, what a mess,” Charlotte murmured.

“Not to worry, Charlotte dearest.” Victor had that oily way of speaking that reminded one of Uriah Heep. “I will arrange for extra—”

“Mother!” came an all-too-familiar shriek. Billie Attenborough, pulling Dr. Craig Miller, stomped into the dining room. Did Craig Miller have any hobbies besides Billie? This being Saturday, shouldn’t he be playing golf or tennis or being a good Coloradan and hiking up a mountain? Somehow, I doubted Billie allowed Craig to do much of anything in his spare time except take care of her.

Billie was wearing a flaming-red pantsuit, which I thought fit her mood, if not her figure, to a T. “How could you come out here without me?”

“Sweetheart, I thought you’d want to sleep—”

“And how was I supposed to sleep with someone dinging on the doorbell?”

“Well, that was Jack—”

“Jack, huh?” Billie said. “Where is he? I’ll ring his bell for him!”

“Billie dear—”

“So, you’re here,” Billie said to me, lifting her dimpled chin.

“Your mother requested my presence,” I said, trying to keep the defensiveness out of my voice.

“And I suppose you’re charging us for your time?” Billie’s eyes blazed at me.

Come to think of it, that wasn’t a half-bad idea.

“Billie, my sweet,” Craig Miller began, pushing his mop of dark curly hair out of his face with his free hand, “Goldy has been more than generous with you, for numerous extra hours of planning.” He held up his hand when she began to interrupt him. “And your mother has been the soul of kindness—”

“What about me?” Victor Lane’s high-pitched voice caught me off guard. “Got any kind words for me, Doc?”

Craig Miller actually laughed, a wonderful snuffling noise that made me smile. He wore a navy polo shirt and khaki slacks, looking casual, relaxed, and not at all worried about the upcoming nuptials. Well, if he was relaxed about it all, he was the only one present who was. “How about,” Craig addressed Victor, “if the two of us guys let the women work things out in here?”

“Great idea,” agreed Victor Lane, smoothly following Craig Miller out of the dining room.

I wanted to scream, No, no, don’t leave me here with the Harpies! But I didn’t. Plus, we hadn’t exactly worked out the flow issues.

“I think I need to get to the kitchen to meet with the chef,” I said quietly.

“You’re not going into that spa kitchen without me!” Billie cried. “I want to hear what you two talk about!”

YOLANDA GARCIA LOOKED up in surprise when an unexpected trio of women—yours truly, plus Billie and Charlotte Attenborough—invaded her culinary space. Yolanda, who was Cuban, wasn’t just pretty, she was beautiful, with creamy brown skin, lots of dark hair that she had pulled up under a hairnet, liquid brown eyes, and a smile that would break your heart. If the smile didn’t do it, her cooking would. Her homemade Cuban Bread, which she served with a Tomato-Camembert Salad, made even Julian swoon.

“Yolanda,” I said apologetically, “is this a good time for us to talk to you about the wedding plans for Sunday?”

“Goldy, sweetie,” Yolanda said, “so good to see you! It’s a fine time for you to come. Come whenever you want.” She wore a brilliant white, starched uniform and apron, and moved quickly to embrace me in a hug. “I’ve got some flan that you’re just going to love, and none of the women here—”

“Who the hell is Yolanda?” Billie Attenborough demanded. I was pretty sure Billie knew full well exactly to whom I was talking.

Yolanda drew herself up straight. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she was imposing nonetheless. “I am Yolanda. Who are you?”

Aw jeez, I thought. Was there anyone Billie Attenborough came in contact with whom she did get along? I wished Craig Miller would come back.

“Wait, wait,” I said. I felt in my purse for the flash drive with the menus and recipes. On the counter on the far side of the sink, there was a computer, thank goodness.

“Are you the cook?” Billie demanded, pointing a finger in Yolanda’s face. “Because we have a very big wedding coming in here tomorrow!” Billie cast a derogatory look all around. The other kitchen workers, sensing fireworks, had made themselves as scarce as Craig Miller. “This is your kitchen? How in the hell can you work in such a small—”

“Hey, chica!” Yolanda retorted, one hand on a hip, the other picking up a frying pan that she held in a somewhat, ah, aggressive manner. “This is my space! My kitchen!”

“Do you know who I am?” Billie demanded, pointing a finger in Yolanda’s face.

Yolanda frowned in mock horror. “Do I look like I care who you are? Do you know who I am? Now, if you don’t mind, I need to talk to Goldy—”

Billie turned to her mother and fell against her chest. “I can’t work with this woman!” she wailed. “And I can’t call everyone again and have the wedding changed one more time, to some new place!”

“Now, Billie dear,” said Charlotte, patting her daughter on the back, “you know perfectly well who Yolanda is, and you’ve told me how well you do with the diet here, so this is no time—”

Oh, dear, I thought, when’s the next flight to Anchorage? Maybe Julian could handle the whole Billie wedding. No, I wouldn’t do that to him.

Craig Miller burst into the kitchen. “What in the world is going on in here? What’s all the yelling about? What is wrong, for heaven’s sake?”

I waved in Billie’s direction, and managed not to say, “Craig, if you want to keep your mental health, you should cancel your wedding.”

Craig Miller eased Billie’s heaving body away from her mother and onto his own chest. “There, there, dear,” he soothed, patting Billie’s back. “Everything’s going to be all right. We probably shouldn’t have come here and worried your pretty head about details. Let’s go out in the hall.”

Great idea, I thought as Billie allowed herself to be led into the hall. In fact, forget the hall and just get Billie out of here, period.

“I think we should probably go,” Charlotte said to me.

“Will this flash drive work on your computer?” I said quickly to Yolanda.

She scowled at it. “Yeah. Sure.”

“All the menus and recipes are on it. I’ve made extra crab cakes and sauce already, and my assistant is doing more of the other dishes. But we’ll need to be set up for a hundred and fifty, and we’ll probably need an extra, oh, eight to ten servers, if that’s okay.”

“No problem,” said Yolanda.

“Goldy?” said Charlotte.

Yolanda rolled her eyes at me. I wanted to tell her she should get out while the getting was good, as in, before this wedding started the next day. But I didn’t have a chance.

Once Charlotte, Craig, Billie, and I were out in the pine-paneled space, I wondered what we were supposed to do next. We hadn’t yet done the walk-through, and with Victor off somewhere, I doubted we were going to get to it. Billie was still sobbing. Were we having fun yet?

Craig finally said, “Billie dear? Why don’t you let me ask Victor to fix you a nice smoothie? Peach?” Billie kept sobbing, but nodded against what had been Craig’s clean polo shirt. When Billie lifted her head to take a tissue from her mother, a great wet blob indicated where Billie had lain her head. Lovely. “There now.” Craig kept his tone comforting. “A peach smoothie that’s sweet like you? Does that sound good? How about you, Charlotte?”

“Oh, I’d love a strawberry one, please!”

“Goldy?” Craig asked.

“If they have coffee flavor, I’d love it.”

Craig ruefully shook his head. “Victor’s rules. No coffee in the whole place. Sorry.”

“Not to worry,” I replied. “Thanks for asking.”

“Now,” Craig said to Billie and Charlotte, “we just need to go find Victor, to get the key to the Smoothie Cabin—”

I turned away. Actually, what I really wanted was another iced latte, preferably with two or three big scoops of coffee ice cream jammed on top, and a spiral of whipped cream on top of that. I doubted Gold Gulch Spa offered such a treat, so I decided to go in search of my godfather instead.

I didn’t want to bother Yolanda again, not when she was probably still upset about our last intrusion, and anyway, Jack hadn’t gone by us. Billie, Charlotte, and Craig were moving down the hall away from me and speculating among themselves as to whether there would be any other place where the wedding could be held at this late date. Aspen Meadow Country Club? A country club in Denver? Would all the dates in August have been booked long ago?

Charlotte, hearing me, turned back. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “we’re having the wedding and reception here. I’m just letting Billie ventilate.” She frowned. “Could you go see if you can find Jack?”

“Sure.” I walked away and pushed through the swinging doors. After a moment of indecision, I chose the path that led to the hiking trails. Boulders had been placed along the way, and late-blooming bushes of pink muskmallow and perennial daisies hugged the crevices between the rocks. All the recent rain we’d been getting had left swaths of puddles along the trail, and as I hopped, skipped, and jumped along, I almost missed the sign that said smoothies! with an arrow pointing toward the very last section of the building, which also housed the kitchen, dining room, and TV and living rooms.

The woman who had been shepherding the ladies along on their walk—the twenty-something Isabelle—was nowhere in sight, but the ladies themselves were lolling about on freestanding porch-style swings. And they were all sipping pastel-colored drinks from large clear plastic cups.

“Best thing about this place,” one was saying to another.

“I’m so glad Isabelle said we could skip the hike. This smoothie is yum. I can’t believe it’s low fat.”

“Me either. I wanted to have two yesterday, even offered to pay, and Victor said I couldn’t, that it was too many calories. Mean!”

I asked first one, then another gaggle of women if they’d seen a dapper fellow in his fifties walking past, maybe smoking a cigarette. I worked my way through the groups of women, and they all replied in the negative.

I looked up the boulder-lined path, then drew back as the odor of sulfur invaded my nose. Clouds of steam were drifting down from a place up the path, and with my marvelous powers of deduction, I figured that was where the hot springs pool was. I scanned the woods and what I could see of the paths again. Jack really couldn’t have gone hiking by himself, could he? Not after two heart attacks—both the results of his lawyering days, he said—plus, he smoked, and he hated exercising. But then where could he have gotten to in such a short time?

Nearby, two women were swinging contentedly.

“Maybe their smoothies really do have sugar and cream in them,” one of the women commented. “It sure tastes like it. I could just kill for another one before lunch!”

Talk about a fixation. I’d have to get the recipe for this concoction before I left the next day.

“Maybe that’s why they won’t let you have two in one day—they really are fattening.”

“We’re being weighed tomorrow morning, Sara Ann. That’s why they won’t let us have more than one at a time.”

“Well, yesterday my roommate didn’t want the mango one she ordered, so she gave it to me. I drank it right after I had my blueberry one, and I felt so mellow, I decided to sunbathe instead of exercising!”

“Uh-oh, Sara Ann! You risked the wrath of Victor by not showing up for water aerobics? Did he get in your face later?”

“Yeah. But it was worth it. And anyway, I told him I wasn’t paying for him to yell at me, so he backed off.”

At that moment, both women looked up at me expectantly. Was I eavesdropping, or did I have another problem? their look said.

“You still haven’t seen my godfather?” I asked lamely.

“No,” said Sara Ann. “Why don’t you check in the bushes beside the dining hall? That’s where people go to smoke sometimes. When they’re hiding out, that is.”

“Thanks.”

I got the bright idea to try Jack on my cell. But the screen said no service. I tried again, heard the characteristic chirp of Jack’s phone, then lost the service again. I glanced around once more. No Jack.

The door to the Smoothie Cabin was firmly closed, and as if that weren’t enough, a shut sign hung by a rope over the door. I moved closer to the sign, retried Jack’s cell, and heard it chirp again, but only once. Before it could go to voice mail, I lost the service again.

Well, doggone it. I tiptoed right up next to the Smoothie Cabin, where whispering voices were just audible within. If the smoothies made you want to sunbathe instead of go to water aerobics, had somebody figured they wanted to get a really good tan this afternoon? I knocked on the door, and there was sudden silence.

“Jack!” I called in a stage whisper. “It’s me, Goldy! Charlotte’s looking for you! Are you in there?”

There was still no response. By this time, I was very curious as to what was going on behind the Smoothie Cabin door. Could Jack be inside? Could he be in trouble? He didn’t seem like the getting-into-trouble type, somehow. He seemed like the causing-trouble type.

But still. I did worry about him. At least, that was what I told myself as I traipsed through mud and puddles and around two Dumpsters to get to the other side of the building. I jiggled the locked door handle, then realized the door was ever so slightly ajar. This must be the entrance that the staff used for taking out the trash, and for receiving deliveries of supplies.

I was careful not to bang the door as I entered. Yet for the second time that day I found myself tiptoeing…this time to where I judged the Smoothie Cabin wall began. There was some kind of window there.

The window looked into the Smoothie Cabin. And there I gave a start and gasped.

To my astonishment, Jack was inside the Smoothie Cabin—really just a glorified closet—and he was with Isabelle. I waved and waved to them, but they could not see me. For crying out loud, I was not looking through a window: I was gazing into a one-way mirror, the reflective side of which was facing Jack and Isabelle.

They were not doing anything untoward, but were looking through cabinets. Jack was holding what looked like a small key. I could barely hear Jack’s whispered words.

“Do you have any more keys? Does anyone?”

I could not understand Isabelle’s response. What were they looking for, protein powder? Whey whip?

My fist was poised, next to the glass, to knock and alert them to my presence. But I was frozen. I wasn’t really spying on them, I told myself, more in bewilderment than anything else; I was just trying to figure out exactly what was going on. But before I could do anything, I heard the raised voices of Craig Miller—and Billie and Charlotte Attenborough.

“Quick!” Jack whispered. “Put it all back together!” And he and Isabelle began to zip around the Smoothie Cabin interior, putting away containers and closing cabinet doors.

Suddenly the main door of the Smoothie Cabin was wrenched open, revealing Victor Lane, Craig, Billie, and Charlotte. Then—in order to cover up his real purpose for being there, I guessed, meaning, to snoop—Jack grabbed Isabelle and kissed her. Victor, surprised, jumped back.

Unfortunately, it was the Jack-Isabelle clench that Craig, Billie, and Charlotte witnessed. Charlotte, screaming an obscenity, slammed the Smoothie Cabin door on Billie’s hand. Billie shrieked and began sobbing again.

As confused as ever, I stood, openmouthed, and waited for Jack to finish kissing Isabelle. He did not. As soon as Victor firmly closed the Smoothie Cabin door, though, Jack and Isabelle unclenched and began checking that every open cabinet door was firmly closed.

At that point, I noticed the security cameras at the upper corners of the one-way mirror. One was pointing inside the Smoothie Cabin, and had recorded everything that had transpired within.

The other was pointed at me.

10

Luckily, I was able to get out of there quickly, before Victor Lane or one of his surrogates could chase me down. Maybe Victor really, really didn’t want any of his charges breaking into the Smoothie Cabin to get extra calories.

Then again, as Tom always said, I was of a somewhat paranoid nature. Jack didn’t need or want extra calories, I thought as I hurried along to his car. So what had he been looking for? And why did he have to cover up what he was doing by pulling Isabelle in for a smooch?

In any event, I was expecting a very long, very chilly ride home. But then Charlotte announced she was going with Billie. Jack began to speak to Charlotte’s turned back in low tones. Bottom line: Charlotte relented. This time, I let myself into the rear seat, only to have Jack surprise me by asking me to drive. He and Charlotte wanted to be chauffered, he said with a smile.

“What ever,” I replied happily, and took his key ring from him. “Are we going to the Attenborough place or to your house?”

“Let me see how my peacemaking mission goes,” he whispered. “Her place first, if that’s okay.”

What the heck, sure, it was fine. My stomach was growling from the lack of both breakfast and lunch; I was massively irritated at having to endure yet another temper tantrum from Billie Attenborough; and I had about a hundred details of the next day’s wedding to go over. But, drive? Be a chauffeur? No problem!

At first, Charlotte and Jack were so quiet in the backseat, I couldn’t tell how the peacemaking was going. After a while, I could tell that Charlotte was weeping softly. Even though I knew, or suspected, that Jack smooching Isabelle was fake, designed to cover up what ever he was doing in the Smoothie Cabin, if it had been Tom kissing a girl who was younger and thinner than yours truly, well, there would have been more than gentle crying.

Jack said, “Oh, my sweet girl, please don’t. C’mon, dear sweet Charlotte. Come be close to me.”

Eventually Charlotte sniffed and whispered that with Jack always off with Doc Finn, and ignoring her ideas for fixing up his place, and not wanting to spend tons of time with her, well, she didn’t know why she even kept seeing him. Clearly, she wasn’t his girlfriend, and he seemed to be making it clear he didn’t want to get married. So what was she to him? She wanted to know.

Jack said that Isabelle was supposed to be making him a smoothie, and all of a sudden, she’d grabbed him and started kissing. This was a lie, of course. I wondered if Charlotte would buy it. Why not just say, “Isabelle and I were hunting around for something in the Smoothie Cabin. So when you, Victor, Billie, and Craig suddenly opened the door, I had to conceal what we were doing. I couldn’t think, so I grabbed her and made it look as if we were hiding out to smooch. I know it looked bad, but…?”

How would that work?

“Do you mean to tell me,” Charlotte whispered fiercely, “that a fifty-something man would prove to be so attractive to a twenty-something woman, an employee of the spa, no less, that she would grab him on spa property and start kissing him? You must think I’m awfully naive, Jack.”

“Let me ask you this, Charlotte,” Jack replied, his voice low. “Do you think Isabelle is nice looking?”

Charlotte sniffed again. “No, I don’t. She’s…too thin.”

“Not all the women in the world are as lovely as you, my dear.”

“Jack, don’t—”

“I’m not done. Do you think it’s even possible that she would want to try her making-out skills on an old guy like me? Maybe because she thought I wouldn’t say no?”

I rolled my eyes.

Charlotte said, “Oh, Jack, come on.”

Jack said, “Look, Charlotte, I’m sorry. Isabelle was helping me look for something. I heard people coming, so I grabbed her. End of story.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Just…something that didn’t belong there. That’s all. Look, will you come over and spend the night with me? Please?”

Again I had to remind myself to keep my eyes on the road, as it twisted and wound all the way back to Aspen Meadow. As far as I knew, aside from Finn, Jack had never had overnight guests. I didn’t want to ponder why he was suddenly offering Charlotte an invite.

Unless…unless he thought she had some information about Doc Finn? Maybe Billie had confessed something untoward to her mother? I wondered.

Jack liked Charlotte. He didn’t love her. I wondered if that was enough for Charlotte. And if it was too much for Jack.

Man, relationships! You think once you get out of high school, all the mucky mess and emotions and expectations and disappointments are behind you. News flash to the uninformed: they last your whole life.

Charlotte was saying, “Stay in your house? To night? Jack. Thank you. Please listen, though. My only daughter is getting married tomorrow afternoon, and I have a thousand things—”

“May I come over to your place, then? You’re always inviting me. This afternoon, I’ll take you out to lunch, and then we can have some fun, and then I’ll take you out to dinner, and we can have some more fun.”

“I thought you were taking me to the rehearsal dinner to night.”

“Oh, yeah, the rehearsal dinner. Forgot about that. Where is it?”

“Well,” Charlotte said tentatively, “since we changed the venue, we’re doing the walk-through, a rehearsal, yes, at Aspen Meadow Country Club. Then I’m throwing a dinner party for the bridal party, also at Aspen Meadow Country Club. You are invited. You’ve always been invited.”

Jack said, “May I take you out to lunch? Wherever you want to go.”

Charlotte paused. I couldn’t resist: I looked in the rearview mirror. Jack was kissing Charlotte on the neck. It sure as heck wasn’t Charlotte who was all charm.

Charlotte sighed. “All right, then,” she whispered at last. “But you have to promise to be out of the house by eight tomorrow morning.”

AS I PILOTED my godfather’s Mercedes down Upper Cottonwood Creek Road, I called Tom on my cell phone. There was no answer. He was probably still with the county medical examiner. Reluctantly, I punched the numbers for Arch’s cell.

“Jeez, Mom,” he said when he finally picked up. “It’s summer, and I’m still in bed over at Gus’s house.”

“Sorry, buddy.” One of the conditions of our buying Arch a cell phone was that he was not allowed to turn it off, ever. Unfortunately, Arch’s teenage sleeping pattern didn’t match my grown-up working one, and invariably we were at odds over who was bothering whom. I said sweetly, “Listen, bud, can you get up and come get me over in Flicker Ridge?”

“Now? You have got to be kidding me.”

“Yes, now. Sorry.” Just after his sixteenth birthday in April, Tom and I had bought Arch a used VW Passat. One of the conditions of that purchase had been that he would help out occasionally with running errands. Since Arch’s driver’s license had been freshly minted, he’d been very happy to “get a ride,” as he put it, although it seemed to me that what he was getting was not a ride, but wheels. Another Mom job: learn how nomenclature differs from one generation to the next.

Arch said, “Do you remember that Gus and Todd are coming with me, and spending the night?”

“Oh my, I forgot.”

“We’re not going to bother you, Mom. And it’s way past our turn to have everybody.”

Actually, he was right. This summer, the Druckmans and the Vikarioses had done the heavy lifting in the Entertain-the-Kids department. They’d always insisted that they loved having the boys as much as possible. And I believed them, but my gut still gnawed with guilt. The Druckmans were leaving on Monday for a family fishing trip in Montana. When they came back, school would be starting. I needed to do my bit, as Arch had reminded me. Over the protestations of Jack, I gave Arch the address of the Attenborough residence.

“Just take my car home,” Jack said. “Charlotte can run me back to my place in the morning.”

“I cannot run you anywhere,” Charlotte said huffily. “I’ll be too busy!”

At the Attenborough place, I told Charlotte and Jack I would just wait inside Jack’s car until Arch arrived. Jack said that was fine, but please would I lock the car and bring him the keys? I agreed, and the two of them took off for the house.

Truth to tell, I also wanted to stay in the car because I figured the last place Billie would look for me was right out in front of her own house. To make sure, though, when Craig Miller drove up in his Lexus, I ducked. I felt childish, but I really, really didn’t want Billie to catch sight of me.

After what I thought was a safe interval, I lifted my head, only to scream when I saw Craig Miller smirking at me through the driver’s-side window. He had his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, and he was rocking back and forth on his loafers, the preppy Cat Who Swallowed the Canary.

“You about scared me to death!” I said after I finally found the proper button to bring down the window.

“Are you hiding from Billie?”

“I, well, I…yes. Is she coming out here to tell me she wants some more changes to the menu?”

“I doubt it. I saw you, but she didn’t. She was too busy complaining about the spa venue. All the way back I heard about how impossible it was all going to be. It was really a fun drive. But don’t worry, she’s going to stick with having everything there. Since the date has been changed so much, we had to go with some later reservations to the Greek isles, so we’ll actually be staying at the spa for the first couple of days of the honeymoon.” He laughed that snuffly laugh of his, but I wasn’t disarmed by it. When Craig glanced up at the house, I felt a twinge of fear that he would signal Billie. I was ever mindful of Henry Kissinger’s dictum: Even a paranoid has real enemies. Craig turned back to me and asked, “May I get into the car with you?”

“Billie’s not going to be looking out the window, and see you out here, is she?”

For answer, Craig chuckled again. As he rounded the front of Jack’s car, I wondered for at least the fiftieth time what this handsome, well-built doctor saw in Billie. He was a self-assured professional who, Marla had told me, was only twenty-eight. Billie was thirty-six, not terribly attractive, and a bitch. Her mother was nice, and she was rich, but Craig wasn’t marrying Charlotte.

Then again, who was I to decipher the motivations of love? My first time around, I’d married a violent narcissist, which showed you how much I knew.

“I know I’ve said this to you before, Goldy,” Craig began, once he was sitting in the passenger seat. He turned to face me, his expression all earnestness. “Billie and I are just very, very appreciative of all the work you’ve done for us.”

“I’m just doing my job, Craig.”

He smiled. “Seems to me you’ve gone above and beyond the requirements of your job.”

“Thanks.” I really did not want to talk about the wedding, or Billie, or anything related to Billie or the wedding, so I plunged in with, “Actually, I knew a doctor once with the last name Miller. Philip Miller? Ever heard of him? He went to the University of Colorado Medical School—”

“No, can’t say that I have. What kind of doc is he?”

“Was. He’s deceased.”

“I’m sorry. It sounds as if he was a friend.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Was I so transparent, or was Craig Miller just really good at reading people? Well, that was his job, I supposed. Philip Miller had been able to read people, too, and it had gotten him killed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Craig asked, again all earnestness.

“No, thanks.” I tried hard to think of how to change the subject. “Um,” I said finally, “where did you get your medical training?”

“The Ca rib be an,” Craig said. “And after living there year-round for four years, I swore up and down I was going to live in a place with a really cold winter and lots of snow.”

I burst out laughing. “D’you think you ended up in the right place?”

His smile filled the car. “Oh, don’t I know it!” I was afraid he might go back to talking about the wedding, but he didn’t. Come to think of it, it’s women who love talking about weddings, not guys. Craig eyed me with the sly expression Arch used to employ when he wanted something from the cookie jar. “That was quite a stunt your uncle pulled at the spa.”

“He’s my godfather, not my uncle. And trust me, he pulls stunts all the time. Which one were you talking about?”

Craig raised an eyebrow. “Making out with a twenty-year-old in the Smoothie Cabin? Has he no shame?”

I gave Jack’s it-wasn’t-my-fault version of the kiss in question. I even managed not to smile when I said that Isabelle was the aggressor.

“You expect me to believe that?” Craig asked. “That a spa employee tricked an older man into a glorified closet? So she could kiss him? Why not just ask him out on a date?”

I shrugged. At that moment, Arch’s battered Passat drove into view. I explained that I needed to get going, as I still had so much to do before the you-know-what the next day. Craig said that he understood, and hopped out of the car. He offered to take the keys up to Jack, but I said I’d promised to deliver them myself. I locked the Mercedes and followed Craig up the steps to the house.

When Jack came to the door, I said, “Jack.” Once Craig disappeared through the living room, I hesitated. Should I bawl out my godfather for a) honking his horn this morning, b) disappearing during the spa visit, and c) pulling the stunt with the Smoothie Cabin?

“I’ve upset you,” Jack said. “I screwed things up out at Gold Gulch, didn’t I?”

“Sort of.” I felt uncomfortable.

“You know how much I love you, don’t you, Gertie Girl?” When I nodded, he pulled me in for a hug. “I’m sorry. There was a reason for my stuff at the spa. I…I’m just not ready to tell you yet. Will you forgive me?”

With my head in his shoulder, I said, “Of course.”

He thanked me, hugged me again, and took his keys. He said he’d see me the next day.

“You want to drive, Mom?” Arch asked. From the backseat, Todd and Gus gave me sleepy greetings.

“Not particularly,” I began, “I just drove all the way—”

But then I had a good look at Arch. He appeared to have slept in his rumpled, none-too-clean shorts and T-shirt. He had dark bags under his eyes, which he could only manage to keep half open. So maybe he hadn’t actually slept at all. While he was waiting for me to answer, he yawned.

I said, “Yeah, sure, give me the keys, hon.”

Arch, Todd, and Gus all fell asleep on the way back to our house, which was less than twenty minutes away. I shook my head. When Arch was an infant, he’d had numerous sleepless nights. Sometimes I’d found that the only solution was to take him out for a ride in the car. As soon as we’d gone half a block, he’d always be in dreamland. Looks as if things hadn’t changed that much.

Marla called on my cell when we were halfway home. The buzzing of the phone did not seem to bother the boys, and I resolved to call Marla back later. But she would not be deterred. She called again, and again, and again, until I finally answered.

“I need to see you,” she said breathlessly. “Where are you now?”

“Almost to our house. Want to come over? I have extra crab cakes.”

“Ah, the promise of food. Yes, please. And I have such a juicy and delicious piece of gossip for you, you won’t believe it.”

The boys groaned when the car stopped and didn’t move again. Finally, they piled out, extending their arms, cracking their joints, and complaining more than Rip Van Winkle with a backache. Arch yawned and asked if he could make his pals pancakes, if he promised not to get in my way. They were so hungry, he added. And he wouldn’t make any mess.

Right, I thought. But I only said, “Yes, Arch, I think that’s a great idea.” I glanced at the clock: 1:00 in the afternoon already? “And could you make enough for me, too, please? I’m ravenous.”

Arch was pleased. Although I’d often offered to teach Arch to cook, he’d always resisted. But making flapjacks was a skill he’d learned in Cub Scouts, and he still loved whipping up big batches. He’d even perfected the art of dropping dollops of batter into a hot pan when it was just the right temperature. Plus, he always insisted on melting real butter for the batter and then pouring more on top of the flapjacks themselves. He’d even learned to make clarified butter, which he made and froze in small batches, to use in the pan so the fat wouldn’t burn before he ladled in the batter. I guess he was his mother’s son, after all.

Even better than all that, Arch was always particularly pleased with his creations when my dear Tom would tuck into a stack of eight or more of the creations, and invariably pronounce them the absolute best pancakes he’d ever tasted in his entire life.

While Arch gave directions to Todd and Gus on setting the table, I checked the messages. Julian had called to say he had located plenty of new potatoes to make our salad for the additional fifty people. Was I doing okay? I left a voice mail message on Julian’s cell saying I was fine, no problem.

Was I fine? Did I have enough food for the Attenborough wedding? Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

So while Arch sizzled clarified butter in our flapjack pan, I began measuring out the ingredients for extra crab cakes.

“Gosh,” Gus asked, “who is all the crab for?”

“A wedding tomorrow.”

“Who’s getting married?” Todd wanted to know as he frowned over the cutlery drawer.

“Billie Attenborough and Dr. Craig Miller. He’s a doctor at Spruce Medical Group.”

“Oh, man,” Todd commented, “my mom hates Spruce Medical Group. She took me there when I had that torn rotator cuff, you know, the one I had the operation for at the beginning of the summer? My mom wanted an MRI, but whoever was in charge there said I only had a sprained arm. Anyway, the guy told me to start lifting weights. He even showed me how to lift the weights, especially with my left arm, which was the one that was hurting so much, especially at night.”