The Grilling Season

“Need you… to park…” Out of breath, Clark wobbled, stiltlike. I certainly hoped he wasn’t participating for more than five minutes in today’s face-off or whatever the hockey equivalent of a scrimmage is. “Park behind the line,” he blurted out as he pointed to the closest chalk stripe. He pressed his hair against the sides of his head and gasped. “Then… you can walk down with the beer and food to where we’ll be playing, with a tray or something.”

“Clark,” I began patiently. “There is no way – “

“Back up then,” Clark interrupted, waving dismissively toward the front of his house. “It’ll be okay, the cake’s going to come in that way, too. Back to the sidewalk. Open your doors and…” He took another deep, agonizing breath and squeezed his eyes shut. “I’ll help.”

Oh, sure, I thought as I gunned the van in reverse. And within ten minutes of you trying to help me, [‘II be trying to remember the CPR course I took right after Marla had her heart attack. The van sputtered. I braked a little too hard at the beginning of the sidewalk, a herringbone-brick path that led back to the garishly decorated house.

It was not my place to tell Clark McCracken that he should not be tugging two fully loaded dollies up his sidewalk so soon before his party. But Clark seemed determined to be as physically involved with the setup for his hockey celebration as possible. I knew what he would do next-splash ice water on his face, comb back his sopping hair, and leap down the stairs to be the official greeter. Then, with an enormous sense of justification, our host would slug down a speedy half-dozen beers before beginning the roller hockey derby in his driveway, which would be followed by a lot more brewskis, a minimal amount of food, and passing out on a piece of patio furniture before I’d finished serving the entree. That is, if he didn’t hurt himself with all the activity first.

On second thought, maybe I should summon an ambulance. Just in case.

“Okay,” he said, still panting heavily. “What goes in first?”

Twenty minutes later I was set up in the kitchen. Clark, wheezing from his exertions, made a martyrlike declaration that he was going to light his gas grill – ever a man’s job, even if no actual starting of fires was involved.

“Clark,” I cautioned politely, “please be careful. There was just a big article in the Mountain Journal about how those grills need to be checked – “

Again I got the dismissive wave. “Don’t quote Frances Markasian to me, please. I’ve never heard of mountain moths building nests in propane grills! What will that woman think of next?” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe a word that crazy woman writes. She’s not a reporter, she’s a viper looking for a cause. Explosions from moths, give me a break! But don’t worry, I’m going to clean the vents. It’s my job.”

“Just be careful,” I repeated gently.

I unwrapped the appetizers for the party: an enormous oval basket of fresh vegetables meant to resemble, as did the rest of tonight’s food, a hockey rink. In the place of the goals were baskets of chips, and in the center of the rink-basket I gently lowered a huge crystal bowl of Mexican dip, my own concoction of thick layers of guacamole, cubed tomatoes, smooth sour cream, shredded crisp lettuce, chili beans mashed with picante sauce, sliced black olives, and an ample blanket of golden grated cheddar cheese.

“Ooh, may I taste?” Patricia McCracken cooed as she tiptoed into the kitchen. Her tousle of streaked curls was held back with a twisted headband printed with tiny Avalanche logos. But her fine-featured face was haggard. She wore an oversize Avalanche jersey that reached almost to her knees. She looked like a coed who’d spent the night in a fraternity house, complete with borrowed pajamas and bags under her eyes.

Despite my best intentions to cater this event, I couldn’t help but ask what was on my mind. “Patricia, are you sure you want to go through with this? You look exhausted.”

“Yes,” she said, “I do. Tyler’s already over at some body’s house. Besides, what am I going to do, call everyone and say, ‘Sorry! Murder in the neighborhood! Gotta cancel!’ Oh, gosh, that reminds me, the centerpiece cake’s not here yet. Could you call the bakery and find out if Mickey is going to send somebody over with it?”

“No problem.” Patricia extended an index finger to scoop up a bit of dip. I punched in the buttons for the Aspen Meadow Pastry Shop and handed Patricia a small plastic bowl of dip that I had set aside for sampling. She wrinkled her nose and whined, “Is this the same?”

“Patricia, please. Of course.” I removed the plastic wrap from the Grilled Slapshot Salad.

“Well, it doesn’t look the same.” She shoveled a pile of dip onto one chip and popped it into her mouth.

“Aspen Meadow Pastry Shop,” announced Mickey Yuille in the sad, gruff voice I recognized so well.

“Mickey, hi, it’s Goldy Schulz. I’m over at the McCrackens’ place and she’s waiting for her cake. Can I tell her it’s on the way?”

Mickey sighed. “Brandon always insists on helping out with my Saturday deliveries. But now they’ve had some kind of crisis down at his office, and my other guy is sick, so all the Saturday-afternoon deliveries have been delayed.”

I held my breath. Brandon Yuille, head of Human Resources at ACHMO, was already being questioned? By whom? The police? His Minneapolis head office? “We really need somebody to bring the cake over,” I implored.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. That’s what I was going to tell you. Brandon came in late. He’s out on his rounds now and should be there any minute. And say! Great fudge, Goldy. Brandon brought me some made from your recipe. Come by and see me sometime. I want you to try out my new cinnamon rolls. They’re bigger than the other guy used to make them.”

I thanked him, hung up, and unwrapped the biscuits. To Patricia I said, “The cake’s on its way.”

Using two chips, Patricia scooped up another precariously balanced load of dip from the plastic bowl. “Mm-mm,” she exclaimed as she delicately wiped an errant glop of sour cream from the side of her mouth. My words registered and she gave me a puzzled look. “The cake is on its way? So are my guests! We’re starting the hockey game earlier than we’d planned, in case we need overtime!” Her voice was full of panic.

“Patricia! Are you sure you’re okay?”

“No, I’m not okay, thank you very much. Am I ever going to see John Richard in civil court now, do you think? Unlikely. I sold my car to pay my lawyer’s retainer. Your ex-husband is sucking me down a drain.” She sounded very bitter.

Captain Ahab, I thought again, and cocked an ear toward the hallway. “I think either the cake or some of your guests might be arriving.” I loved catering. Occasionally, though, while placating a nervous hostess, I ended up burning the butter or committing some other faux pas culinaire. I wanted her to leave the kitchen, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

“Clark can greet the guests,” she rejoined excitedly. “I want to talk about what happened this morning. What did you see? Were you in on the – “

Mercifully, she was interrupted by dark-haired, handsome Brandon Yuille. Banging through the kitchen door, Brandon balanced an enormous white box on his outstretched arms. The cake. I motioned to the kitchen island and he expertly slid the box to safety. With his eyes twinkling, Brandon swept his long hair off his forehead. Of medium height and slightly – but appealingly – chubby, he wore a loose yellow oxford-cloth shin with no tie, khaki pants, and loosely tied brown leather boat shoes. He was good-looking and single, although somewhat too young for Marla, much to her chagrin. With a flourish, he opened the top of the cardboard box.

“Oh, Brandon, it’s super,” I said admiringly.

The rink-shaped cake was actually made of two thick layers of ice cream topped with a thin layer of yellow cake. Mickey had icing-painted all the right red and blue lines and the Avalanche logo. He’d even placed tiny plastic hockey players at various places and miniature goals at each end. “The cupcakes will look perfect surrounding it. Let’s get it into the freezer.”

Patricia was staring at Brandon. “Don’t you work for ACHMO?” she demanded suspiciously.

He reddened. “Yes, I … I’m just helping my father… .” His look grew puzzled. “Wait a minute. You’re the one who’s suing… Oh, I’m sorry, – I know you’ve had a hard time –”

“You all are spying on me,” Patricia responded hotly. “Don’t think I don’t know about all the records you’ve been trying to get your hands on or have destroyed. You can leave my home now.”

“I apologize for coming,” Brandon mumbled as he slid the cake into the freezer.

“Patricia, please,” I soothed. “Mickey Yuille is the new proprietor of the pastry shop. Brandon works for ACHMO during the week and helps his father on the weekends. Brandon, I’m sorry about this – “

But Brandon’s leather shoes were already making squeaking noises as he hastened out of the kitchen. So much for asking him any questions about ACHMO’s response to the recent demise of their vice-president.

Patricia sniffed. “If I’d known the pastry shop guy was related to an ACHMO guy, I would have had you make the centerpiece cake.” She made it sound as if that was the last thing on earth she wanted.

One of the guests, a slender, energetic woman with curly black hair, crashed into the kitchen. Her blue eyes shone with anticipation as she hurtled toward us. “Listen, Goldy, what’s the real dirt on your husband?” Two more women crowded in behind her, whispering and staring at me avidly.

Oh, brother. Every bone in my jaw ached from being clenched. I leaned against the refrigerator and glanced longingly at the fish fillets. Should I pretend I didn’t know what was going on? With my husband?

Actually, ladies, my husband is a cop who spent the afternoon running errands. That is, after he arrested my ex-husband

“Out, out, out,” Patricia commanded with surprising authority. To my relief, her noisy friends backed out of the kitchen. “And it’s her ex-husband!”

I could hear a muffled whine: “But we want to hear about…” The door closed on them.

“Your poor son,” Patricia said, suddenly remorseful. “He must be in agony. And how embarrassing it’ll be when his friends start talking about all this. I’m so glad Tyler’s not here. I certainly don’t want him asking questions. Keep right on with your work, Goldy. I’m staying with you until Clark starts the hockey game. You need protection from those busybodies.”

Of course, she was right. So was Marla. I should have worn a shirt that said I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING.

“It’s ACHMO.” Patricia said it dismissively as I steadfastly organized my supplies. She munched another dip-loaded chip reflectively. “You ever try to talk to somebody on the phone there? ACHMO re minds me of a church I went to once. Everybody hates everybody. The institution doesn’t function and it’s everybody else’s fault. The more you try to replace people, the worse it gets. Better to just burn the place down and start over.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what they did to me,” she said. Actually, I had never asked for the litany of volleys in Patricia’s negligence lawsuit against ACHMO. I knew she had lost her baby. I was not so interested that I had to hear all the details of the legal battle. Nor did I want to. “You heard ACHMO canned Ralph, of course,” she continued conspiratorially. “He’ll be here tonight, poor thing.”

“I did hear he had been fired.” I could sound as sympathetic as the next person. “Did Ralph find a new job?”

She nodded. “He was lucky to get something with another HMO, but it’s in administration. I’m sure there are many, many people Suz Craig fired,” she stated in the same offhand tone. “But two in Aspen Meadow? Please. We should get federal funds.” She lifted another chip as she raised an eyebrow.

“The other person she fired is Amy Bartholomew?”

“So you know about Amy. Yes. The woman’s a real healer, Goldy. Amy’s the one who told me to have this parry. Suz lost a gem in her. But Amy sees people at her health-food store now. I don’t believe she ever supported six slot machines in Central City, the way they said.”

I placed the biscuits on a buttered cookie sheet and covered them with foil to reheat later. “Well,” I said hopefully, “the police are bound to sort it out. Maybe you’d like to check on your guests… ?”

Unfortunately, Patricia still seemed to be in no hurry to leave. “So are they… going to put your husband on the case? The investigator? That would be something, wouldn’t it? I can’t imagine – “

“No, Patricia.” I peered out the window that overlooked the driveway. The male guests had divided themselves into two teams: one wearing Tshirts, the other not. A half-dozen men sat on the wooden retaining wall strapping on in-line skates, while another three-helmeted, padded, bare-chested – were taking tentative gliding turns around the drive. Their faces were hostile and they appeared to be yelling. Hurling insults at each other already? “Uh, do you have a doctor around? I mean, just in case there’s a problem with the hockey game outside?”

Alarmed, Patricia stepped up to the window beside me. “Oh, for crying out loud, they’ve started? Uh-oh, there’s Drew Herbert. He’s got the logo of the Detroit Red Wings tattooed on his chest.” She rapped on the glass. No one outside paid the slightest attention. “Who is …” One of the skaters took a spill and Patricia yelped. “Oh, Clark’s going to get us sued!” With this, she rushed out of the room.

Two nets abutted opposite ends of the driveway. One goal stood by the paved edge that gave way to the sloped front lawn and Tyler’s swing set, the other had been pushed up against a high retaining wall made of four-by-fours. Transfixed, I watched from the window until all twelve men were skating at a dizzying speed. Wielding lethal-looking hockey sticks, they bunched and raced, bunched and raced, all the time weaving past one another in furious pursuit of a bright purple tennis-size ball.

The score seesawed between the Shirts and the Chests, with the Shirts leading in high-fives and the Chests in sweat-production. About ten spectators, including the three women who had barged in on me, gathered on the driveway sidelines, hollering and laughing and swilling what looked like large gin-and-tonics in what I hoped were plastic – not glass – cups. What had happened to the beer? Had Clark brought it down to the end of the driveway?

When the score was two to one, a fight broke out over whether one of the Chests had skated out-of-bounds. First two, then four, guys started jostling one another. Unfriendly shoulder shoves accompanied open-mouthed braying.

Squawking, Patricia dashed into the fray. We were still twenty minutes from when I was supposed to bring out the first batch of appetizers for two dozen people. But if this squabble heated up much more, I’d have fewer mouths to feed than I’d planned.

The men argued and gestured with their hockey sticks. Here! they seemed to be saying. No, the ball went out over there! Two more women, apparently mindless of their own physical safety, rushed in from the sidelines to try to break up the conflict. Patricia stabbed a finger accusingly in her husband’s face, while another woman decided her husband needed to have his red face sloshed with gin-and-tonic. When Clark pushed Patricia aside, she turned and stomped back up toward the house. The conflict continued unabated.

Two men popped each other on opposite shoulders while skating sideways and trying to keep their balance. Then one of the Shirts unstrapped his helmet and snapped it upward, smacking it into the nose of his opponent in the melee. The man flailed backward, then did a belly flop forward on the blacktop. The battle ceased briefly while the injured man lay flapping his arms and legs. His squeals for help were muted-probably he had landed on his diaphragm.

Patricia McCracken, her face red and her voice shrill, rushed back into the kitchen. “Beer! Dammit, Goldy! What are you standing there for? Beer! Don’t wait for halftime! Take them some beer now!”

I mumbled something about a medic being a better idea than a bartender but scrambled obediently around the kitchen, where I quickly filled a Styrofoam cooler with three six-packs and a shower of ice. Beer didn’t seem a very good idea to me, especially on top of all those gin-and-tonics. Still, my contract did not include ground cleanup, if it came to that. I marched carefully down the walk to Clark McCracken, who gestured grandly toward his cement-hockey game.

“Take it down to them! Take it down!” he hollered, his face scarlet with exhaustion and what I suspected was pain. “Throw the cans at them if you have to!”

Without Clark, the players had resumed their game, which I found incredible. The Shirts and the Chests were skating around one another with even more alacrity and daring than before. One helmeted player thwacked the ball toward the goal and barely missed the net. Instead, the ball bounced off the retaining wall and smacked one of the female spectators in the knee. Her shrill squawk of pain went utterly unheeded as the skaters bent and swerved around one another to pass a newly produced ball.

“Beer break!” I called as the cans chinked against one another with what I hoped was an inviting sound. But the players could not hear me or the cans as they pushed, grunted, and jostled for position. Clark, somehow revived, whooshed past and waved me down to the sideline. I sighed, heaved the Styrofoam chest above my rib cage, and clink-clomped closer to the players, keeping a wary eye on the game.

Clark bellowed enthusiastically to his fellow skaters: “Hey, guys! A beer break would – “

But I never heard him finish. From the chalked line where I stood, I was suddenly aware of a shift in the game. Like a tornado that had changed direction without warning, a gaggle of sweating skaters loomed. Charging out of the crowd came Ralph Shelton, hell-bent in my direction. I dropped the beers. The Styrofoam chest landed on my feet. Spilling ice filled the air as Ralph Shelton slammed into my stationary, unhelmeted, unpadded body. As he hit me, the look on his bandaged face was a determined, angry grimace, as if he had every intention of killing me.

12

There was, apparently, a shortage of doctors. In any event, no one stepped up to offer me help. I lay on the pavement one second, two seconds, three. My eyes felt permanently crossed. As far as I could determine, everyone seemed to be clustered around Ralph Shelton.

I gasped but couldn’t bring any air in; the wind was gone from my body. Blood dripped from my forehead. Finally some people moved toward me. Their mouths chattered incomprehensibly. Move, I told myself. Get up. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I groaned and lifted one shoulder. Pain pierced my stomach and shot up my legs. My calves had been gashed by Ralph’s in-line skates. Even more agonizing was my head, which throbbed unremittingly.

As I speechlessly eyed the gaggle now gawking down at me, I was convinced that the cement had cracked my skull. Perhaps I had a concussion. Perhaps my brains were leaking out. Well, I had agreed to cater to a group of hockey fans. I probably didn’t have any brains left to leak.

“Goldy?” A strange woman’s voice accused me from faraway. “Why did you drop the beer?”

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was sitting in a gleaming blue-and-white bathroom. I had a vague recollection of someone lifting me and then placing me into this space. I studied my surroundings. Thinly striped blue porcelain tiles covered the floor, ran up the walls, surrounded the tub. Someone had wiped off my legs, arms, and face. The room swam. This was a nightmare, and I was dinner on a Staffordshire plate.

“I won’t be much longer,” came a comforting voice from the vicinity of the sink. Water was running. I risked eyeing the sink area.

The plump woman who stood beside me was of medium height. Her strawberry-blond hair shone. In the mirror I could see she had a kindly face. Actually, two kindly faces. I groaned and closed my eyes.

An impatient, distressed voice spoke from the doorway. “Lucky you’re coming around, Goldy.” My heart sank: Patricia. This was a bad dream. “We’re starting on that vegetable basket you put out. Are you all right now? My husband can’t put the fish on the grill until you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?” I muttered as the kindly red-haired lady smeared a gold-colored jelly on my forehead. The jelly looked like Vaseline and smelled like something you’d get in a Navajo gift shop. “What are you doing?” I asked uneasily, even as the comforting warmth of the salve magically removed the throbbing in my head. “Do I know you?”

“Shh, shh.” The woman smoothed more salve on my right arm. “Now smear some of this on your other arm.” I obeyed. More water spurted from the faucet. The red-haired Florence Nightingale handed me a glassful. “Can you drink some of this and then put this under your tongue?” When I nodded mutely, she shook out a speckled beige tablet from a wide brown bottle that hadn’t come from any pharmacy.

“I’m not taking any drugs,” I said firmly. Or at least I think I did.

Her laugh rippled off the porcelain walls. “This is about as far from drugs as you can get,” she assured me.

“Goldy, did you hear me?” pleaded Patricia, my former friend, my former pleasant client. “We’re going to start on your appetizers. Clark’s putting on a video of one of the Cup games and I want dinner to be served in forty minutes. If you’re still going to cater this party, you’d better pull yourself together.”

I clasped the tablet. It was still difficult to bring Patricia into focus. “Ah, do all the skates have their guests off?” I managed. Dyslexic sentence. Still couldn’t think right. No wonder press conferences after hockey games were so uninformative. “Ah …” I tried again. “Guests have their skates off?”

“Of course they do,” Patricia retorted. “You’ve been in here for almost a quarter of an hour. I’m worried that the grill’s going to run out of propane. When that last buzzer sounds, I want these guests to have grilled fish on their plates. Please hurry!” Then she turned on her heel and stomped away. I hoped Clark had put on a video of the last game of the 1996 Stanley Cup. Then we would have dinner in five hours, and I would have the last laugh.

“Don’t mind her,” said the red-haired woman. “And by the way, I’m a nurse. Put that pill under your tongue. It’s a homeopathic treatment for shock and pain.”

“What… ?”

But I was in too much pain to argue. I obediently slipped the pill under my tongue and got a smile as a reward from my new guardian angel. Doggone if this woman didn’t have an aura. On the other hand, maybe my head injury was even worse than I feared.

She said softly, “It’s called arnica, from a flower of the same name.”

“Who’re you?” I managed.

“Ralph Shelton called me,” she replied in that mellifluous voice that reminded me of stirred custard. “I live close by.” She concentrated her warm brown eyes on mine. “Ralph and I used to work together. He was so worried about you. He told me l you were an old friend of his.” She added gently, “My name’s Amy Bartholomew.”

I gagged on the second tablet as Amy patted more of the salve on my right shin. “I thought you…” What did I think she was going to look like, Kenny Rogers fresh from singing “The Gambler”? “What’s that you’re putting on me?” There was a taste of grass clippings in my mouth from the pills. “This stuff in my mouth tastes funny.”

“The salve contains goldenseal, olive oil, comfrey, yarrow, white oak bark, and all kinds of other healing herbs. Beginning to feel any better?”

I nodded, then waited for the pain in my head to pulse in punishment for my unwise move. To my astonishment, it didn’t. I looked down at my legs: my stockings were torn; bloody scratches crisscrossed my knees. I wished I had a change of clothes, but of course I did not. Amy continued to dab salve on the cuts. When she finished, she told me to hold out my hand. I did, and she shook a handful of the tablets into my palm.

“Take two more now, then another four in half an hour. Then four more every hour until you go to bed. Okay?”

“Okay.” I was still trying to calm the chaos in my head. “Do you have a card or something? I mean, so I can pay you? I doubt the McCrackens will cough up the money for your time and supplies.”

Amy shook her head and chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. Patricia is a customer of mine. Come see me, though, on … say, Monday or Tuesday. At the store. I want to take a look at your eyes. You know where I am? By the lake?”

I nodded again. Hesitantly I said, “Do you… did you hear about Suz Craig?”

Her face darkened. “Don’t bring up negativity now. You can’t digest it. You need to get better. Focus on healing.”

I sighed deeply. Focus on healing. I’d discovered the corpse of a murdered woman, my violent ex-husband was screaming threats from his jail cell, my I son was furious with me, I’d been hit in a roller hockey derby, the party I was catering was going down the tubes, and my scratched and bloodied body would be covered with bruises for weeks. Focus on healing? No problem.

After Amy left, I ordered myself to stand up. Then I checked in the mirror. Not as bad as I would have thought. There were three separate but relatively small cuts on my face and neck. My right eye was already pink and beginning to swell. My right shoulder hurt. The headache still echoed darkly in the back of my skull. I popped in a couple more arnica tablets and tried to concentrate on setting up the salads.

The guests were fully engaged in watching one of the playoff games between the Avalanche and the Chicago Blackhawks. I scanned the room for Ralph Shelton. Apparently he’d gone home. But questions nagged. Had he deliberately run into me? Had he meant to hurt me? Or was it just difficult to stop on in-line skates? I refused to ponder these questions until I was safely at home. First, I had a dinner to serve.

I tiptoed past the noisy living room to the security of the kitchen and spooned the salads into their bowls. My spirits began to revive as I poured the marinade over the tuna and heated the Mexican eggrolls I’d made the day before. The smell of hot south-of-the-border food was marvelous. I sliced one of the eggrolls to make sure it was suitably hot and crispy, then dipped it into an avocado-lime mixture and took a bite. The eggroll skin crackled around the chile-laden stuffing of chicken, black beans, cumin, and melted cheese. Yum. I was feeling so much better it was amazing. Now alI needed was a Dos Equis, a hot shower, and a leap into bed. Fat chance.

I slipped the biscuits and potato rolls into the oven, passed around the eggrolls, and received a gratifying chorus of oohs and ahs and I’ll have another one of thoses. No one commented on my bruised and battered face. I put the fish on the grill and checked on the heating biscuits. Frowning, Patricia devoured half an eggroll. Her face softened. Could she be feeling remorse for scolding me after I’d been slammed nearly senseless by one of her guests? I wondered. Maybe she’d realized I could sue her. Maybe she just liked Mexican food. I tested a corner of the grilled fish: flaky and deliciously flavored with the marinade. Apparently I could still do my job correctly.

The guests, some still wearing in-line skating attire, others clad in Avalanche gear, boisterously tumbled out to the buffet line after the buzzer sounded in the Blackhawks game. One or two eyed me curiously, but no one bothered to ask how I was. At this party, they expected injuries. Nor did they ask me what the story was on the Jerk’s arrest. Okay by me: the invincible caterer had work to do.

Soon the guests had munched their way through the main course and I put on coffee to brew. Eventually, the guests were drinking their coffee and eating Stanley Cupcakes topped with slices of ice-cream rink, while lamenting that the beginning of the NHL season was over a month away. I glanced at the clock over the kitchen window. Ten to eight. The sun slid slowly behind the mountains. Just above the jagged, deeply shadowed horizon, thin striations of gray cloud lay in perfect, straight lines. It’s a giant comb, Arch and I would have said, back when he was little. I ran hot water into the sink and put in the first batch of dishes to be rinsed. I couldn’t wait to finish this job.

Just after nine o’clock I heaved the first of my heavy boxes across my deck. Tom was waiting. As soon as he saw my face, he shook his head. He opened the back door, came out, and took the box from me. A huge dark green apron swathed his body. He’d been cooking, as usual, because he knew I would not have had time to eat.

“Miss G!” His face furrowed with worry. “What happened to you?”

“Don’t ask. It’s not that big a deal, anyway.”

He sighed. “You get into more scrapes in a day than I do in a year. And I’m the one with the dangerous job.”

“You’ve never catered to hockey fans,” I muttered glumly.

“True.” He set the box on the counter and chuckled as I flopped into a chair. He stooped to give me a kiss, then eyed my cut cheek. Instead he kissed the top of my head.

Later, when we’d brought all the supplies inside, I asked, “Where is the rest of this family?”

He smiled and started the food processor grating potatoes. “Upstairs. Macguire’s had quite a day, his most active in the last month. He’s had a long shower. But I think he may be running a bit of a fever. Arch took the dog and the cat into his room and the four of them are laughing over dolI-collecting magazines.”

“What?”

Tom deftly beat an egg, dipped in a flour-dusted fish fillet, then rolled it in shreds of potato. I suddenly realized I was starving. “Don’t worry,” he went on, “I gave Macguire some ibuprofen. He had an incident over at the lake with Arch. Oh, and Arch isn’t going to the Druckmans’ tonight, he wanted to stay here and make sure Macguire was okay.”

“Back up. What incident? Why were the boys at the lake?”

Tom took a deep breath, not a good sign. “Apparently the health-food store was closed. Macguire was too tired to walk any farther, so the two of them, went over to the LakeCenter looking for someone to give them a ride home. One lady – what’s her name, Rodine? – said she would if the two boys could bring in some tables. Do you believe that? Why wouldn’t she just give the kids a ride home?”

I sighed. “Because she’s a gold-plated bitch, that’s why.”

“Of course Macguire was too weak to lift a table, and Arch was too small, so they asked if they could do something else to earn their ride. So Mrs. Rodine had them carry in some cartons full of boxed dolls. They hauled a crate up on one of the stands inside the LakeCenter while Mrs. Rodine and her pals were yelling directions to some other underlings outside. So Arch and Macguire, trying to be helpful, started to take the doll boxes out of the crate. Once they had them all out, Arch got worried about Macguire, so he went to a soft-drink machine to get the two of them some pops. Meanwhile, Macguire started to take the dolls out of the boxes – “

“Oh, no. No, no, no. The collectors don’t want the dolls out of the boxes. The collectors want them NRFB. Never Removed From Box. It makes a huge” difference – “

Tom held up a hand. “When Arch came in with the drinks, he tried to warn Macguire, but it was too late.”

I repeated, “Too late. Oh, God.”

Tom seemed resigned to telling this tale of human folly. Yet his green eyes were merry as he drizzled olive oil on the griddle. “Three women screamed and chased Arch and Macguire out of the LakeCenter. Then a guy, one of the helper-husbands, called the sheriff’s department on his cellular phone – “

I moaned. Tom slid the potato-crusted fillets on the hot griddle, where their sizzling sound made my mouth water. “Since I was on my way home from the hardware store, I was the closest.” Another smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “So I answered the call. I’ve done a lot of strange duties in my day. But trying to convince a hysterical trio of women that removing a 1994 Holiday Babsie from its original box is not a chargeable offense-now that was perhaps the most challenging job I’ve had yet.” He chuckled.

I moaned again. “These women didn’t actually. do anything to Arch and Macguire, did they? Why does Macguire have a fever?”

Tom pursed his lips and flipped the fish. “The Babsie ladies chased our boys to the end of the old pier, where unfortunately Macguire lost his balance and fell into the water. A woman in a shell rowed over and held on to him until someone from the LakeCenter could throw out a life preserver.” Tom

carefully scooped the golden-brown fish pieces into a buttered pan and eased the whole thing into the oven. I rubbed my aching skull. “I … know that doll collecting is a bona fide hobby. Son of like be-ing a hockey fan. But I just don’t understand why these pastimes become manias.” “I asked the same question. I might as well have asked the ladies’ Bible study to describe the Rapture. One woman told me very seriously that doll collecting was like the best sex you ever had, times

“

ten. I let that pass. While the fish was baking, I moved-slowly, painfully-up the stairs to check on Macguire and Arch, who both immediately demanded to know why I looked so awful. I stalled and took Macguire’s temperature. It was one hundred degrees even, not enough to call his doctor, he maintained. Then I told the boys I’d gotten hit by a hockey fan. The fan had been wearing blades, I explained, and I had not. “Dude, Mrs. Schulz,” said Macguire admiringly. “You’re brave.” “No, just dumb enough to be in his way.” Apparently being with Macguire had worked the kind of effect on Arch Marla had predicted it would. My son did not seem preoccupied with his father and the events of the morning. He didn’t even appear to be angry with me. At least not at the moment. He pointed to the magazine in his lap. “Check this out, Mom.” I bent to look at the page. After a second I moved in closer. I wanted to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me. A Never-Removed-From-Box Duchess Bride Babsie was selling for twelve hundred dollars. Another one that had been taken out of the box sold for six hundred dollars. The dolls had sold for less than twenty dollars originally, and I remembered my little childhood friend in New Jersey who had taken such delight in playing with her Babsies. In the catalog, I saw one that looked familiar from my friend’s collection. It was an MIB-Mint-In-Box-Number One Blond Ponytail Babsie. The doll had just gone at auction for six thousand dollars. I felt faint.

“Mom, are you all right?” Arch asked anxiously.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “I’ve already seen a nurse, and she gave me a homeopathic remedy.”

“Homeopathic?” Macguire grumbled. “What is that?”

“It means natural,” I explained. “Please don’t stay up too late. I don’t need both of you to get sick.” Arch gave me an exasperated look and I closed the door before I could offend him further. Ten minutes later I was scrubbed, robed, and more ravenous than ever. In honor of my service to hockey fans, Tom had named his creation Power Play Potatoes and Fish. He served them with a fine julienne of carrot, steamed baby peas, a small green salad, and southern spoon bread topped with pats of butter. I took a greedy bite of the fish: Tom’s pairing of a crunchy potato crust with the delicate texture and rich taste of Chilean sea bass was divine, and I told him so. He smiled and told me the recipe was now taped to my computer screen. Then he frowned.

Power Play Potatoes and Fish

4 (6 to 8 ounces each) fresh Chilean seabass fillets

˝ cup flour

2 eggs

4 large russet potatoes

2 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 400°. Butter a 9-by 13-inch baking dish. Rinse off the fillets and pat dry with paper towels. Sprinkle the flour on a plate. Beat the eggs in a shallow bowl. Peel the potatoes. Grate them onto a large, clean kitchen towel that can be stained. Roll the potatoes up in the towel and wring to remove moisture. (It is best to do this over the sink.) Divide the potatoes into four piles.

In a wide skillet, heat the olive oil. Working quickly, dip each fillet first in the flour, then in the egg. Pat half of each potato pile on the top and bottom of each fillet (the equivalent of one grated potato per fillet). Bring the skillet up to medium-high heat. Place the potato-covered fillets in the hot oil, salt and pepper them, and brown quickly on each side. When all the fillets are browned, put them in the buttered pan and bake about 10 minutes, or until they are cooked through. Do not overcook the fish.

Serves 4

“What was the name of the guy you said hit you?”

“Dr. Ralph Shelton,” I mumbled, mouth full of succulent fish. “Remember? I told you about him earlier today. He’s an old friend of ours. Used to be with ACHMO, but according to town gossip he was fired by Suz Craig.”

“Right. And I was going to check on him, which I did. Which I actually told Donny Saunders to do, more accurately. By the way, did the gossip say why this Dr. Shelton was fired?”

I indicated a negative and took a bite of the carrots and peas, celestially fresh, sweet vegetables. The spoon bread was as rich and tender as anything Scarlett O’Hara had ever put into her mouth. I made “mm-mm” noises and Tom nodded in acknowledgment.

“Brandon Yuille, you know him?” he asked, his mind still on work.

“He’s the head of Human Resources for ACHMO. He’s also the son of a baker in town. He was at Suz’s house when I catered over there. I saw him today, but briefly. Why? Have you talked to him?”

“Yeah, a whole team went out to talk to the ACHMO department heads, but most of them are in San Diego at a conference. Medical Management, Member Services, Health Services, Quality Management – four of the six people who had to deal with Suz Craig on a daily basis are gone for the week, although they’re coming back early. The only department heads left in town were Human Resources and Provider Relations.” He took a breath. “John Richard Korman is absolutely insistent he’s innocent. The cops who’re questioning him? They’re getting real tired of hearing about Suz Craig doing this to make enemies, Suz Craig doing that.

“I hope they’re ignoring him. John Richard Korman is probably the worst enemy Suz Craig ever made. The most dangerous, certainly.”

Tom shrugged. “He’s the prime suspect, so the department is concentrating on him. But Donny Saunders has asked me to help him out. I agreed.”

“So where does Brandon Yuille come in?”

“Korman insists that Yuille and Suz Craig were having some kind of feud. Yuille claims he was with his father at his bakery from midnight to five last night, so he couldn’t have killed Ms. Craig.”

“You called Brandon?”

“Caught him unawares. He’ll probably never talk to me again without a lawyer present. And he’s not the most talkative man in the county,” Tom observed. “Anyway, he was awfully vague when I wanted to know why Ralph Shelton left ACHMO.”

“You asked him that? Brandon was vague or he l didn’t know?”

Tom’s face was unreadable. “Your ex-husband maintains that Ralph Shelton hated Suz, too. I’m wondering if his firing had anything to do with Patricia McCracken’s lawsuit against ACHMO.”

“What are you talking about? I mean, I know Ralph is an obstetrician, but…” I felt muddled. It had been too long a day.

Tom stood and picked up my whisker-clean plate. He ran water into the sink, then said, “What I did get out of Brandon Yuille was this: Ralph Shelton used to be associated with an ob-gyn practice down in Denver. Shelton was on call at St. Philip’s Hospital when Clark McCracken brought his wife, Patricia, in the night she lost their baby. There she is, losing blood and disoriented and Shelton tells her he’s with ACHMO. Even though they’re old friends, our Patricia McCracken hauls off and slaps the guy across the face. He fell, and it knocked the wind out of him. That woman’s unbelievably strong, even when she’s sick.”

“But,” I protested, “we all used to be close. Besides, Ralph Shelton wasn’t the problem. John Richard and ACHMO were.”

“That night Patricia McCracken sure saw Ralph Shelton as the problem. Then the chain of events goes like this. She files one suit against Korman; she files another against ACHMO. Ralph leaves his practice under a cloud. Our investigation is very preliminary at this point, but it looks as if after that Shelton took an administrative job with another HMO. One named MeritMed.”

I said reflectively, “But Ralph and the McCrackens seem to have buried the hatchet. I mean, he was invited to their hockey party tonight.”

Tom grinned. “Yeah, after their little tussle in the hospital Patricia apologized all over the place to Shelton. Maybe she’s trying to be sweet to him these days, so that he’ll tell her some inside stuff on ACHMO that she can use against them in her suit. I mean, now that he’s persona non grata there.”

“Ralph seems to stick together with another persona non grata,” I commented as I poured two dessert sherries. I told Tom about being tended to by Amy Bartholomew, nurse lately of ACHMO. “She’s involved with natural remedies now.” That reminded me. I sought out my last four arnica tablets and washed them down with the glass of cream sherry. It may not have been what the homeopaths would have recommended, but I thought it was wonderful.

Tom pulled me into his lap. “Tell me we’re going to have a break from talking about this case tomorrow, Miss G. This guy gets arrested first thing in the morning, and it ends up ruining our entire weekend.”

It could ruin a lot more than our weekend, I thought glumly, but didn’t say so. “You’re always telling me how if a case isn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours, it’s unlikely it’ll be solved at all.”

“Wait. One more thing. Suz Craig did deny Korman his bonus. Late last week.”

I sighed. “That’s what Marla was afraid of.”

“You still don’t think this case is solved?”

“I think this case is far from over. But we won’t mention a word of it tomorrow. Besides,” I teased, “I want to talk some more about the joys of doll collecting. I’m not sure I believe their claims. I mean, best sex times ten?”

“You do have to wonder,” he replied, deadpan, then led me upstairs.

13

You’d think after all I’d been through, I would have slept without a break for twelve hours. Not me. I slept for two. I awoke at midnight damp with sweat, wrenched from sleep by a nightmare starring John Richard. I’d been jolted awake believing I was Suz Craig, and I was being beaten to death. Perhaps my muscles had cramped after my collision with Ralph Shelton. Whatever the reason, sleep was impossible.

I tiptoed to the kitchen, where I made myself a hot chocolate and topped it with a fat dollop of marshmallow cream. Nothing like chocolate and marshmallow to soothe the nerves. When I was eleven and had failed a social studies test, I’d headed straight to the drugstore and ordered chocolate ice cream slathered with spoonfuls of creamed marshmallow. Did they even make that kind of sundae anymore? I wondered.

I sipped the chocolate, booted up my computer, and started a new file: JRK ARRES7: I remembered Arch’s words: He really needs you. Well, I didn’t care about what John Richard Korman needed. But I was interested in the truth. And I needed Arch to believe I cared about him.

It had been a tempestuous day. I had promised Tom we wouldn’t talk about the case on Sunday. Still, the information about the crime now bubbling up reminded me of the schools of minnows that can occasionally be seen at Aspen Meadow Lake. If you don’t get out your net right away, you’re going to lose them.

I began by listing everything I knew about the people involved. Suz Craig had run the Denver office of the AstuteCare Health Maintenance Organization. John Richard Korman, one of the ACHMO providers, had been dating Suz for the past seven months. On the home front, Suz had bought a luxurious house in Aspen Meadow, where she’d been doing an expensive landscape project. On the business front, she had reportedly fired employees without remorse, and refused those she didn’t fire their bonuses. And she had presumably enforced the rules of the HMO, which could have had some implications for Patricia McCracken’s case. Patricia sure thought so. Maybe I had to find out the details of her case, after all.

QUESTION, I typed. Why exactly is Patricia suing both JRK and ACHMO?

QUESTION: Did Suz Craig fire Dr. Ralph Shelton? If so, why?

QUESTION: Was gambling really enough of a reason for Suz to fire Amy Bartholomew, R.N.?

QUESTION: What did JRK and Suz Craig argue about at the country club.?

I sighed. How would I get the answers to these l questions? And why should I? I saved my file, shut down the computer, and sipped the steamy hot chocolate. The marshmallow had melted into a creamy layer on the chocolate surface. I licked it off carefully, the way a child would. Outside my kitchen window, elk bleated. I did not feel the remotest bit tired. I needed to get some sleep. How on earth could I face church in a state of exhaustion? Then inspiration struck.

Cook! That’ll relax you. Put all these people and all these questions out of your head for a while and whip something up. I fingered the containers of Dutch-processed cocoa and the jar of marshmallow cream I’d left on the counter. Why couldn’t you put these together in a cookie? Surely there could be nothing like chocolate and marshmallow in a cookie to soothe the nerves?

I put some hazelnuts in the oven to toast, then melted a jagged brick of unsweetened chocolate in the top of our double boiler. I combined sun-dried cranberries and oversize morsels of semisweet chocolate in a bowl, then scattered the hazelnuts to cool on a plate. I began to feel better. By the time I was beating unsalted butter with sugar and cream cheese, I was humming, and this was a mistake. Jake came bounding into the room on his long bloodhound legs, followed closely by a sleepy-eyed Arch clad in rumpled pajamas. Arch fumbled with his glasses and stared in puzzlement at the bowls, the butter wrappers, and the whirling beater.

Chocolate Comfort Cookies

1 cup chopped hazelnuts

2 cups (1 11 ˝ - ounce package) extra-large semisweet chocolate chips (Nestle’s mega-morsels)

˝ cup sun-dried cranberries

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

1 cup granulated sugar

1 3-ounce package cream cheese, softened

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

2 ounces best-quality unsweetened chocolate, melted

1 ˝ teaspoons vanilla 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour (high altitude: add 2 more tablespoons, for a total of 2 ˝ cups)

˝ teaspoon baking powder

˝ teaspoon salt

ź cup Dutch-processed cocoa

1 cup commercially prepared marshmallow cream

Preheat oven to 325°. Spread nuts on an ungreased cookie sheet and roast for 7 to 12 minutes, or until they are lightly browned and some skins have loosened. Set aside to cool.

Butter 2 cookie sheets. In a large bowl, combine the chocolate chips, cranberries, and cooled nuts; set aside. In another large bowl, beat together the butter, sugar, cream cheese, and egg until very creamy and smooth. Beat in milk, melted chocolate, and vanilla. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, and cocoa, then add to the butter mixture. Blend in the marshmallow cream, stirring until thoroughly combined. Add the chips, cranberries, and nuts. Stir until well mixed. Batter will be thick.

Using a ź - cup or a 4-tablespoon ice cream scoop, measure out batter and place 2 inches apart on cookie sheets, putting no more than 6 cookies per sheet. Bake 13 to 17 minutes, until puffed an cooked through. Cool on sheet 1 minute; transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

Makes 2 dozen.

“Gosh, Mom! What are you doing? Did you forget something? Do you have to take cookies to church?”

“Sorry, honey, I just couldn’t sleep. How about some hot chocolate with marshmallow? That’s what I used to have when I was your age and flunked a test. Or when I was your age and couldn’t sleep. It always worked, despite what they now say about the caffeine in chocolate.”

“Well, I could have slept if you hadn’t awakened Jake,” my son grumbled crossly. He shuffled to the back door and opened it, but the elk had stopped bugling and Jake wasn’t the least bit interested in a midnight run. Resigned, Arch closed the door and flopped into a chair. “Sure, I’ll have some cocoa, thanks.” Immediately he was up, offering Jake one of Tom’s homemade dog biscuits. “Yeah, boy, there you go! Don’t worry, I’m not going to have a treat unless you do!” The large, tawny dog wagged his tail, licked Arch’s face, and whined with canine contentment.

I heated more milk and stirred it into a smooth, thick paste of cocoa, sugar, and cream. In his corner, Jake crunched appreciatively. His dark eyes favored my son and me with loving glances. Arch gave him two more dog biscuits, then watched while I generously glopped marshmallow cream on top of his drink. When I put the steaming mug in front of him, I expected him to pounce on the rich treat as expectantly as I had. Instead, he blew tentatively on the foamy top, then sipped.

“Mom. There’s something I need to talk to you about.” He put his mug down. “It’s about Dad.” When my face fell, he quickly said, “Go ahead, make your cookies, it’s not important.” He added earnestly, “I really mean it, Mom. I don’t want to disturb you. Cook, if it’ll help you go back to sleep. I just have a couple of questions… .”

He had questions, I had questions, everybody had all kinds of questions. My headache returned with a vengeance. I beat the egg and milk into the batter, then added the melted chocolate and vanilla. Once the oven was preheated and the cookie sheets buttered, I measured out what I thought would be a judicious balance of dry ingredients and began to mix them into the batter. These cookies promised to be terrific. But apprehension had drained the joy from cooking experimentation.

Arch said, “So. When was the last time there was an execution in Colorado?”

“Arch!”

“No, really, just tell me. And… was it by lethal injection?”

I sighed and scooped the batter onto the cookie sheets. “No, the last execution used the electric chair. And it was over thirty years ago, I think. Law enforcement in Colorado has switched over to lethal injection. But they’ve never used it.”

“The death penalty” – his voice cracked – “is for first-degree murder, right?”

I slid the cookie sheets into the oven and turned. “Arch – “

“Just tell me.”

“Yes, for first-degree murder. But – “

“Are you going to help Dad?” he demanded. His question stung. I set the timer and tried to think of what to say. Finally I asked, “What would you like me to do?”

“Oh, you know,” he replied earnestly, “that stuff you do sometimes, go around asking questions, like that. Try to help with the investigation the way you do with Tom.”

“Tom’s off this case, and I’m a witness. Which is supposed to mean that I don’t go around talking to people connected with the case.”

“You did when you found that guy’s body out at Elk Park Prep and when that lady was killed in the parking garage.”

“Those were different. I didn’t see any suspects, and I certainly didn’t witness an arrest for homicide. And besides, those things happened when I was pretty ignorant about law enforcement.”

His thin body sagged. “So that means no.” His tone turned morose. “If Dad does get out of jail on Monday the way he thinks he will, I think I should go live with him. Until the trial. I mean, it might be the last time I would see him.”

I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, in the middle of the night, in the warm security of our home, here in our warm kitchen. In the extremely unlikely event that John Richard got out of jail anytime before his preliminary hearing, I couldn’t imagine that he would want Arch to live with him. Whatever punishment I had envisioned for the Jerk during all these years, it hadn’t looked like this. It hadn’t looked like losing my son.

“Arch,” I said quietly, “are you threatening me with moving out? ‘Cause that’s what it sounds like.”

“Mom! Of course not! I’m just trying to do what’s right here. He is my father.”

I struggled for clear thoughts and the right words. “Okay, look. If I can talk to some people … and those conversations would help lead to justice … Justice, I’m talking, Arch, not ‘getting somebody off.’ There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, yeah, truth, justice, and the American way. Courtesy of SuperMom.”

“Arch!”

“Okay, okay.”

“If I could talk to some people but not jeopardize my position as a witness, would you stay here at home? Your dad’s really not… set up to take care of you. And I would worry about you.”

He nodded, whispered “Okay,” and drank his cocoa in silence. Then he sniffed, mumbled, “Be right back,” and left the room. Jake, ever faithful, scrambled after him. I took the cookies out of the oven and set them on racks to cool.

When Arch returned, he clutched a wadded-up tissue. I couldn’t tell if he’d been crying. “I was just thinking, Mom.” He’d changed his tone, a clear indication that he wanted to discuss a new topic. “You said you were having a cup of hot chocolate to drink right now, because you couldn’t sleep? But when you can’t sleep, you should go out for a drive. Don’t you remember? That’s what you used to do when I was little. When I couldn’t sleep, you took me out for a drive, and you said it made you sleepy, too.”

“Oh, hon – “

“You probably don’t remember, but you used to say that driving me around was like having hot chocolate when you were little. The rhythm of the car put me to sleep the way the hot chocolate did you. Even if it was the middle of the night, if I was fussy, you would take me. I don’t remember the drives, I just remember you telling me we used to go.”

I nodded and checked the cookies; they were almost cool. i remembered the drives, all right. And I hadn’t taken them just because Arch was fussy. Time and again, I’d gripped that steering wheel the way fear had clutched me. Rocking over bumpy mountain roads, I’d been desperately trying to figure out a way to escape from my life, from John Richard Korman’s abuse, and a marriage I just couldn’t hold together anymore. I had been lost in the worst way, and it had taken years to get my life on the right road.

Now I packed up the cookies, stacked all the dirty dishes in the sink, and threw away the ingredient debris.

“A drive sounds like a great idea,” I told my son. “But what do you say we get some sleep first?”

Arch agreed. For once, he wasn’t in the mood to taste my new cookies, and neither was I.

14

I begged the Almighty to help me rest up before church began the next morning. Finally I fell into a restless slumber at dawn. Tom woke me, bearing a cup of steaming espresso.

“If you want to make it to the late service,” he advised gently, “we need to get a move on.” As I struggled upright and promptly winced, Tom added with concern, “Sure you don’t want to just stay in bed this morning?”

I assured him I was just stiff. Plus I’d been up during the night cooking. He shook his head and began to massage my aching shoulders. My lower back was still in spasm, and my right ankle throbbed. After drinking the espresso, I checked the ankle. It was ominously blue-black. I limped into the bathroom to take a hot shower, dabbed bits of makeup over the scratches on my face, and finally felt ready to get spiritual succor. While Arch rummaged through the clean laundry for a pair of pants, I tiptoed into Macguire’s room. His forehead felt hot, but he moaned a refusal when I suggested his seeing a doctor. I begged him to take a couple more ibuprofen, which he did. By the time I closed his door, he was asleep. Damn Gail Rodine for making Macguire fall into the lake over her damn silly dolls.

When Tom, Arch, and I arrived at the massive oak entryway to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, the two men in my life held the doors ajar chivalrously. I hobbled through. When the sea of faces turned to appraise my entrance, I immediately realized we’d have done better asking for communion to be brought to the house. For the infirm, having the sacrament delivered was a common enough practice. But it wasn’t a very common practice for a caterer who’d been trampled by an inebriated hockey player the same day her ex-husband was arrested for murder. So I hadn’t thought of it.

Still, I should have known what kind of spectacle, and fuel for gossip, my bruised self would present. The ripple of whispers rose to a wave. Marla, wearing a lilac-print designer sundress, bolero jacket, matching purple earrings and high heels, immediately bustled over.

“I don’t think they’re staring because they want to book a buffet brunch,” she confided.

“Gosh, Marla. Thanks for the news flash.” The choir shuffled into the vestibule. I took advantage of their arrival to whisper to Marla, “I told Arch I’d ask around about John Richard.”

Her taupe-and-lilac-shadowed eyes widened at my confession. “Bad move, Goldy Schulz.”

Tom guided us to a pew at the back and the four of us squeezed in. Marla hugged Arch and palmed him two Cad bury bars, which he stuffed into his pants pocket. MarIa’s cardiologist ever X-rayed her Louis Vuitton handbag and discovered the bulges were chocolate bars and cream-filled cupcakes, he’d probably have cardiac arrest himself. She leaned close to me.

“Check out who’s visiting. I’m an Episcopalian, so I can’t point.”

It took me a few seconds of scanning the pews to locate Chris Corey, his sister, the cat-loving Tina, and Brandon Yuille, sitting together on the opposite side of the nave. Tina had already told me she was a parishioner. Brandon attended occasionally. I’d never seen Chris at St. Luke’s before.

“Probably here to plan Suz’s memorial after coffee hour,” Marla whispered. “Anyway. As long as you’re poking around, have you heard anything new? And what happened, did you lose a fight with your blender?”

I glanced quickly at Arch. My son always made a good, but not perfect, pretense of not listening to adult conversations.

“No and no,” I whispered back to her. She opened her mouth, probably to ask another question. Mercifully, the opening bars of the processional hymn rang out. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”

As much as I tried to concentrate, my eyes wandered back across the nave where Tina and Chris sat with Brandon. As the Old Testament lesson was read, I tried to recall when I’d seen Tina attending church, if ever.

To my horror, I giggled. Stress. I gulped and caught a glimpse of Marla’s puzzled face, as well as the sudden confused looks from the two Coreys and Brandon Yuille. Well, great.

As we rose for the reading from Luke, I thought of what Marla had said about why two ACHMO department heads would be in church this morning: all the other department heads were away in San Diego. Chris and Brandon were indeed probably here to make funeral arrangements for Suz Craig. Suz had no relatives to perform this task, and Arch had told me that Suz was a nominal Episcopalian. Arch had also reported that Suz had accompanied John Richard on his rare appearances at St. Luke’s. Of course, John Richard did not go to church so much to worship as he did to brag about or show off whatever new possession he had, be it car, condo, or concubine.

Stop. In any event, our priest, now delivering his homily, liked to think of St. Luke’s as a happy, if not always harmonious, family. Supposedly only family members could use the church building, even if they were dead. You couldn’t be baptized, married, or dispensed to the Hereafter unless both you and the people making the arrangements were churchmembers. So it looked as if Suz belonged to St. Luke’s, albeit posthumously.

Man, what was the matter with me? I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on the intercessions. A woman prayed for the repose of the soul of her neighbor, Suz. By the time I opened my eyes, the woman’s prayer had ended. I had not seen who it was. Brandon quietly echoed the supplication for Suz, then offered a plea for his father, who spent many hours alone. My mind took off again. Brandon had been at the bakery with his father from midnight to five? Sounded like a weird explanation of your whereabouts, even if your father was a lonely widower. The idea of spending many hours alone made me think of John Richard, who, I was willing to bet, was not attending chapel this morning in the Furman County Jail.

During the offertory, two visiting bagpipe players sounded the mournful notes of “Amazing Grace.” While one of the choir sopranos sang the lyrics, my brain reverted to Ralph Shelton. Why had I had the strong feeling Ralph was hiding something when I went to his house? He’d been so hesitant, as if he wanted to talk to me but was afraid to. At the words, “I once was lost, but now am found,” I glanced over at Arch. Tears slipped out of his eyes. My heart twisted in my chest.

Forget hugging him. Forget asking what was wrong. I knew better than to treat a fourteen-year-old boy in a way that would embarrass him. Still, it had been years since I’d seen Arch weep openly. I rummaged through my handbag, found a paper napkin, and wordlessly handed it to him. Without acknowledging me, he snatched the napkin. Tom patted my shoulder. Marla shook her head.

During the final hymn, Arch decamped to the men’s room. As soon as he left the pew, Marla leaned over. “We should skedaddle before the horde descends on us during the coffee hour. Let’s see if Brandon Yuille or the Coreys will talk to us. As ex-wives of the accused, we can say we have the right to know why he might have killed their boss.”

“I don’t want to leave Arch… .” Marla said, “Arch’ll be better off with Tom than with you right now. Think about it. Tom should take him down to the jail for visiting hours.” She addressed Tom: “Can the Jerk see Arch today?”

Tom ignored the perplexed glances we were receiving from the people in the pew in front of us and nodded. “Let me take him down to see his father, Miss G. It’ll be okay,” he reassured me.

My sore shoulders slumped in defeat. Arch returned. The four of us bowed as the cross went by. Then we waited endlessly for the choir, bagpipe players, and priest to process out. When I finally told Arch that Tom would take him to see his dad while Marla and I ran a few errands, he brightened. I was surprised. I’d have thought he’d have responded with apprehension. It seemed I was past knowing what my son needed.

Marla pinched me and I scooted out of the pew, ignoring my aching body. I was feeling every hour of my age today. Once we were outside, she used her sixth sense – the one that fed on gossip – to locate Brandon Yuille and Chris and Tina Corey, who were standing by a pine tree at the edge of the parking lot.

“Yoohoo!” Marla called. “Need to chat for a sec!”

Brandon waved unenthusiastically while Chris, his ankle still in a cast, shifted the weight of his cumbersome body and forced a smile. Brandon, ever sharp, wore khaki pants and a military-style khaki shirt. Tall and heavy, Chris Corey had an enormous potbelly and pale hair and beard. He looked like a young blond Buddha, or rather a young blond Buddha who wore a white dress shirt and gray slacks, and limped. What I’d liked best about Chris when I first met him was that he didn’t insist anyone call him doctor. His rumbly baritone had reminded me of a physician from our family’s distant past. But when I’d asked him if he’d ever treated us – a pediatrician who’d treated Arch, maybe? – he’d said no. Maybe Chris reminded me less of Buddha than of Santa Claus. When he smiled, his blue eyes crinkled. Apparently, Tina, a female version of her portly brother, hadn’t been able to find a Babsie-goes-to-church outfit. She wore a severe black cotton suit, and her hair was twisted back in a tight bun.

“I know you two probably don’t want to talk right now,” Marla gasped to the men, out of breath from her brief but determined trek across the gravel-covered lot. “Actually, we don’t either.” She feigned a sadness as fake as squirt butter. “It’s just that we have to… .”

“It’s okay,” Chris replied amiably, tugging on his blond beard. “It’s a tough situation. But we can’t visit for long. We’re here to plan the funeral.”

“We can’t talk very much at all,” Brandon added, his voice tight. He flipped his long, dark bangs out of his eyes. “The priest just has to finish talking to the coffee-drinkers.”

I nodded. The coffee hour was always the time when our pastor had to field questions that fell under the general rubric of pastoral theology. In actuality, coffee-hour questions rivaled anything Ann Landers had ever had to face. Is God punishing my neighbor with cancer? My son baptized his anole lizard and then the lizard died. Can you give it a Christian burial.? For our spiritual leader, discussing Suz’s memorial service might prove to be something of a relief.

Marla plunged right in. “If our ex-husband goes down for murdering his boss, it’s going to be bad for us, you know. Much as we don’t mind the Jerk suffering, we’d like to know why he killed Suz Craig.”

Chris, Brandon, and Tina stared at Marla, open-mouthed.

“That’s not…” Chris began. “You can’t expect us to discuss – “

“Oh, yes, we can,” Marla continued brazenly. “You guys are department heads with a big corporation. You need to be responsive to the public, or at least to the ex-wives of the guy who’s been charged with murdering your boss. So what we’ve heard is … there were problems with firing at that HMO. Were there problems in the Human Resources department, Brandon? Did everybody hate her?” When he gaped blankly at her, she turned to Chris. “Can you answer our questions? Please?”

I was embarrassed. This wasn’t asking a few questions. This was grilling, with no hot dogs in sight.

“Ah.” I leaned in for a few confidential, light-hearted words with Tina Corey. “That doesn’t look like a Babsie outfit that I recognize. Let’s see… could it be … Babsie-as-a-Choir-Director?”

Tina’s face became rigid. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Goldy, please,” interjected Chris, “could you not – “

“Babsie-as-Altar-Guild-Director?” I attempted, undeterred.

“Be quiet,” said Tina. Startled by her harsh tone, I pulled back. Apparently, Babsie wasn’t a churchgoer. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Er, how’s the cat?” I Tina’s face remained stonelike. She said nothing. Maybe the cat had run away, and she blamed me. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Some people just can’t shoot the breeze when they’re about to plan a funeral. I shot Marla a pleading can-we-leave glance.

Chris squinted over Marla’s shoulder and waved to the priest, who was heading our way with a worried look on his face.

“We don’t want to cause a ruckus,” Chris said soothingly.

“Then answer my questions,” Marla insisted.

“Yes,” Chris said softly. “There were problems at ACHMO. It was not a happy place to work.”

“You all look so solemn. People are wondering what the five of you are discussing out here,” our priest said, joining us.

“Nothing,” Marla said gaily. She always sought gossip but rarely shared it when there was no hope of reciprocal din. She tugged me away and I muttered good-byes to the two men and Tina. Marla pulled open the door to her Mercedes. I got in on the passenger side. After the van, sitting in the low-slung four-wheel-drive Mercedes always made me feel like an astronaut en route to Uranus.

“I can ask Brandon Yuille and Chris Corey a few questions if I want,” Marla said defiantly as she slammed her door and prepared to blast off.

“Yeah, right. You can see how well it went.”

“Tough tacks.” She revved the car and zoomed out of the lot, then slowed behind a van crammed with tourists from Kansas. “So who should we be talking to if you’re going to help Arch? And what are we supposed to say? Or haven’t you figured that out yet? ‘Hi, we’re the two ex-wives of the doctor who’s been busted for murder! Can we come in for tea and a little interrogation?’ “

Chris, Brandon, and Tina stared at Marla, open-mouthed.

“That’s not…” Chris began. “You can’t expect us to discuss – “

“Oh, yes, we can,” Marla continued brazenly. “You guys are department heads with a big corporation. You need to be responsive to the public, or at least to the ex-wives of the guy who’s been charged with murdering your boss. So what we’ve heard is … there were problems with firing at that HMO. Were there problems in the Human Resources department, Brandon? Did everybody hate her?” When he gaped blankly at her, she turned to Chris. “Can you answer our questions? Please?”

I was embarrassed. This wasn’t asking a few questions. This was grilling, with no hot dogs in sight.

“Ah.” I leaned in for a few confidential, light-hearted words with Tina Corey. “That doesn’t look like a Babsie outfit that I recognize. Let’s see… could it be … Babsie-as-a-Choir-Director?”

Tina’s face became rigid. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Goldy, please,” interjected Chris, “could you not – “

“Babsie-as-AItar-Guild-Director?” I attempted, undeterred.

“Be quiet,” said Tina.

Startled by her harsh tone, I pulled back. Apparently, Babsie wasn’t a churchgoer. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Er, how’s the cat?”

Tina’s face remained stonelike. She said nothing. Maybe the cat had run away, and she blamed me. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Some people just can’t shoot the breeze when they’re about to plan a funeral. I shot Marla a pleading can-we-leave glance.

Chris squinted over Marla’s shoulder and waved to the priest, who was heading our way with a worried look on his face.

“We don’t want to cause a ruckus,” Chris said soothingly.

“Then answer my questions,” Marla insisted.

“Yes,” Chris said softly. “There were problems at ACHMO. It was not a happy place to work.”

“You all look so solemn. People are wondering what the five of you are discussing out here,” our priest said, joining us.

“Nothing,” Marla said gaily. She always sought gossip but rarely shared it when there was no hope of reciprocal din. She tugged me away and I muttered good-byes to the two men and Tina. Marla pulled open the door to her Mercedes. I got in on the passenger side. After the van, sitting in the low-slung four-wheel-drive Mercedes always made me feel like an astronaut en route to Uranus.

“I can ask Brandon Yuille and Chris Corey a few questions if I want,” Marla said defiantly as she slammed her door and prepared to blast off.

“Yeah, right. You can see how well it went.”

“Tough tacks.” She revved the car and zoomed out of the lot, then slowed behind a van crammed with tourists from Kansas. “So who should we be talking to if you’re going to help Arch? And what are we supposed to say? Or haven’t you figured that out yet? ‘Hi, we’re the two ex-wives of the doctor who’s been busted for murder! Can we come in for tea and a little interrogation?’ “

I sighed. “Let’s go talk to Frances Markasian. You said she came to visit you, why didn’t she come to visit me? I think she lives in the Spruce apartments.”

Marla pressed the accelerator. “Now there’s an upscale address.”

The Spruce apartment building was a four-story stucco edifice that had probably been constructed when Aspen Meadow was rapidly expanding in the sixties. Spruce up was just what the building owners had not done, unfortunately. The seventies had seen the apartment house, which sat perched on a hill overlooking Main Street, painted a blinding yellow. I was willing to wager there’d been no repainting since. Warped and rotted cedar-shake shingles curled on the roof or lay helter-skelter between the crab-grass and the drooping lodgepole pines that flanked the building. Marla pulled the Mercedes next to a wall of yellow cinder blocks that marked off the front parking area. I didn’t see Frances’s Subaru, but knew there was another cracked-asphalt blacktop behind the building where the residents kept overflow cars.

“Tell me again why we’re here,” Marla said doubtfully.

“All this happened to John Richard yesterday,” I reminded her. “You know Frances Markasian. She’s a fast and efficient snooper. If somebody knows anything, she will.”

“All I know is that she’s also covering the doll show at the lake,” Marla grumbled. “Maybe she’s doing a story on Coroner Babsies.”

The elevator was out of order. We walked up the stairs to apartment 349, the Markasian residence, and knocked. No one home. An elderly man came out into the third-floor foyer and unabashedly watched us as Marla rapped harder. The elderly man cleared his throat.

“Hey, you girls!” he snarled. His white hair had been brutally shaved in a crewcut, and his deeply lined face looked malevolent. “What do you want? You’re not more of them, are you?”

I held my index finger up to Marla: Let me handle this. To the elderly gent I said pleasantly, “More of whom?” He made an impatient gesture. “Parade of people all day. That woman’s not a reporter, she’s a bureaucracy. Get out of here, you’re ruining the place.”

I felt my cheeks redden. :: But Marla wasn’t merely blushing. She was purple with rage. “Cool your jets, fella! If we want to look for somebody, we’ll look, you got it? We’ll knock on every door in the place if we want to. Ever heard of freedom of the press? Do you know where we can find Frances Markasian?”

“Look, you two!” he cackled. “You want stories on your dolls? Grow up! Dolls for grown women,” he spat. “You want Frances Markasian, go down to the lake and find her!”

I was ready to retreat, but Marla insisted on having the last word, as usual. She wagged a lilac-painted nail at the man.

“Watch your mouth, please! Collecting is a venerable hobby. And it’s a smart investment! Not only that, but you’re rude!”

“I may be rude, but I’m not crazy!” he cackled before disappearing into 350.

Marla shot after him and I had to limp along behind her to catch up. Fortunately, the man’s apartment door slammed before Marla could force her way in for a confrontation. Marla rapped hard and repeatedly on his door. Squeals of “Shut up!” and “Go away or I’ll call the cops!” issued from other apartments. But our white-haired, unpleasant critic did not reappear.

11

In the afternoon sun Aspen Meadow Lake shimmered like sugar on ice. Several dozen cars in the dirt parking area made me wonder if there was a waiting line for skiffs and paddle boats. We got out of the Mercedes and approached the LakeCenter’s front door.

The LakeCenter was a jewel of that architectural species known as “mountain contemporary.” Constructed of row upon row of massive blond logs, wide, soaring trapezoids of glass, polished plank flooring within, aprons of flagstone without, and topped with a phenomenally expensive all-weather shingle roof, the structure was the glory of the Aspen Meadow Recreation District. The interior consisted of a huge space, fancifully called “the Ballroom,” and a more intimate-adjoining space known as “the Octagon.” Both rooms provided unequaled views of the lake. There was a kitchen, too. I would be working there when I catered to the Babsie people. Alas, the kitchen afforded no scenic vista.

Unfortunately, the LakeCenter was locked up tight. We rounded the building, looking for Frances Markasian and any evidence of the doll show. The cormorants paddled furiously along the lake’s edge. When they dove for fish, they would stay underwater for so long it seemed impossible that a land-based animal would not drown. But then, miraculously, the sleek black birds would pop back up, triumphantly clasping tiny, slithering fish in their beaks.

When we came up on the boat-rental shop, we found that it was indeed open. Thirty or so people waited for skiffs.

“A land-office business,” Marla commented, “despite the fact that it’s on the water.”

“But no Frances,” I pointed out.

“Think we should go talk to those other people John Richard mentioned, Ralph Shelton and Amy Bartholomew? And how’d you get messed up, anyway?”

“I’d rather not see either of them just yet. Ralph Shelton banged into me yesterday at the McCrackens’ party. Literally. Amy Bartholomew patched me up. Before Ralph used me for a landing pad, I tried to ask him some questions about Suz. He didn’t have much to say. Ditto with Amy, except I got some New Age gobbledygook about Suz Craig’s negative karma. I don’t want to ask them any more questions until we know better what we’re looking for.”

“What exactly are we looking for?” Marla said as she va-voomed the Mercedes.

“I wish I knew.”

“Speak for yourself,” she shot back. “We know the Jerk did it. I’m looking for lunch.”

“Hold on a minute,” I replied. “Frances hates to cook. She’s a cheapskate, but every now and then she shows up at the Aspen Meadow Cafe, especially if she’s doing an interview and the paper is springing for the meal. With any luck, we could run into her there.”

We trekked over to the cafe, but Frances Markasian was again nowhere in evidence. So Marla insisted on treating me. With the Jerk finally in jail where he belonged, she claimed, we should have every manner of salads to celebrate. Using her best queenly manner, she waved at the waitress and announced: “Bring ‘em all.” Soon platter after platter arrived: roast beef salad, pasta salad, corn and pepper salad, fruit salad, and an arugula salad with toasted walnuts that I went wild for. I knew from experience that I’d never get the recipe from the cafe chef, so I made a mental note to reinvent it in my own kitchen, using some meringue-baked pecans I had frozen. Not one to neglect balance, Marla ordered a bottle of champagne and hot popovers to go with our salads.

I laughed at her indulgence. Really, I’m extremely fortunate that I have both Marla and Tom to be sure that I’m regularly fed as well as loved and fussed over. For someone in the food business, such care is a rare treat.

Marla claimed to want none of the leftovers. When our waitress handed me the bulging bags of goodies, I observed, “Our family will have enough here for a week.”

“That’s the idea,” Marla replied happily. “Besides, dealing with the Jerk, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

When she was signing her credit-card slip, a newly arrived group of diners caught my eye. I grabbed Marla’s arm. “Hey, check it out.”

She followed my gaze. We watched Frances Markasian trying to decide which of the outside patio tables would suit. With her were Chris Corey and his sister, Tina. Tina had changed into some kind of costume. This time, I was sure it was a Babsie outfit.

“Do you know why Tina changed into that getup?” I asked Marla, who made it her business to know as much as possible about the lives of Aspen Meadow residents.

“The costume? Who knows. Tina is an aide at Aspen Meadow Preschool. She’s the head Babsie-club organizer, too, so it might have something to do with the show starting. Maybe Frances is interviewing her.”

Tina now sported the same long blond pigtails she had at Gail Rodine’s house yesterday. She wore a frilly lace blouse and a royal-blue vest with matching skirt, both covered with a lace-edged, snow-white apron.

I said, “For the doll show I’ve mainly been dealing with Gail Rodine. She’s in charge of hospitality and security.” Marla made a face. I pushed my chair back. “I promised Arch I would help him. Let’s go crash their lunch.”

“Mah-velous,” she said. “I love crashing anything.”

Frances was peering into the cafe for a waitress. As she did so, she impatiently tapped one foot. The foot was encased in a duct-rape-wrapped sneaker. Her black trench coat was, of course, unnecessary in the August heat. But Frances was (or fancied herself) a high-powered investigative reporter temporarily trapped in Aspen Meadow, Colorado. With long, wildly frizzy black hair, skin of an unhealthy pallor, thrift-shop clothes, and a chain-smoking habit that would undoubtedly blacken her lungs within a decade, she at least knew how to dress the part.

Frances’s ambition in the county was legendary. She went after every crime and disaster story like a starving wildcat pouncing on its prey. Her headlines were certainly creative. In May we’d had I-70 DRIVER SHOOTS ROADSIDE BUFFALO IN COLD BLOOD! June had seen EXPLOSION IN MOTH-INFESTED PROPANE GRILL SAILS PRESIDENT OF KIWANIS INTO CREEK! Readership of our town paper had tripled since Frances had come on staff two years ago.

“Hey, Goldy,” she said amiably as we neared her table. She pushed the black frizz from her forehead. “I’ve already been by to see you today, but you weren’t home. Do you know the Coreys? Chris is head of Provider Relations with ACHMO-the AstuteCare Health Maintenance Organization in Denver. And this is his sister, Tina. She works at Aspen Meadow Preschool and presides over the local Babsie doll club.”

“Good to see you, Frances. And I know both Coreys,” I replied. “In fact, we’ve already chatted this morning.”

Chris brought his unwieldy bulk to a standing position, balancing awkwardly on his cast. His pale beard bobbed as he greeted us.

“We’re sorry to disturb you,” Marla lied in a breathy gush.

Frances rumbled a laugh and lit a cigarette.

“No, you’re not sorry. Anyway, this is great. I’m absolutely desperate to talk to Goldy. Sit.”

Tina nodded at us. Her cold manner had changed completely from her behavior at church. She blushed. If I’d been wearing her outfit, I’d have blushed, too.

Gaping at Tina, Marla said, “Well, Heidi, where’d you leave your sheep?”

Chris smiled indulgently, but the color deepened painfully on Tina’s neck and cheeks. She lowered her head and smoothed the frilly apron. I knew better than to ask about the cat again. Frances scowled in the awkward silence. This was not a good way to start a lunch-crashing, no doubt about it.

“Wait a minute,” I said enthusiastically. “I know that outfit, Tina! It’s the Icelandic Babsie!” Tina raised her head, grasped a blond pigtail, and gave me a shy smile. “I’m catering the doll show,” I reminded her, since she seemed not to have remembered me at church. “Do you remember me from the Rodines’ place yesterday?” I shook Tina’s limp, fleshy hand. “Do you remember me?”

Tina regained her composure. “Of course. You I gave me my new kitty.”

Finally, we were on solid ground. Maybe she just didn’t discuss dolls or cats at church. “That cat sure took to you,” I said warmly. Tina beamed.

Under her breath Marla muttered, “Gosh, Goldy, run for office, why don’t you?”

Our waitress reappeared, and Chris announced that he was treating everyone, what would we like? Chris, his sister, and Frances ordered sandwiches. Marla, suddenly the picture of charm, said she’d love some fudge meringue pie. I went for Linzertorte and iced coffee, trying to think of how to ask Frances my questions about John Richard. What have you dug up? Are you on to something? Exactly why did you want to see me this morning? Lucky for me, Frances pried so blatantly that we were spared subtle inquisition. Instead, she plunged right in.

“Hey, ladies, think your mutual ex-husband will grant me an interview from behind bars?” Her slightly yellow teeth flashed in a wide, crooked smile.

“I don’t know,” I answered sincerely. Marla said, “I’ll pay for you to do the interview, if you get a photo of him in an orange suit that you publish in the paper.”

“Has it been hard, or are you two just loving this?” Frances wanted to know, with her usual sensitivity.

Marla shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I’m loving it,” I told Frances tartly. “A woman is dead. Plus my son’s suffering pretty badly, especially after his father called from jail yesterday. Arch is down there visiting him right now.”

Too late, I realized I should have kept my mouth shut. Frances and I were friends, but nothing came before a scoop. She dug frantically in her voluminous black handbag, yanked out a pen and a grimy pad of paper, and began to scribble. “What did Korman say in this phone call that upset Arch?”

“Nothing! Please, stop taking notes. For crying out loud, Frances, this is personal.”

Chris mumbled, “Maybe we should talk about something else, Frances. I don’t think – “

She gestured imperiously. “It’s always personal for somebody, Goldy.”

“Don’t give me that low-brow journalistic jive. Please. If you want me to stay here and visit, promise not to print anything about my son.”

She kept on scribbling, pursed her lips, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Okay, I won’t if you’ll let me run some stuff by you. Besides, I’m sure you’ll want to hear all I’ve learned about this Craig business. Chris here” – she flapped a casual hand in his direction – “is an insider. There’s all kinds of scuttlebutt. You know this town. Once something happens, it’s like a …” She closed her eyes and sought the perfect simile. “Like a … volcanic energy erupts around the desire to know what’s going on.”

Chris took a deep breath and shifted his weight uncomfortably. Tina sipped some water. Marla, of course, was all ears. But Mount Saint Frances calmly lit a cigarette. My attempt to ask Frances a few delicate questions was going awry pretty quickly.

“Run some stuff by me?” I echoed. “Such as?”

“Okay, this is top secret. If somebody comes up to the table here and wants to know what we’re talking about, we say I’m interviewing Tina for the doll show.”

“So what are you running by me?”

“ACHMO is planning a raid,” she informed me blithely, her tone a shade lower. “On John Richard Korman’s office. Tomorrow morning.”

Marla shrieked with glee. I said, “A raid? Frances, what on earth are you talking about?”

Our food arrived and I was thankful for the momentary distraction. A raid? What were they looking for? And why would ACHMO raid anyone’s office? This could not be true. I assumed an expression of polite interest and, because the waitress hovered over us, attempted to change the subject.

“How’s your ankle coming along?” I asked Chris. “I should have asked after church.”

He smiled shyly. “I’ll be kicking field goals in no time.”

Frances took three bites of her sandwich; pushed it away, and relit the half-finished cigarette she had carefully squashed out when the food arrived. “So. You want to hear about the raid or not?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” urged Marla, eyes sparkling. “Why don’t you just tell the police about it?” I asked. The Linzertorte was delicious, a crunchy crust covered with jewel-colored raspberry jam. “A raid by the HMO has got to be illegal, Frances.”

“But it isn’t.” Chris’s surprisingly powerful baritone commanded attention. “We do it all the time. Usually we call first, which is what we’ll do tomorrow. We come in to check information in the files.”

“What?” Marla exclaimed. “What about patient confidentiality?”

Chris readjusted his ankle and went on. “Marla. Goldy. May I call you by your first names?” Frances nodded, I noticed, before we had the chance. “It’s in our contract,” he continued. “We can visit any practice we own. A nurse, a doctor, someone with medical training who’s working for the HMO, comes in. It’s not really a raid” He grinned indulgently at Frances, who was lighting her second cigarette. “We just want to check how certain procedures get billed, and we do it by going through individual files. The provider’s office has to let us have what we want.”

Well, my curiosity was piqued, no question. John Richard in jail and ACHMO was going to crash into his office to go through his files. Small wonder that Frances was interested, too.

“What are you going to be looking for tomorrow morning? Something related to Suz Craig?” I asked mildly.

“And may I come?” demanded Marla.

Chris’s reply was matter-of-fact. “No, oh, no. And actually, Suz is – was – -the one who ordered this visit. It’s been planned for a while, but we were C waiting until Korman was called out on a delivery. Now we’ve got a perfect opportunity to go in. And it’s not what the Medical Management person will say she wants that matters. Or what I say, as head of Provider Relations. Since she’s a nurse and I’m a doctor, that’s how ACHMO gets around the patient confidentiality issue. But in this case what we say we want and what we’ll actually be after are two entirely different things.”

“What is it you’ll actually be after?” I inquired innocently. “And why are you telling us this?”

Chris tugged on his beard. “What we’ll be looking for are personal notes from Korman about the McCrackens’ suit. At least, that’s what Suz, and now the chief honchos at ACHMO, want us to be looking for. And those would be illegal for ACHMO to lift. The corporation is trying to cover itself, and it’s taking the opportunity of Korman being out of the way to be thorough. Frances will tell you about it. She’s going to write an article exposing the whole thing.”

“Frances is going to write an expose?” I said, wide-eyed.

“Imagine that,” commented Marla. “And will this expose help or hurt the no-good doctor in jail for murder?”

Frances scowled as she crushed out her cigarette and lit another. She muttered, “The timing could be a little better. The angle I’m going to be looking for is: Did Korman have a clue that Suz Craig had this raid on his records planned?”

“What do you get out of this, Chris?” I asked. “Don’t you still work for ACHMO? Won’t this article get you into trouble with them?”

“I want people to know what the HMO is up to,” he answered darkly. “You shouldn’t be able to just go through people’s files whenever you want. And Frances is going to keep my identity a secret. I can’t afford to lose my job.”

“But ACHMO wouldn’t have killed one of their own, would they?”

A pained expression wrinkled the heavy folds of his face at my question. “I don’t think so. Neither does anyone I’ve talked to. You can imagine, Goldy, all of our phones have been ringing off their hooks ever since the captain down at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department called ACHMO’s chief honcho in Minneapolis yesterday. One of my higher-ups at corporate called and said now was the time to go through Korman’s records, the way Suz planned. So that’s why they’re sending me in tomorrow – to find any personal notes Korman might have left in his office.” He paused and blinked at me. His eyelashes were so pale, they were invisible. “Everyone at ACHMO is convinced your husband beat Suz to death.”

“He’s my ex-husband,” I said quietly. Why did no one seem to remember this?

“My ex-husband, too,” said Marla defiantly. “So get your facts straight before you go off insulting us.”

Frances leaned affectionately toward Chris and whispered something in his ear. Tina fluffed the lace on her Icelandic Babsie blouse. And I sat back and thought that now I had one more thing for the sheriff’s department to ask John Richard: Know anything about Suz’s dirty little scheme to betray you?

“Look, Goldy,” Frances said, “there are two things we want to talk to you about. First of all, Patricia McCracken. Seen her lately?”

“As a matter of fact, I catered a party for her last night.”

“Is that where you got banged up?” I nodded and pretended not to notice the way the two Coreys stared at my face. I concentrated instead on the sky, where layers of pink cloud were again gathering in the west.

Frances persisted. “Now we all know Patricia got dumped by a doctor, then married a dentist. She doesn’t have the kind of money she used to, since there are at least fifty dentists in Aspen Meadow. Back in the old days she had a way of displaying the three things she bought with her divorce-from-the-doc settlement: a too-large diamond ring, a sapphire bracelet removed and perpetually left behind in exercise class, and an always-filthy white Triumph whose leather seats her son, Tyler, had smeared with fingerpaints when he was a toddler.”

“She just sold the Triumph to pay her lawyer’s retainer,” Marla interjected. “Everybody in town knows that.”

“Have you met Tyler?” Frances asked, unfazed. “He’s a five-year-old monster.”

“I know him,” Marla said. “He’s a brat.”

“Oh, no,” said Tina. They were her first words in a while. “He’s extremely creative. He used to help me with the hamsters. He just has a lot of energy, that’s all.”

Frances raised an eyebrow at me. “Yes, I’ve met Tyler,” I replied. “Arch baby-sat him a couple of times when Tyler was younger. But the kid was so hyper that Arch said he’d never go again, no matter how broke he was. Last night the McCrackens took Tyler over to a friend’s house rather than risk him wrecking their parry, which got wrecked anyway,” I muttered, thinking of the hockey free-for-all and my aching bones.

“Uh-huh,” replied Frances, bored. She fished in her purse again, pulled out a can of Jolt cola, and popped the top. She was never without several cans, and given its triple-caffeine hit, I doubted she ever slept at all. Now she took a long swig, then dragged on the cig. I wondered if her doing an article on HMOs would have any influence on her unhealthful habits. Somehow, I doubted it. The cigarette dangled from her mouth as she handed Chris the Jolt and pawed again through her purse for another notebook. She retrieved it, flipped a few torn and curled pages, and announced: “Okay, here it is. Our Patricia begged Dr. John Richard Korman to stick her in the hospital when the placenta previa was causing problems in the pregnancy. But ACHMO wouldn’t cover it. ACHMO said Patricia should rest right in her own snug little bed until she was ready to deliver. With all of the McCrackens’ money tied up in their heavily mortgaged house and Clark’s mostly off-again dentistry practice, the prospect of an open-ended hospital stay was enough to conjure up bankruptcy. So Patricia peddled her jewelry,” Frances added with relish. “The diamond ring and sapphire bracelet paid for a one-month hospital stay that ACHMO wouldn’t spring for plus babysitting for Tyler. She couldn’t sell the Triumph because she would have had to buy a new car when she had the baby, and the Triumph had depreciated too much even to give her a down payment. And little Tyler’s fingerpainting on the white seats didn’t exactly add to its value.”

Frances looked at me as if expecting praise. I looked back at her in silence. Marla rolled her eyes.

Frances sighed. “So she sold the jewelry and stayed in the hospital until she ran out of money. Then she checked into a low-cost suite near the hospital, you know about those? She put that on her credit card.” Frances raised her eyebrows, pressed her lips into a grim line, and flipped another page of her notes. “But it wasn’t enough. She lost the baby’ at seven months. Talk about bitter-that woman’s saliva could pickle a turkey.”

“Frances,” I chided. “You don’t have children. You can’t imagine the loss – “

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Patricia McCracken went nova. She sued Korman. She sued ACHMO. Her lawyers accepted the cases on contingency. Patricia took out a second mortgage on their Keystone condo and sold the Triumph after all, to pay the other legal fees. She didn’t care what she spent, as long as she brought John Richard Korman and ACHMO to their knees. You can’t sue an HMO for malpractice. So she’s trying to sock them with negligence, for even having Korman as a provider. What Patricia didn’t tell me, but I was able to find out from another source, is that our very same Mrs. P. McCracken was arrested last week for smashing flagstones in Suz Craig’s driveway.”

I sat up straight. “What?”

Marla murmured, “For heaven’s sake, Goldy, what good is it to have you married to a cop if he doesn’t even keep us supplied with news of local crimes?”

“Ah,” said Frances. “Marla and Goldy are finally interested. You know how angry that woman was? I’ll tell you. She was screaming about how if she couldn’t have her baby, some conniving coldhearted childless bitch’ ” – she glanced at her notes, “and I quote, ‘isn’t going to entertain with a big patio paid for with blood. With BLOOD!’ “

“But Patricia McCracken was in Keystone last week,” I pointed out.

“Not the whole week she wasn’t. Anyway, after the arrest, Suz Craig didn’t press charges. But Ms. Craig did get a restraining order against Patricia, who agreed to undergo psychological evaluation. She also agreed to enter grief therapy for people who’ve lost their babies before delivery, as soon as she returned from a planned trip to Keystone.” Frances slapped her notebook shut with a triumphant thwack.

“Except for the flagstone story, did you get all this from Patricia?” I asked.

“Of course I did,” Frances responded hotly.

“What the hell kind of reporter do you think I am? And I had to give Tyler all the candy corn I usually keep in my purse to keep him from crawling all over me.”

Marla said, “Candy corn? Is that the best you could do?”

Tina Corey tsked. To Tina’s brother I said, “How come ACHMO doesn’t recommend hospitalization for placenta previa?”

“I don’t make the rules, Goldy. Some MBA does. What ACHMO did wasn’t illegal, unfortunately.”

I turned back to Frances. “But if Patricia is suing, isn’t there some kind of gag order on her talking to you?”

“Gag order? Are you kidding?” Frances pulled out another cigarette and lit it with the end of the one she was finishing. “That woman is dying to have her story published in the most incendiary manner possible. The only reason she talked to me was that the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News weren’t interested. And coupled with what I know about ACHMO swooping into the Jerk’s office to search for notes on the case… well.” She inhaled in a satisfied manner. “ACHMO is going down.” She smirked at me.

I had the sudden feeling I needed to get home and check that Arch had survived his jail visit. “Well, we’ll see. Marla, are you ready?’” Without waiting for a reply I said, “We need to fly, Frances.”

“Hold on, you haven’t told me anything yet about Suz’s murder. I don’t want to talk to you just about Patricia McCracken.” Frances began to rummage in her purse again while Marla popped a last bite of pie in her mouth. “Look, I’ve got a few things to show you.”

“Frances, I can’t tell you anything. You must be able to understand that – “

Her nicotine-stained fingers held out three newspaper clippings. Reluctantly, I took them. Marla peered over my shoulder. Frances swiped the hair out of her left eye and demanded curtly, “Tell me if either of you know either of these guys in the first one.”

Two smiling men held up glasses of wine to the camera. MERITMED HMO CELEBRATES NEBRASKA SUCCESS. Well, bully for them, and I hoped they were quaffing an Omaha vintage. But there was no doubt that I knew one of the two men. In fact, I had seen him yesterday, up close and personal. The caption read: “Ralph Shelton, M.D., and Mark McCreary, Chief Executive Officer, MeritMed, observed the company’s success in the Cornhusker State.” I checked the date: May 14.

I tapped the blurry images. “Ralph Shelton used to work for ACHMO, now he works for MeritMed. So what?”

Frances blew smoke in a steady stream off the patio. “MeritMed has an office in Denver.” She squinted at me; I shook my head. “In March Ralph Shelton was fired from AstuteCare by Suz Craig.”

I looked at Chris. “You want to tell us a little more about those problems with firings?”

He shrugged. Marla demanded, “Do either of you know why Ralph was fired?”

Chris shook his head. “Not yet.” While Marla read the first article, I perused the second piece. It was much shorter, with no accompanying photograph. It was an announcement from a paper in Vail.

Dr. John R. Konnan will address the Colorado Association of Obstetricians tonight at 8 P.M. on “Postpartum Use of Antibiotics.” Summit Stag Hotel, across from Vail Valley Medical Center.

The article was older than the first, dated in early January.

“Frances,” I asked, perplexed, “why are you showing us this? I don’t know John Richard’s schedule. He goes to these conventions if it means he can ski and whoop it up. The only times I know what he’s up to is when we have to change our visitation arrangements with Arch.”

Airily, Frances waved this off. “Do you know your ex-husband’s relationship with a drug company named Bailey Products?”

“Yes,” interjected Marla, her voice sour. “John Richard travels around, or he used to travel around, touting their product. Something called Biocess. How do you know about it?” When Frances glanced at Chris, Marla pressed, “Do you know what happened to the Biocess endorsement money?”

Frances nodded. “Yeah, I found out from Ralph Shelton, who also used the stuff in his practice. Ralph’s old buddy John Richard Korman pushed Biocess from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. At least until recently. Check this out.”

I took the article Frances now proffered, and again Marla read over my shoulder. This was from a newspaper in Omaha, and like the first clipping, was also dated May 14. The headline ran: MEDICAL CONFERENCE ATTENDEES WARNED OF ANTIBIOTIC’S POSSIBLY LETHAL SIDE EFFECTS. I skimmed this one, too, which basically said that an HMO executive was warning his colleagues in other HMOs that in the course of their standard audits, his organization had found that Biocess had been linked to one death from liver failure, and several cases of negative side effects, plus higher costs postpartum. I skipped to the end of the article, where a Bailey Products spokesperson said that an Adverse Event Form had been filed with the FDA and that Bailey had put the use of Biocess on hold until they could do more studies of the antibiotic.

“Hmm,” I said noncommittally, and handed the article back to Frances.

She took it and said, “So Biocess, Korman’s much-loved designer antibiotic, was discovered to cause liver damage. And the cornucopia of goodies from Bailey Products available to John Richard Korman was suddenly empty.”

“There’s your answer to what caused that blip in income,” I told Marla.

Frances went on. “Now you two, of all people, should know Korman’s financial situation had become really, really bad. In fact, everything was about to come crashing down on his head. And think how much worse it would become if Suz Craig denied him a big fat bonus. Which she did.”

I said to Chris, “Why did Suz deny the bonus? Why would she?”

“Legitimately?” he asked with a frown. “We send out questionnaires to a sampling of a doctor’s patients. If we get even one serious complaint, the bonus is automatically denied. Or if a doctor refers patients to specialists too much, or if he refers too little, the bonus is denied. If he hasn’t seen enough patients or cut costs over the past year, the bonus is denied.”

“Now that’s what I call both a carrot and a stick,” Marla murmured.

I said, “Look, Frances, we both knew he was having money problems.” But truly, neither Marla nor I had known the full extent of the problems.

“Yeah, yeah,” Frances was saying. “And now ACHMO is going to raid him. And you know they’ll make him the fall guy for the McCracken mess if they find one scrap of paper they can use to blame !him for the whole thing.”

I asked Chris, “You mentioned that you’d be looking for what you called ‘personal notes’ that: John Richard might have made when you go in tomorrow. What kind of notes?”

Frances eagerly interjected: “They’re looking for anything John Richard might have written to cover himself, like ‘I told Patricia that my recommendation was for her to go into the hospital. But then I had to tell her that the HMO vetoed it.’ Or like ‘Told P. McCracken today that HMO had denied her hospital stay because they’re penny-pinchers. Cheap sons of bitches!’” she finished with a flourish. : I addressed Chris Corey. “Do you think there were such notes? And exactly who is going in looking besides you and the Medical Management lady?

Somebody who represents Suz’s interests in protecting ACHMO?”

Chris leaned forward. “Korman and ACHMO are not exactly on the same side on these suits, you know. If Korman kept notes to try to cover himself, ACHMO wants those notes very, very badly. If Korman criticized the HMO to a patient, he violated the terms of his contract with us. Worse for AstuteCare, if the HMO recommended bedrest at home while Dr. Korman claims he recommended a hospital stay or she’d lose that baby… Well, you can see what would happen to the malpractice suit, and how bad ACHMO would look. ACHMO needs to know what he’s thinking, what he’s done.” He shook his head glumly.

“Something else,” Frances said. “Chris tells me ACHMO was considering putting Korman on probation as a provider, just for being sued for malpractice.”

Marla erupted in a gale of laughter. As Frances lit yet another cigarette, I wondered how ACHMO was reacting to the Jerk being accused of murder.

Frances exhaled and went on. “Plus, if Korman was saying one thing to Patricia McCracken and another to ACHMO, then ACHMO claims they can put him out the door. And, believe me, if Korman got kicked off the ACHMO provider list, he’d have nothing, since he sold his practice to them. And the person deciding about his probation is Suz Craig. Or should I say was Suz Craig?” she concluded gleefully.

“Why don’t you talk to the police?” I asked with a glance at Chris. He shook his head sadly. “Why tell me?”

Frances quirked her bushy black eyebrows and, true to form, ignored my questions. Of course I already knew the answer: Because she wanted a story. “Listen,” she demanded, “did Korman give either you or Marla anything to keep? Like any files or packages or notes on the McCracken case? I won’t be able to nab ACHMO without something concrete.”

Again Marla burst out laughing. “He gives me any files, he knows I’m going to shred them. Goldy might smoke them in her barbecue.”

“Are you kidding?” I protested. “I’d put them through the vegetable shredder.”

Frances shook her head. “Okay, okay, it was worth a try. But think. You probably heard the story about Suz and John Richard arguing at the club Friday night. After what I just told you, wouldn’t it make sense that they argued about money? He says he needs his bonus, she says he’ll be lucky not to be cut off by ACHMO completely. Goldy, does Tom know yet what they were fighting about?”

“I’d like to stay married, thanks, Frances.” I’d had enough. “Okay, Marla, I really need to get, home. I’m worried about Arch.”

“I’m with you,” she said heartily, and took a last sip of coffee. We shook hands with Chris and Tina, thanked them for treating us to dessert, and started to leave.

“Hey! Hold on!” Frances cried as she nipped along behind us. “I need to know what Korman called about from jail!”

I finally managed to get Frances to let go of the Mercedes door handle by promising to call her if there were any momentous developments in the case of John Richard. “Momentous developments” to me meant anything the Furman County Sheriff’s Department public information officer was about to announce to all the newspapers, but I did not make this clarification to her.

Frances’s black coat billowed out behind her and the smoke from her cigarette whipped away as she strode back to the cafe for another Jolt cola. I would call her if I wanted to know something. But next time I’d be careful not even to mention Arch.

16

At home Macguire announced he was having trouble swallowing. His fever had abated somewhat, but he still would not eat a morsel. I made him some soft-serve strawberry Jell-O. After three bites he announced he needed to go back to sleep. Well, great.

I perused the contracts for the doll-show meals that Gail Rodine and I had worked out. Babsie-doll collectors were apparently as paranoid about getting mayonnaise on those itsy-bitsy plastic high heels as they were about having their dolls taken out of their original boxes. So the Babsie-bash organizers, despite the fact that they were expecting over two hundred people per day at the show, had only sold tickets for forty box lunches on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday a sit-down breakfast for the executive committee and helpers – twenty people – would be followed that evening by a concluding barbecue, for which the show organizers had sold sixty tickets. All the meals would be served on the LakeCenter patio picnic tables. A guard would be stationed at the back door so that not a smear of barbecue sauce could touch a single doll’s ponytail. Best of all was that Gail Rodine’s down payment would provide the first installment of Arch’s fall tuition at Elk Park Prep, an expense John Richard was supposed to cover. The likelihood of that happening was now as slender as spaghettini.

Arch, Tom, and I had takeout Chinese food that Tom had insisted on bringing home. I was both curious and apprehensive to hear the details of their afternoon. How did your father look in an orange suit..? Was he handcuffed.? And most important: Did he say he did it? But Arch mumbled that he didn’t want to talk about it. I was bothered that he was so very subdued. While we were doing the dishes, I brought Tom up to date on all I had learned from Frances and Chris Corey. He placed the last serving spoon in the dishwasher, washed his hands, and took some notes that he said he’d pass on to the D.A.‘s investigator. Then he set his notebook aside and told me that Arch hadn’t uttered a word all the way home.

“Did you see John Richard, too?” I asked him.

Tom shook his head. “Miss Goldy, you’d better prepare yourself. This is a classic lose-lose situation. Tomorrow John Richard may get out on bail. It’s a long shot, but… The county judge who’s coming up on rotation? Name’s Scott Taryton. Taryton’s stated publicly that he’s tired of all the mollycoddling women are getting these days. For mollycoddling, read rights.”

“Oh, don’t – “

Tom held up a fleshy palm. “Listen. A female judge down in Denver let a first-degree murder suspect out on thirty thousand dollars’ bond last summer. The woman had shot her husband, alleging abuse. Taryton blew a gasket when that judge granted bond. We’ve been waiting for some kind of retaliation from him. Setting bond for a man implicated in a murder – especially one stemming from a domestic dispute – would be just his cup of tea. John Richard could be it.”

“But isn’t there a law about not letting murder suspects out?”

Tom scowled. “Oh, sure. Murder suspects, according to state law, need to be held without bond until a hearing on the evidence. But after bail was granted last summer for that other suspect, the upholding of that particular state law has become fuzzy. Fuzzy enough for Taryton to do exactly what he wants.”

“God help us.”

“Taryton’s no friend to women,” Tom concluded grimly.

It was no wonder that I once again had trouble sleeping. The insomnia came despite an expert shoulder massage from Tom and a late-night phone check from Marla – did I want help from her for any of the doll-club events? I thanked her and said I would be fine; I needed the work to keep my mind occupied.

I fell asleep dreaming of dolls bearing trays of grilled burgers. At two I awoke with my heart hammering. Ram, ham, ham, John Richard used to hit me. He’d shake me and then strike my face with his fist I’d try to get away or fight back. No use. Ram. One leg, the other leg, my back. He was a great believer in symmetry.

I shuddered and crept out of bed. Then I took a shower to relieve my cramping muscles. I toweled off and listened for noise in the house. Had I awakened anyone this time? Apparently not. I dressed silently – sleep was now impossible – and suddenly remembered Arch’s advice: You should go out for a drive. That’s what you used to do when I was little. When I couldn’t sleep… .

Should I? Well, why not. I found my keys and purse and tiptoed out onto the back deck. Overhead, shreds of cloud drifted across a river of stars. The air was warm. A sudden bleat! bleat! accompanied a rustling of leaves. A wave of panic swept over me. Then I saw a dozen elk moving slowly under the pine trees. It was a one-in-ten year for the big animals.

I sat in the van and wondered how long a drive I needed to make to get tired enough to go back to sleep. I didn’t have anyplace to go. But even as I turned the key in the ignition I knew where I was headed.

My van engine sounded loud on Main Street. All the stores, of course, were dark, from Darlene’s Antiques & Collectibles to the Doughnut Shop. A breeze washed through the aspen trees lining the street. Cottonwood Creek splashed and rumbled, while a cloth sign advertising Aspen Meadow Barbecue flapped like a forgotten flag. Gone were the rows of motorcycles ordinarily parked at acute angles in front of the Grizzly Bear Saloon on summer evenings. They had roared off into the night hours earlier, and the saloon was engulfed in darkness.

The van chugged past the spotlight trained on the waterfall emptying out of Aspen Meadow Lake. The cormorants had abandoned their perch, and I wondered fleetingly where the birds spent their nights. The LakeCenter roof twinkled with a string of Christmas lights that our recreation district board had insisted would give the place a festive look year-round. They’d been right.

The small shopping center housing one of our two grocery stores was also dark, except for the Aspen Meadow Pastry Shop, where, I was sure, the ever-industrious Mickey Yuille was making cinnamon rolls for his Monday-morning customers. Perhaps Brandon was there keeping him company.

At the entrance to the country club, a dark car sat under the streetlight. Its door read MOUNTAIN SECURITY, but no one was inside. Perhaps the fellow had succumbed to sleep and was lying across the front seat. I was tempted to find out how ticked off he would be if I blasted him with my horn.

I turned onto Jacobean and glanced at the clock on my dashboard. Eleven minutes from our house to Suz’s, no traffic. The streetlights cast a neon glow on the asphalt and all the mown lawns. The yards were perfect except for Suz’s. There, mounds of topsoil lay untouched, and yellow police ribbons were pulled taut around the crime scene and the house. Even though it was only one day after the murder, the sheriff’s department could not afford to put deputies in front of the house. I pulled up slowly by the ditch and glanced again at my dashboard clock. Thirty-two minutes after two. John Richard’s place onto Kells Way was three blocks in one direction, then another two around a curvy road that cut a circle through the club’s residential area, then two more blocks in the direction of the golf course. His house was on the downhill side of the road leading to the course. I wondered if there were police ribbons around it, too.

When my van accelerated noisily down Jacobean, I saw a curtain being drawn back in the Tollifers’ front room. A yellow trapezoid of light framed a figure peering out. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with insomnia tonight.

A scant six minutes later I turned onto Kells Way. Here the streetlights were tucked into the tops of lodgepole pines. The light that fell on the asphalt shifted and swayed with the movement of the trees. Six minutes to the street sign-but how long to his driveway? I let the van drift down to the curb in front of the mammoth mock-Tudor residence that John Richard occupied all by himself. It took only a few seconds. I cut the engine and rolled down the window. Was I feeling tired? Not even remotely. So much for Arch’s prescription for insomnia.

The wind picked up. Wind chimes on a nearby deck swirled and tinkled. The sound filtered through the rush of clicking aspen leaves. I breathed in the sweet summer air and wondered if John Richard had a window in his cell.

Okay, now, think. If John Richard had left Suz’s house around one A.M., as he claimed, then he could have been back at his place before one-ten. Say he I went inside. Had a few more drinks. Decided to go back and finish their argument. This was a possible reconstruction of events, but not a likely one, given his violent way of finishing things once he’d started them.

My neck stiffened and I tried to get comfortable. The pain in my shoulders had subsided to a mild ache. I reached for a tablecloth I kept stored in a plastic bag behind the passenger seat. I shoved aside the earphones and wires of Macguire’s Walkman and pulled out the damask cloth. Tucking it around me, I tried to envision another way of timing-Friday night’s events.

No matter how much other people may not have liked Suz, John Richard was the one who’d been with her, arguing with her at the club, possibly about his terrible financial situation. Say he’d fought with Suz at her home, left her dead or near dead, then had gone back to his house around three or three-thirty A.M. This, I thought, was a more likely scenario. It fit the way he acted. Once he was enraged, it could have taken him several hours to work his way through it. What had Tom said? Near as they can figure, Suz Craig died between three and five … Rigor hadn’t set in when the medics arrived. If John Richard left Suz sometime after three A.M., then everything fell into place.

The breeze died; the rustle of leaves and pine needles stopped. In the distance a car rumbled around the club’s circle. A wide swath of light swept the end of Kells Way. Then there was sudden quiet.

Say John Richard’s fight with Suz had gone on and on. She screamed and contradicted him. The argument became violent, with pots and pans being used for weapons. Then Suz finally got the usual bam bam bam. Then more arguing and maybe another horrible whack. Then he left in a huff, with her hurt and screaming. She would have cried for him not to leave her in such a state. Then she stumbled outside for help, fell into the ditch, and died. All this would explain why rigor hadn’t set in until just after seven A.M.

There was a noise on the street that was not from a tree, a car, a herd of elk, a sprinkler system, or a set of wind chimes. My heart stopped. Someone whispered with loud insistence.

“Hey, man! Aren’t you done yet?” My spinal column turned to ice. The voice was about fifty feet away, on the same side of the street where I sat in my van. Whoever this was, he or she or they must have come along after I’d parked my vehicle, during that ten minutes when I’d been sitting deep in thought.

I cut my eyes both ways, without moving, but could make out nothing. Kids sneaking home after hours? Car thieves? Burglars? If a couple of guys were going to rob a private residence, I didn’t care. I just didn’t want them to add assault of caterer to their list of crimes.

“No, man, I’m not done!” came the urgent whispered reply. “This fluorescent stuff is dripping all over the damn place! Plus, I’m almost out! So hand me another can and shut up!”

There was grunting and clinking. “I’m tired of doing a good deed, man!” was the bitter response. “That security guy comes this way right on the hour!”

“I told you to shut your mouth, or the neighbors will get him here even earlier!”

“But it’s almost three!” his partner insisted. “He’s going to be here any second! We need to split! Just leave it!”

My dashboard clock said 2:52. Eight minutes until the security guy showed up … if he did. Ever so slowly, inch by inch, I leaned forward to look out the windshield. If I could see them, I could figure out how to drive off without incident. Kells Way was a dead end. If these two guys – whoever they were, whatever their intentions – were in front of me, I could rev the ignition, throw the van into reverse, and zip backward up the street. If they were behind me on Kells, I could make a U-turn and accelerate across someone’s driveway to get past them.

Spotlights shone down on the homes, driveways, and lawns on each side of the street. John Richard’s house boasted spotlights above the garage that did not quite illuminate the two darkened stories of the rambling, beamed structure. Nothing out of place appeared on his blacktop. Then I noticed several cans that looked as if they’d been discarded to one side of the driveway. Farther over, almost to the stone entryway that was topped by an expansive burgundy awning, I could see the bottom of a ladder. Why would John Richard have left a ladder out? He hated doing home repairs.

Inching forward slowly in my seat, I strained my eyes to see more. A figure was moving through the trees. Then I made out someone on the ladder. A car door slammed, and the movement under the trees abruptly stopped.

“Hurry up, man! What’re you doing, getting high on fumes?”

This whisper came from high on the ladder. From the same direction as the car door, a motor started up. Someone was going somewhere. The guy under the trees scrambled up the ladder rungs, and I heard the unmistakable hiss-s-s of a spray-paint can.

It was the country-club vandals.

The car that had started around the circle above Kells revved and moved. Was it the security man? I couldn’t tell. Headlights coursed along the left side of the street, the dead end, then John Richard’s house.

One of the vandals was at the bottom of the ladder. The other was at the top. Young men, lean and tall, dressed in dark colors. In the approaching headlights a dripping, crooked word painted in brilliant yellow appeared above them. KILLER

17

I shivered again. Perspiration sprouted on my forehead and palms. The vandals who had caused so much property damage in the club area were spray-painting their verdict on John Richard’s house. Or maybe it was something they’d seen. Well, I’d forgotten the cellular phone and couldn’t call the cops. So these guys would have to make their point to law enforcement on their own. I was getting out of here.

I pumped the accelerator, turned the car key. The motor strained, didn’t turn over, died. I’d flooded the engine. I turned the key again, didn’t pump the gas. This time the engine whined and died again. Footsteps thudded across John Richard’s lawn. Dammit all, anyway.

Frantically, I rolled up my window. But I couldn’t reach across in time to close the one on the passenger side. A lanky figure in a black ski mask pulled up the lock, wrenched open the door, and scrambled in. I could smell the sweat on his body. They’re kids, I told myself. Don’t panic. Behind the black mask the vandal’s eyes glared menacingly at me. He grabbed my upper right arm.

“Get out of the car,” he hissed angrily. “And shut up.”

“Let go,” I said evenly, tugging away from him. “I was just sitting here because I went out for a drive – “

His fingers bit into my arm. “Shut up and get out.”

“Stop pulling on me and I will,” I replied in a quiet, nonthreatening voice that I hoped didn’t betray how furiously my heart was hammering. To my astonishment, the figure in black loosened his grip slightly. I shed the tablecloth and hopped awkwardly onto the street.

“Watch her,” Vandal One ordered Vandal Two. In the streetlight I could see Vandal Two was brandishing a tire iron. “I gotta check her van,” the first guy said. “See if she’s got some kind a weapon or night-vision camera in there.”

“That’s ridiculous, of course I don’t,” I snapped. “I’m just a caterer.” I strained to see up the street. The passing car had disappeared without turning down Kells Way. Where was the security man?

“Oh, yeah?” said Vandal Two, a smirk in his voice. He twirled the tire iron inexpertly. “Kinda early for fixin’ breakfast, wouldn’t you say?”

“Listen, guys. The man who lives here, the guy who was arrested? He’s my ex-husband.”

“Really,” said Vandal One. He spat. “What, this guy’s in jail, you’ve got an old key, you figure you’ll go in and pick up a few things while he’s not around?”

“No. That’s not why I’m here.”

Vandal One leered ominously. “Then why are you here?”

When in doubt, tell the truth. “I couldn’t sleep. I went out for a drive.”

Vandal Two’s eyes sparked behind the mask. He raised the tire iron. “You’ll sleep if I knock you over the head.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could pull them back. “Hey, tough guy! I thought you were so worried about the security man driving up!” This warning earned me a rude shove on the shoulder. I stepped back and said, “Why’re you, here?”

Vandal Two stabbed a finger at the house. “Can’t you read? We know he did it.”

In the darkness it was almost impossible to see the ugly yellow word. “Ah. Killer. How do you know that?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know. We see lots of things.”

I shrugged. But if these two knew anything about the attack on Suz … “How – “

“Wait a minute,” exclaimed Vandal One, “you said you’re a caterer? I read about you.”

I said mildly, “And you are… ?” When he didn’t answer, I went on. “So why are you so certain my ex-husband killed her?”

“You think we have time to tell you anything?” , erupted Vandal Two. To his compatriot he urged, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“I’m married to a cop,” I announced hastily. “If he catches you, he’ll ream both of you out so bad i you’ll get a life sentence for shoplifting when this is over. Both of you,” I added, stalling for time. Where in the world was that security guy, anyway? “But if you’ll talk to me about why you think my ex-husband is guilty – “

The guy with the tire iron waggled it in my face. “I know why you’re here. Insomnia, my ass. That doc goes down, I’ll bet you inherit this house. You’re too shy to gloat over your loot in the daylight, but you just couldn’t sleep until you got a good look at your new place.”

I was tempted to ask: Just how much of that paint did you inhale, anyway? But there was no telling these two anything. No telling them that, come those circumstances, Arch would inherit. Not that my son would want this enormous place. Not that my son would want anything besides having his parents alive and well and out of jail. But I needed to know if they had seen something Friday night. And where was the security man? Why did no neighbors seem to hear me out here arguing with vandals?

I made a decision. The vandals probably wouldn’t hurt me, despite the pop Vandal Two had given my shoulder. These two were cowards, which was why they defaced other people’s property at night. Still, they were angry young cowards, so I would have to be careful.

I took a tentative step toward my van. “I want to go home. Are you going to tell me why you think my ex-husband murdered that woman? Or do you want the cops swarming all over here tomorrow with their fingerprint equipment? Actually,” I said offhandedly, “they’ll probably do that, anyway. A murder investigation is a whole different ball game from cleaning up graffiti, guys.”

Vandal Two lifted his chin mockingly. “You’re just dying to know, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I am.” Vandal One pressed forward. “We saw him,” he said, his mouth so suddenly close to mine, I trembled in spite of myself. His breath smelled of potato chips. “The Korman guy left that night in a white Jeep. He’s gone two minutes and then comes back in the Jeep, only slower this time.”

“What time did he do this leaving and returning? Where were you when you saw all this?”

“Oh, bitch, what do you think I am – Rodney King with a video camera?”

“Rodney King didn’t videotape – “

“Shut up,” growled Vandal One. “The doc leaves in his Jeep. About ten minutes later he drives up again, but the lights are off.”

“What do you mean, the lights are off? And was it two minutes or ten minutes? Are you sure it was Korman? Was it a white Jeep or a silver one? He has one of each.”

“Look, it was a white Jeep. And it happened.

He drove away fast and came back slowly, with no .I lights. He knocked on the side door and what’s-her-name yelled at him a little bit. Then she let him in.”

Vandal Two hissed, “Suck it up, man, somebody’s coming! We gotta split!”

The tire iron clanged to the pavement. The: boys bolted. I peered up Kells Way into the glare of headlights. The approaching car was not the security car. The driver stopped, opened a mailbox, and stuffed in a newspaper. This person didn’t bring security; he brought the news. He would be no help. Spooked by some ambushes in Denver, the newspaper delivery folks now wouldn’t stop if you were bleeding your guts out in six feet of snow. But I didn’t need this person’s assistance.

I whirled and peered into the shifting light of the yards. The vandals had vanished. They had found a magical way of disappearing through people’s property. From what vantage point had they watched Suz Craig’s house the night she died? The two guys hadn’t seen me drive down Kells Way. Perhaps they’d been vandalizing the club road signs on an adjoining block when I’d parked.

The metallic slap of mailboxes being opened and closed punctuated the night air. There was no sign of the security man and no sound of a pickup truck or some other vehicle being driven away. Where had the vandals gone? I had no idea.

It was time to boogie. By the time I drove past the security car with its still-dozing watchman and arrived home, the dashboard clock read three-forty-five. Time flies when you’re avoiding insomnia. I shivered my way into pajamas, eased into bed, and slid my arms around Tom’s warm body. No use waking him. A reasonable morning hour would be a better time to tell him all that had happened.

But I’d awakened him anyway. He turned over and mumbled, “Where in the world have you been, Miss G.?” I shushed him gently and curled in closer. But he took my cold hands in his warm ones. “I went downstairs looking for you… then I saw the van was gone. Honestly, I’ve been a wreck.”

I wove my cold legs through his deliciously warm ones. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a drive. I wanted to … to time the driving distances over by Suz Craig’s. How long from Suz’s house to John Richard’s, you know. But” – I hugged him tight – “I ended up interrupting a pair of vandals spray-painting John Richard’s house. You’re not going to believe it, but these guys were painting the word ‘Killer.’ So I talked to them – “

“What?” Tom extricated himself from my embrace, threw off the sheets, and turned on the lamp. Soon he was dressed in a terry robe and had one of our zillion leaky Biocess pens poised over his trusty spiral notebook. He said, “Would you care to make a quick statement, Mrs. Schulz?”

I sighed, then told him all about the vandals on Kells Way. I included their rude shove and their nonvideotaped account of how they’d seen John Richard drive away from Suz’s house in his Jeep that night and then return very slowly, lights out. “They thought I was in front of John Richard’s tonight so that I could steal something from inside the house. Or to gloat over inheriting the place.”

Tom tapped his notebook. “You didn’t hear them drive away? But yet you say they were afraid of the country-club security man. Who never showed up.”

“Maybe they hid in their car or their truck,” I offered.

He scowled. “Maybe. More likely, they’re teenagers who live right there somewhere. They probably took off on foot or on bike, figuring they could come back later for their paint and ladder.” After a moment of pondering, he turned off the light and pulled me close.

I murmured, “I’m sorry I worried you.” His breath brushed my ear. “Please don’t do any more middle-of-the-night neighborhood prowling, okay? Can we get you a prescription for sleeping pills? It’d be safer.”

“No, thanks.” I hesitated. “Tom. It takes almost ten minutes to get back to John Richard’s house. These guys couldn’t tell me if it was ten minutes or two minutes between when he roared off and when he returned. And why would he drive back so soon? He never recovers from a fit of temper that fast.”

“Haven’t a clue. I’m going back to sleep. But I want a promise from you. A couple of promises, actually.”

“Name them.” “Miss G. You seem determined to poke your nose into this. Maybe you doubt Korman killed the woman. Maybe you’re trying to help Arch. But you’re snooping around. Don’t disagree.” When I nodded, he went on. “Okay, promise me: You won’t go down to that ACHMO office. You won’t break into John Richard’s office and go through his files. You won’t break into Suz Craig’s house or John Richard’s house. We – Official law enforcement – will go to the offices and interview the people. We will go through the files, search the houses, all that. Okay?”

“What can I do?”

“Do what you always do. Talk to people. Feed them your great food. And try to stay out of trouble. Promise?”

I sighed. “You drive a hard bargain, cop.” He sighed too. “Let’s just say I love my wife. And I want to keep her alive.”

The next morning, Monday, I was sleeping so deeply when Tom left that he didn’t bring me coffee. I didn’t even hear Arch go out, although he left me a note taped to the computer saying he’d be back from his friend Todd’s house by dinnertime. I banged around the kitchen making espresso and toasting homemade bread. I started a sponge for the brioche I would use for the doll people’s box-lunch sandwiches. No other catering assignments loomed, so I checked that I had the right smoked meats and cheeses, plus some almonds, lemons, and seedless raspberry jam. I wanted to start experimentation to make my own Linzer tarts. I reread the last line in Arch’s note: You promised to help Dad, Mom.

Right. Help him without visiting the ACHMO office, without breaking into Suz’s or the Jerk’s house, without sneaking into the Jerk’s office to go through files. How about this: I could visit John Richard’s office and not poke into files. Couldn’t I?

I put in a call to Tom’s phone and got his machine. Any leads on the vandals? I wanted to know. Or on anything else? Call me back. After I finished breakfast – crunchy toasted Anadama bread thickly slathered with butter and apple butter – I checked on Macguire. He was sleeping. I felt his forehead. The fever seemed to have broken.

His yellow-flecked brown eyes opened wide when I withdrew my hand and he groaned. “What’s up?”

“Not much. I just wanted to check on you. Any chance you’d want to walk over to John Richard’s office with me in a little bit? ReeAnn will probably be there.”

It’s amazing how energizing infatuation can be. With much groaning, Macguire roused himself, showered, shaved, and dressed. When he shuffled into the kitchen, his white cotton T-shirt and dark jeans hung so limply on his emaciated frame that I found myself begging. After all, it’s my profession to feed people.

“Please, Macguire. Please eat something. Let me fix you some juice and toast. People love my homemade bread and – “

“No. Thanks.” He surveyed the kitchen dispiritedly, then looked at my anxious face and relented. “Okay. I’ll have a little glass of juice and a piece of bread. Don’t toast it, though. Toast is too crusty. Hurts my throat.”

He swallowed less than a quarter-cup of juice and nibbled a third of a slice of crustless homemade bread. At least it was something.

When we walked through the door of John Richard’s spacious, all-beige office fifteen minutes later, ReeAnn Collins was in a state, and it wasn’t a good one. Holding the lengthy phone cord in front of the marble counter, she paced across the deep-pile carpet, complained into the receiver, and gestured furiously with her free hand. Her buxom figure was shown off to splendid advantage by a size-too-small white T -shin and clinging black biking shorts. Her curly black ponytail and long, pouffed bangs bobbed as she bent from time to time to whack at magazines that spilled from the beige-painted tables.

“First Judy calls in sick. She’s a nurse, but she can’t tell me what kind of sickness she has. So here I am, left to do everything, and then the sheriff’s depanment calls and says don’t touch anything. They’re on their way.” She nodded us distractedly toward the waiting-area chairs. “Then ACHMO calls,” she continued into the phone, “and says don’t give anything to the sheriff’s department.” I sat down and wondered, as I always did, how hugely pregnant women could ever extract themselves from these deep, soft couches once their appointment time arrived. ReeAnn stormed on. “ACHMO says the files belong to them, and if I give the sheriff’s department anything, I’m in deep yogurt. So then they say they}re on their way.” She set her heart-shape, usually quite pretty face into a pout as she listened to the advice from the other end of the line. She examined her black-and- purple-painted nails and sighed. “‘Okay. Bring your bike rack. Noon.” She slammed the phone down and examined us bitterly. “What do you want?”

Macguire tucked his chin into his neck and gabbled something unintelligible. Poor kid. Aside from ReeAnn’s plentiful figure and pretty face, I couldn’t figure the attraction. Maybe it was the black-and-purple nails.

“ReeAnn,” I reassured her, “we’re here to help you. You see, I talked to somebody from ACHM after church yesterday, and after what happened to Ms. Craig – “

She stabbed a dark fingernail at Macguire. “Are you the one who told the cops I didn’t like Ms. Craig? Because they came to my place yesterday, you know.”

“Er, I, no – ” Macguire stammered. “I guess I – “

Before he could continue his feeble protests, ReeAnn pointed the fingernail at me. “Uh-huh. And you, Mrs. Ex-Korman Number One, exactly how’re you going to help me? My boss is behind bars and the cops think I hated his girlfriend? What’re you going to do, hire a temporary nurse to come in and help out? Call all the expectant women and recommend other doctors to them? You going to loan me some money from your catering biz when I don’t get paid this week?”

“ReeAnn, you’re upset. Please call me Mrs. Schulz. Or Goldy.”

“I know,” she said spitefully. “You’re here about money. That’s what Mrs. Ex-Korman Number Two is always calling about.”

I replied calmly, “I’m not interested in money, or at least only marginally. Listen, do you know why the ACHMO people are coming today?”

She sighed dramatically and looked away. “I never know. One week it’s ‘Let’s see how you’re billing ultrasounds.’ Then they pull out ten records of women who’ve had ultrasounds. If one of the patients happened to say, ‘Oh, my, I’d like to have an ultrasound because I’m worried about the baby,’ and the doc writes that in the woman’s file, you can kiss your reimbursement good-bye.”

I said, “Hmm.” Chris Corey had explained that the HMO came in to the doctors’ offices to check billing, but I still didn’t know the reason. “Why does what the patient says about the ultrasound matter?”

“Because,” she supplied impatiently, “if you want to be sure ACHMO is going to pay for the ultrasound, there has to be a medical reason for the test. And the ultrasound has to be the doctor’s idea, understand? Even if it’s the patient’s idea, we have to dress it up like the doctor figured her life was in danger if she didn’t have an ultrasound. Otherwise, ACHMO doesn’t fork over the money for the ultrasound. Understand? Welcome to the world of managed care, Mrs. Ex-Korman Number One.”

This was going to be fun, I could tell. The phone rang. ReeAnn dealt with the problem – a woman seeking an appointment – by referring her to another doctor. Then she turned back to us.

“So what do you two want, anyway? To talk about ACHMO coming? I don’t have time.”

I said bluntly, “Do you think my ex-husband killed Ms. Craig?”

My question seemed to surprise her. She pursed her lips and opened her eyes wide. Macguire watched her in enamored awe. Then she reached back to twirl her ponytail while she considered. “He could have,” she replied noncommittally.

When she didn’t say more, I prodded, “How about Patricia McCracken? Do you think she could have lost her temper with Suz Craig?”

ReeAnn snorted. “That’s just as likely.” The phone rang again. “Listen, I’m sorry, I really don’t have time to chat – ” I waved to her to answer the phone. ReeAnn disposed of this caller by advising her to give the pharmacy a ring.

“Where’s Patricia McCracken’s file?” I asked as soon as the secretary was not-so-ready to chat again.

Her laugh was derisive. “You gotta be kidding if you think I’m going to show you a patient file.”

“I don’t want you to show me anything,” I replied patiently. “What you might want to do is try to find something. It’s what the ACHMO people are going to be here looking for. It could be a letter, a note, something about the McCracken suit. If John Richard wrote a few lines to himself about Patricia McCracken’s care and the ACHMO people take them, it will adversely affect me and my son. John Richard could be found at fault in the malpractice suit and we’ll lose financial support. Actually, what I really wanted was for Patricia to win her suit.”

ReeAnn shook her head vigorously; the ponytail bobbed. “You’ve already lost financial support,” she said scathingly. “He was thinking you were making so much money from your food business, he didn’t have to pay anymore. And then when Bailey Products dumped Biocess … It’s been awful. And he works so hard,” she whined. “And what’ll happen to me if they try him for killing her?”

I took a deep breath. I’d always suspected that ReeAnn and John Richard were cut from the same self-centered cloth. Now I was sure of it. But had ReeAnn and the Jerk been romantically involved in the few months she had been working for him? Could ReeAnn have been jealous of Suz Craig? Jealous enough to kill?

“My son,” I said with a smile, “is extremely upset about his dad being in jail. So I promised him I’d ask around to see if there was anything to clear him, okay?”

“Uh, ReeAnn, remember?” Macguire interjected feebly. “Remember when you mentioned you were involved in a project with the HMO? Something to do with Ms. Craig? Remember, you called her Ms. Crank? That’s probably why the police came to visit you.”

“That woman was a first-class bitch,” ReeAnn spat. “And that’s exactly what I told those cops. I did call her Ms. Crank. And you know what Ms. Crank’s favorite saying was, don’t you?” Macguire and I looked at her expectantly. She raised her voice and trilled, ” ‘I don’t do – I delegate.’ “

“Oh, yes,” I mumbled, remembering that that was precisely what Suz had said to me regarding the preparation of food for her business lunch. “I guess I did know that. But she did help me with the dishes when I worked for her, and she could have delegated that – “

“Cheap!” ReeAnn fumed. “I finally told her, ‘Don’t tell me to do another thing, okay? Delegate somewhere else! I don’t work for you!’ “

“What exactly did she want you to – “

I was interrupted by a knock at the door, followed by the entrance of Brandon Yuille. Today he wore a loose blue oxford-cloth shirt with no tie, navy pants, and Top-Siders.

“Hey-ho, we’re here!” Brandon’s cheery greeting was more along the lines of How soon will Christmas dinner be ready than This is Eliot Ness, get up against the wall. “Hey, Goldy! What’re you doing’ here? I forgot to ask you yesterday, did you try that Thai sauce I gave you?” His whole attitude was much brighter than when I’d seen him after church. Behind him, however, Chris Corey appeared even glummer than he had the day before.

“Ah, no,” I replied, “not yet.”

“Well, then, why’re you here?” Brandon asked again, still smiling.

“I’m just looking for some of Arch’s, er, homework papers.”

“In August? Isn’t school out?”

“They’ve been missing for a long time.”

ReeAnn slapped a pile of files down on the counter and shot me a knowing look of exasperation. “Well, boys, here’s a batch of D & Cs for you to ; look through. Did I guess right?”

“Nah, we need C-sections,” Brandon announced brightly. “They’ve been missing even longer than homework papers.” His laugh was infectious, and I found myself smiling in spite of myself. To ReeAnn he said, “Should we start in there?” He motioned down the hall to the filing office.

“That sounds just great.” ReeAnn didn’t do sarcasm well. “As if I had some choice, right? I’ve got to stay here and do the phones.”

“Here’s the list of the files we’ll be looking for,” Chris said meekly as he squeezed his pudgy body behind the counter and consulted a clipboard. He waited a moment until Brandon was out of earshot. I nipped over to the counter. “Did you do a dummy duplicate of Patricia McCracken’s file?” Chris asked ReeAnn urgently.

“Yes,” she whispered back. “Just the way you told me. I’ve got the original up here.” She pointed to a shelf. The phone rang; she snatched it.

“What?” she squawked. “It’s your turn to bring lunch! You think I can handle one more thing today? Forget it! Tuna sandwiches!” Then she slammed down the phone. It didn’t sound as if she got along very well with whoever it was.

I said, “Chris! I thought you wanted ACHMO to be caught trying to take the file!”

He harumphed and readjusted his capacious belt. “If Brandon takes the dummy with McCracken’s name on it before the police get here,” he whispered impatiently, “then they’ll still be committing an illegal act. And with ReeAnn keeping the real file, your husband’s lawyer can still have the information he needs.”

“He’s my ex-husband, okay?” I hissed fiercely. “And I thought you said it would be a Medical Management lady coming here today. What has Human Resources got to do with checking billing? Does Brandon ever do that?”

Chris shrugged grandly. “They’re scared.” And then, balanced precariously on his cast, he lumbered off after Brandon.

“Don’t remove anything, fellas!” I called after them. “My husband’s a cop and I’ll tell on you!” To ReeAnn I said softly, “The sheriff’s department is on its way?”

“Supposedly.” She eyed the telephone on the marble counter, as if debating which friend she should complain to next.

“Uh, I guess we’ll be going,” Macguire announced. His face was as sallow as I’d seen it since he’d been living with us. Despite his words, however, he didn’t seem to have the energy or the will to move.

“ReeAnn,” I whispered as I scooped up the back copies of Architectural Digest she’d spewed on the floor during her first manic phone call. “Can we please talk for a few minutes? It’s for Arch.”

“I don’t know where his homework is.”

“Please.”

“I have to answer the phone.” “I know you were romantically involved with my ex-husband,” I improvised. When I said this, ReeAnn shot Macguire a withering look. “It’s okay,” I added.

“I’m involved with somebody else right now, not an old geezer. And I was with him all Friday night. My new boyfriend can vouch for me, and I told the cops that, too.”

“Fine.” I tried to think. “Just tell me – What was Suz Craig working on that she was trying to delegate? Delegate to you, I mean? It seems odd she’d ask you to do work for her, when she had a whole army of secretaries to choose from at ACHMO.”

ReeAnn snorted again, her trademark. “I’m not a secretary, I’m an assistant. And the stuff Ms. Crank had me do was penny-ante. ‘Make our dinner reservations.’ ‘Call Aspen Meadow Nursery. Get them to come out and fix my steps.’ “

When she seemed reluctant to go on, I prompted, “That’s it?”

“Well. Not exactly.” She bit the inside of her cheek, then confided, “It’s what John Richard told me she tried to delegate to him that was really weird, if you want to know the truth.”

“The truth would be great.” She leaned close. “She wanted him to put some stuff – I guess it was papers or something – in a safe place, somewhere the ACHMO people couldn’t find them.”

“What stuff? How do you know it was papers? The kind of papers they’re trying to find now?” Suddenly I remembered what John Richard had said to me on the phone: Suz had some kind of delicate material… . What material? I’d thought it related to Ralph Shelton, but was that wrong? “Are you sure it was papers?”

She shrugged indifferently. “Who knows?” The phone rang. ReeAnn answered it and started to redirect another patient. To my surprise Brandon Yuille suddenly appeared at my side. He flashed me his movie-star smile.

“Goldy? May I talk to you for a minute?”

“More Thai sauce?” I said brightly. “Please. Just right outside the front door. Just for a sec, if you don’t mind.”

I walked outside with him. I’d tell him what he wanted to know – maybe – if he’d answer a couple of questions, too. I made my voice pleasant. “Brandon, I was wondering… Was Suz Craig as hard to work for as some people say?”

His fine-featured face bloomed pink. “Some people thought she was… difficult.” His tone grew guarded.

“So, what people are we talking about?” He brushed my question away. “Goldy, there’s something important I need to ask you, but it’s… delicate.” Man, they all loved that word, like they had to rinse out some lingerie. “You know how folks going through a divorce will sometimes hide assets from each other? Like money?”

I laughed. “Of course I do. Who’s getting the divorce?”

He squirmed. “I … can’t say. But you know about hiding assets?”

“Sure. One person in a marriage hides assets, the other gets to hire a forensic accountant, as I had to do, to go through the books of the person doing the hiding. Sometimes you find the stash and sometimes you don’t. Lucky for me, I did.”

Brandon’s eyes, ordinarily deep brown, turned almost black. His voice became painfully earnest. “I promise, Goldy, if John Richard has given you anything to hide… we … I … need to know.”

I almost laughed again. I imagined a list of intimate – make that delicate – questions: Have you had cosmetic surgery? Do you dye your hair? How much do you weigh? which could develop into How much money do you make? Now, apparently, to that invasive list I could add: Has your abusive ex-husband given you anything incriminating to hide?

“Brandon,” I said with equal earnestness as the phone pealed again inside, “if my ex-husband had given me a bald eagle that he had shot and stuffed, I wouldn’t tell the ACHMO honchos.”

Brandon Yuille, my foodie buddy, turned on his heel and strode away. I immediately felt bad. I liked Brandon; I didn’t want to alienate him. From inside the office ReeAnn said, “What? Who? Yeah, she’s here. Goldy!”

When I went back into the office, Chris Corey had not reappeared and Macguire was still slumped in one of the chairs looking catatonic. As soon as Brandon found out the call wasn’t for him, he brushed past ReeAnn on his way back into the file rooms.

“Man!” ReeAnn exclaimed, gesturing with the phone. “What is his problem? Anyway, the phone’s for you.”

I sighed and walked back to the counter. “Yes?” I said tentatively into the receiver.

“Miss G.” Tom’s warm, calm, reassuring voice. “I had a feeling you’d be over there. Bad news, I’m afraid.”

“Go ahead.” “I warned you. The judge did it. John Richard made bail. He’ll be out in two hours, probably back up in Aspen Meadow by noon.”

“No.”

“Yes. Now listen, you’re a witness in this matter. He’s been warned not to talk to any witnesses, but you know how poorly this guy follows directions. If he shows up at the house, or does anything to try to contact you, you ignore him, understand? Call us. We don’t want this case ruined before it even starts.”

“Okay.” My voice was on novocaine.

“Goldy? Don’t want to press a point here, but you’re in danger. You found the body. You saw him drive up with the flowers. You’re the main person who can testify about his physical abusiveness. He’s in some kind of mental state, and he may just want to rid himself of you altogether. Is Macguire there? I thought we agreed you weren’t going to go poking around through files.”

“I’m just here at the office for a few minutes. And I’m not doing any poking through files. The people poking are the ACHMO folks. Are your people on their way? ReeAnn said they were.”

“They should be there in five minutes. Be sure you’re in your kitchen in two hours, okay? I’m warning you, Goldy. I don’t want you hurt. Okay, please put me on with that secretary so I can get her to kick those ACHMO guys out until our people get there.”

I handed ReeAnn the phone, then told her that Macguire and I had to go. She tossed her ponytail in a suit-yourself gesture. But Macguire and I were not going straight home. We had someone else to warn.

18

As we drove away from the office, I waited for a barrage of questions from Macguire. Ordinarily, the teenager took great interest in criminal cases. But he regarded me dully when I said we had one further stop to make.

“You don’t want to go right home?” he asked. “You’re always talking about how dangerous the Jerk is.”

“I promised Arch I’d ask a few questions.” He shrugged and was silent. When we rounded the lake, spumes of dust were rising from the LakeCenter parking lot. The doll-show organizers had arrived. Without enthusiasm, I realized I needed to talk to them, too, before I went home, so that made two stops. I pulled into the lot of the sleek wood-paneled Lakeview Shopping Center, a two-story, L-shaped constellation of boutiques and offices that had recently been constructed on the old site of a gaudy saloon. Before the saloon went bankrupt, it had boasted a Vegas-style light display arranged in the shape of a covered wagon that appeared to roll from one end of the building toward the lake. But drunk wannabe cowboys exiting the saloon frequently thought the neon wagon was going to rollover them. Numerous car accidents had ensued. The sheriff’s department had ordered the light display turned off, and that had been curtains for the saloon.

I parked in front of Sam’s Soups, which had a For Lease sign in its darkened window. Food service in Aspen Meadow is always a touchy business, and Sam’s alternately gluey and thin soups had not been a local hit. Next door to Sam’s, Aspen Meadow Health Foods had held on, but only by going through a number of permutations. Up until a few months ago, my friend Elizabeth Miller had offered everything from twenty-pound bags of millet to gallon jugs of soy milk. Elizabeth had sold the store to Amy Bartholomew, R.N., late of the AstuteCare HMO and new purveyor of homeopathic remedies.

Only she wasn’t purveying at the moment. Amy’s paper clock sign indicated that she opened at eleven. It was barely ten. Not only that but Amy had scribbled “Most Days” on the clock’s center. Great. I glanced across the road at the LakeCenter.

“Mind if we drop by over there?” I asked Macguire, pointing at the LakeCenter. “I just want to see how they need me to set up for the breakfast Wednesday.”

“Sure.” He gave me a weary smile. “I’m not ready to go back to bed yet. I feel as if I spend my life between the sheets.” His face was cadaverous. Poor guy. I felt terrible that ReeAnn Collins had treated him so offhandedly. It’s difficult to take cruel treatment from a member of the opposite sex, especially from someone you care about. At nineteen, I’d been some kind of basket case myself when it came to relationships, and I hadn’t been struggling with mononucleosis and a flaky, egotistical father in the bargain.

“We’ll come back over here when the proprietor opens,” I promised. “You want to rest for a minute before we go talk to the Babsie Bash ladies?”

“Whatever,” Macguire repeated, apparently too tired to think of anything new to say. He stared glumly at the lake, a meadow of sparkles broken up by paddle-and sailboats. I wondered how Tom thought I’d be protected from the Jerk with poor, listless Macguire accompanying me. He’s out. I shivered. But I shook this off, the same way I always tried to rid myself of thoughts that included the Jerk.

Soon we were back in the van, rocking over din potholes, past the boundary of the municipal golf course, and into the wildflower-rimmed lot of the LakeCenter. After I parked, the two of us walked toward the large log building, where men and women with plastic-coated badges that said DEALER were carting boxes of wares inside.

“Gail?” I said when we approached.

Gail Rodine, in conversation with a uniformed man, lifted her chin in acknowledgment. Actually, her chin was about all I could see of Gail’s face. She sported a floppy-brimmed hat that sprouted feathers in every direction and might, I reflected, serve well as a centerpiece for the annual Audubon banquet.

Her mid-thigh-length dress was a glittering black-and-white-striped affair. Where did this woman get the money for her hobby? The LakeCenter was not a cheap space to rent, and I was not a cheap caterer to hire. The local Babsie club must get a cut of the profit made from the sale of dolls, and that percentage must be considerable.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” she announced, and continued her low murmur with an older man in a gray security uniform that hugged his belly like a sausage casing. The man’s complexion was splotched, his nose was bright red, and his silver-gray hair lay in flat, greasy curls against his head. He punctuated every few sentences of Mrs. Rodine’s with a hiccup. He was not the sort of security guard to inspire confidence. Still, I stopped a respectful distance away from their conversation. Despite the fact that Arch had spent the night at the Rodines’ house, Gail and I did not move in the same social circles, as we both well knew. Wealthy folks are very conscious of service-sector people who are intrusive. Macguire held back another ten feet behind me. I think the memory of the women chasing him to the end of the dock two days before made him less anxious to be sociable.

Gail Rodine motioned me forward as she announced crisply to the guard: “And this is our caterer. She’ll be here to set up the box lunches tomorrow, and our breakfast on Wednesday just before nine o’clock.” She cocked an eyebrow at me, as if daring me to contradict her agenda. Actually, I needed to get in closer to eight on Wednesday. But before I could utter a word, Gail noticed Macguire. Her face stiffened with anger.

I tried to sound reassuring. “Gail, we’re just here today to check that the ovens are working and to see where you want the buffet to be. Plus, day after tomorrow, I need to get in closer to eight or eight-fifteen. Would that be okay?”

She lifted her chin, and I had a glimpse of a hooked nose and an auburn-lipsticked mouth with a cruel slant. “Eight will be fine. You said ‘we.’ Is this … person… your assistant? If so, you may come in now, he may not,” she proclaimed imperiously. “That boy has already made our lives quite difficult here. And we’re preparing to take our morning tea break. The break will be held in the same place as the brunch.”

“Okay,” I managed to choke. “Well, then.” She bristled impatiently. “Come and see what I’m talking about.”

Gail marched ahead of me down the path. Ordinarily, I adore my clients. They’re happy to book me. They enjoy planning the menu. They rave about the food I lovingly prepare. Ordinarily, things end happily, with future bookings in sight. But sometimes you can sense when things are going to go badly. Gail had been cruel to the kids at Arch’s slumber party; she’d been mean to Macguire when he’d merely tried to help. I’d just seen her give the security guy hell and I could feel that I was next in line, right before the tea break. I tried to wipe from my mind a sudden vision of Gail Rodine bobbing in a lake of Orange Pekoe, with her Babsie dolls tied around her neck. I suppressed a groan. Behind me, Macguire turned and shuffled back to the van.

I followed Gail past the bored-looking, slightly ripe-smelling guard – after all, what kind of drinking stories could he get from protecting dolls? – and into the kitchen. The large and serviceable space was as I remembered it: two ovens set against one wall, a sink overlooking the parking lot. Two lengthy counters separated the kitchen from the ballroom. These counters doubled as a snack bar in the winter months, during skating season, but would serve for me as a prep area. I checked that the ovens worked and looked briefly into the ballroom, where dealers were cracking open long tables and setting up tiers of empty shelves for their displays.

“In the morning,” Gail explained grandly over the bustle of dealers, “I want all the food out back. Nothing can touch the doll displays, remember. You can wheel the food trays out through here.”

She swished toward the wall beside the kitchen, then expertly opened a door in what looked like a solid block of logs. The door – actually a rectangle of sawed logs that snugged into the wall – gave out on the flagstone patio on the side of the structure. Gail moved outside. She briskly pointed out the grill for Wednesday’s final meal, the picnic tables on the deck overlooking the lake where dining would take place, and the tall doors between the ballroom and the deck.

“No dolls beyond this point, unless they have been purchased,” she said firmly. I smiled, nodded, and wondered how Macguire was doing. After promising Gail that I’d be back the next day with the box lunches, I zipped back to my van.

Macguire, chin in the air, mouth open, had fallen asleep with his head cocked against the neck rest. There was no way he could have been comfortable.

When the van jolted out of the dirt lot, he was stanled awake. He blinked, then muttered, “Uh, I’m ready to go home.”

“Just one more quick stop. I promised this nurse I’d be in to see her today. Plus I want to warn her about my ex-husband being released from custody. He mentioned her on the phone from jail. I should let her know he might show up.”

“Then I’d better go in with you,” Macguire said wearily. “If your ex has already gotten up here, you’ll need backup.”

We bumped back over the potholes, pulled into the Lakeview lot, and parked in front of the health-food store next to a Harley-Davidson. An Indian cowbell attached to the door gonged as we entered. Inside, ruffled green gingham curtains framed the windows. The pinewood-paneled walls were hung with pictures of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and other dignitaries of the vegetarian world. The distinctive smell of exotic herbs and incense that permeates most health-food stores enveloped us.

Even though the store had only been open ten minutes, two people had preceded us. One was Patricia McCracken, whose pear-shaped body was stuffed into a white tennis dress that contrasted with the more exotic surroundings. She sat at a table with Amy Bartholomew. Amy sported a green-flowered Indian dress embedded with spangles. The other person in the store, a black-leather-clad burly man with shoulder-length, curly black hair, studied two shelves stacked with brown bottles. An array of silver rings spilling down his left ear flashed in the sunlight whenever he leaned forward to study a label.

“Even in disguise,” Macguire whispered, “I don’t think Korman could look like that.”

“You’re right,” I whispered back. At their table Patricia and Amy were in intimate communication. Patricia’s voice cracked with pain; Amy’s voice exuded its liquid warmth. After nodding briefly to acknowledge our arrival, Amy directed Patricia to hold a bottle to her heart with her left-hand. With her right hand Patricia was told to press her forefinger and thumb together in an okay sign. Then Amy asked a question and gently pried apart the fingers of Patricia’s right hand. “Six a day?” Amy murmured, and pulled. The okay sign opened. “Eight a day?” It opened again. At twelve a day Patricia’s fingers wouldn’t budge. Amy wrote on a yellow pad while Patricia wrote a check. A novel approach to prescription, this.

Patricia gave me an apologetic glance as she exited. “Do you still hurt from Saturday?”

“I’m fine,” I told her, not quite truthfully. “But listen. John Richard’s out on bail. I don’t think he’d come after you, but when he loses his temper with women… Well. Be careful.”

Patricia’s face tightened and she swore under her breath. Then she shook her head and moved away from me without asking another question.

Amy was already eyeing Macguire by the time the cowbell rang behind Patricia. After an appraising squint, she moved to Macguire’s side. The thin teenager towered over her.

“‘You’re not well,” she murmured.

“Yeah, lady. Really.”

“I’ll be with you in a sec.” Macguire nodded without interest. He stopped in front of a rack of magazines. Amy slipped over to the shelves, where she seemed to know exactly what the Earring King wanted. I watched her hand him a large cellophane bag filled with lots of small cellophane bags, each of which was crammed with multicolored capsules. I could imagine Frances Markasian’s loud headline: COP’S WIFE ARRESTED IN HEALTH STORE DRUG BUST.

The Earring King glared at me. “What’re you staring at, woman?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. My mouth had gone dry.

“Edgar, you need to transform that anger,” Amy gently reprimanded the man. “It’s blocking you.”

Emanating hostility that showed no sign of being transformed, Edgar slapped down some dollar bills for his cellophane bags, mumbled that he didn’t want the change, and clanged through the door. A moment later a motorcycle engine split the silence. Amy shook her head of red hair.

“Cancer,” she said sadly. I didn’t know if she meant the disease or the astrological sign, and wasn’t about to ask. She looked at me and said, “How’s that shoulder?”

“Fair.”

“Let me treat your friend and then you. How’s that?”

“Well…” How was I supposed to say this? My ex-husband called from jail. He suspects you of killing his girlfriend. Or he wants to pin the murder on you. Now he’s on the loose and may come looking for you, Amy. Better pack up your alfalfa sprouts and hit the trail. “I need to talk to you without interruption,” I said somewhat lamely.

“No problem,” Amy replied brightly, and blithely turned the door’s paper clock to CLOSED.

Amy beckoned to Macguire. He shuffled behind us as she led the way to the back of the shop, where small tables were sandwiched between two refrigerated cases that held plastic bottles of chlorophyll and other substances I wouldn’t want to ingest. Next to the bottles were plastic bags of adzuki, black, and pinto beans, a few tired-looking carrots, and a small selection of packaged grains. Macguire flopped into a chair and I sat next to him. Amy clasped one of Macguire’s hands in hers; he immediately withdrew it. I had the same discomfiting sense I’d had in the McCrackens’ bathroom – that Amy was way ahead of me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to catch up.

“Perhaps you should just treat me,” I told her. “I don’t really have any authority to – “

But Amy was absorbed with Macguire’s eyes. He turned his face away from her and rubbed his temples. She said, “What do the M.D.s say?”

“The… Oh,” I faltered, “well, Macguire has mononucleosis, and he … what worries me is that he doesn’t have any appetite. The doctor has said he should be getting better, but… Anyway, he’s staying with me until his father gets home later in the month, and I’m not sure his father would approve of – ” I was yakking away. Why did this woman always make me yak?

“Macguire?” Amy asked in her kind, melted-milk-chocolate voice. “Do you want to be healed?”

Macguire tilted his head skeptically, glanced swiftly at Amy, then stared at the floor. “I guess.”

“Okay. Just relax.” She had him remove his watch. Then he touched his head with first one hand, then the other.

“What are you doing?” I blurted out.

She replied without looking at me. “I’m reading his aura.”

Oh, that! I reflected. Of course. Marla and I would have to offer it in Med Wives 101.

Amy took a small flashlight from her pocket, then opened and smoothed out what looked like a paper diagram or chart of some kind. “Look at me.” This Macguire did, and for the next five minutes Amy shone the flashlight in his eyes and consulted her chart. When she’d made a few notes, she rose arid briskly began to gather supplies. A bottle of chlorophyll. Five brown bottles of pills. Cellophane bags similar to the ones the Earring King had purchased. Then she commenced the same drill she had with Patricia: Macguire held the medicines to his heart, and Amy asked questions and tested the response by pulling apart his fingers pressed in the okay sign. I kept an eye on the door, in the remote case the Jerk showed up.

Finally Amy seemed happy with a combination of three bottles of pills, two cellophane bags, and the chlorophyll. She asked Macguire if he wanted her to run through putting together his twice-a-day regimen. As usual, he replied dully in the affirmative.

“You’d better watch this, too,” she told me, and then showed us the sheet. He was to take ten capsules twice a day, plus a teaspoon of chlorophyll dissolved in a cup of cold water. Yum-my!

I pointed at the capsules. “What’s in these?”

“Shark cartilage,” she replied, “pau d’arco bark, essiac tea, rosehips – “

A vision of Macbeth’s witches rose before me. “Okey-doke,” I interrupted her, before we could get to eye of newt.

“Are you ready for me to take a look at you?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said enthusiastically. What did I have to lose?

While Macguire dutifully swallowed his capsules with a glass of springwater spiked with chlorophyll, I got the same flashlight-in-the-eye treatment he’d received. Again Amy consulted her chart.

“Hmm,” she said. Then the beautiful brown eyes and faded-freckled face regarded me sadly. She bit the inside of her lip and then made her pronouncement: “You’re depressed.”

Great, I thought, got herbs for it? Prozac bark..? Instead I said, “Since it’s truth-telling time, Amy, there’s something I really need to talk to you about. “

“Your ex-husband. Dr. Korman.”

“How did you know?”

She smiled. “I may run a health-food store, but I don’t live in the next galaxy. Suz Craig and I didn’t get along, as you said you knew, when I helped you out at the McCrackens’ house. What, you think Dr. Korman is going to come gunning for me? I was a victim of Suz’s nastiness, so now I’m a suspect in her murder? Is Dr. Korman trying to say I killed her?”

Without warning, I felt infinitely dejected. Maybe it was Amy’s suggestion that I was depressed; maybe it was my acknowledgment of the truth. A woman was dead. If my ex-husband had killed her, he would pay. But so would my teenage son, who: would pay a long-lasting price in emotional pain. If John Richard had not killed Suz, then finding out who did would be left to the D.A.‘s investigator, I. Donny Saunders. Saunders, who, last time we’d met, had informed me radicchio was the name of a mobster. No wonder my spirits were low.

“Let’s get you some herbs for that depression,” Amy said decisively. She moved to the same area of the same shelf where she’d pulled down the bottle for Patricia McCracken. Hmm.

And then I, too, went through the drill of holding the herbs to my heart and having my fingers pried open. Within five minutes I, too, was swallowing mammoth capsules whose ingredient list included only three things I recognized: bamboo sap, ginger rhizome, and licorice root. It didn’t sound like a mixture I’d use in a cookie.

“So is Patricia McCracken depressed, too?” I asked Amy. “About losing her baby?”

Amy lifted her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“Depressed enough to get really angry with Suz Craig?”

“Who knows? Suz distressed a lot of people.”

“Including you.” When she gave a single nod, I swallowed, then said, “Why’d she fire you?”

Amy smiled placidly. “Is that what Suz said, that she fired me? No. That’s what she always said when people couldn’t get along with her… that she fired them, as if they were the incompetent ones.” She shook her head gently. “I quit ACHMO. My payout from the pension plan helped buy this shop.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“Why’d you divorce Dr. Korman?”

“Because he abused me.”

“Aha! Same here. Only Suz Craig didn’t abuse people physically. She beat them up mentally.” Amy said it as if it were a disease. “When I left, I thought, now why did that take me so long?”

“Meaning… . ?”

She frowned and pondered my question. For a long minute she was silent. Then she answered, “AstuteCare has been in Colorado for eight years. I was with them from the beginning, moved up to Medical Management. There was a group of department heads, including Brandon Yuille and Chris Corey, who also lived in Aspen Meadow. We worked as a team. Suz joined ACHMO two years ago. It was the beginning of hell.”

Hell. Interesting. “Why? What did she do to change things?”

“We used to have a weekly meeting to discuss problems we were having. What we needed in the new Provider Relations Manual, that kind of thing. Suz would scream and yell. ‘What’s the matter with you people?’ was her favorite. And then she’d viciously attack every person in the room for being stupid, lazy, incompetent. Or, in the case of Chris, fat. ‘How’s a tub of lard supposed to set a model for health?’ Suz used to yell at him. You get the idea. Brandon Yuille’s father, who’d just lost his wife, was remodeling and reopening the pastry shop. Suz was on Brandon’s case constantly about being there on the weekends instead of working overtime for her. She claimed Brandon came in too tired to be of any use, because he was up all night babysitting his father, on and on. It was none of her business that 1 Brandon’s father was a widower and alone and desperately needed his company. But she mode it her business. She made his life miserable.”

Aha, more hell. “Wasn’t there anybody you could complain to?”

She shrugged. “It was coming to that. A group of them was trying to go over her head.”

“And did they? And to whom?”

“They talked about it. But I’d had enough. Her cruelty was unbearable. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The last – no, let’s see, the next-to-last – straw for me came about five months ago when I was negotiating to buy this store. I saw the store as a long-term project for my retirement. Originally I was planning just to have it open on the weekends, until I could build up the clientele over about a ten-or fifteen-year period, when I retired from ACHMO. But Suz never wanted you to be in charge of your own destiny. She wanted to be in charge of your destiny.”

“She knew you wanted to open this store?”

Amy smiled sadly. “Suz made it her business to know personal details about the people who worked for her.” She shook her head. “Anyway. One of the ACHMO doctors had a gambling problem. Suz asked me – privately, mind you – to follow the guy to the casinos in Central City, see what he was up to, and try to talk to him. See if he’d go into some kind of self-help group, therapy, whatever. If I did, she said, she promised to co-sign one of my loan applications. I didn’t feel good about it” – she shrugged – “but if one of our providers had an addiction that would negatively affect the care he gave, I believed I should help find that out. So, I agreed to follow him.

“So you don’t gamble?”

She laughed softly. “No. I followed this provider of ours to Central City and found him playing slots. I watched him for two hours, then confronted him. He convinced me to dance with the one-armed bandit for a while so I could see how much fun it was. I dropped eighteen dollars in quarters into two slot machines and never made more than a dollar.

Then I convinced this guy-a pediatrician, if you can believe it-to have some coffee, to talk to me. Over coffee he said he wasn’t going to quit gambling. I was wasting my time. Suz got rid of that doctor and now he’s in Utah, leading rock-climbing expeditions. Different kind of gamble, I guess. Then Suz spread it around that had the gambling problem. At that time people were bidding for this store space and I was working feverishly on loan applications. Because I hadn’t succeeded in rehabilitating the pediatrician, Suz refused to co-sign for me, and I didn’t get my loan. When I confronted her about trying to destroy all my plans for the future – to destroy me – she claimed I was paranoid.”

“And so you quit.” Amy looked away for a moment. Then she said, “Well, not just then. You know how it is with institutions you’re involved with. Institution of marriage, institution of the job, institution of the church. At first you’re doing work you love and everybody’s nice. Then maybe the work gets boring but you like the people so much you don’t want to leave. Then some of the good people leave and you think, well, it’s not as good as it used to be but it’s better than going out there looking for something new.”

I looked over at Macguire, who was perusing a magazine on nudist colonies.

“Pretty soon,” Amy went on, “there are only a handful of people you like, or a handful of things you like, about the institution. Then bad things begin to happen. In our case at ACHMO, we got Suz Craig, a female vice-president we didn’t like. She came in and made us all miserable. And although we got a great deal of camaraderie out of talking about her behind her back, it was scant comfort.”

“I still don’t understand why someone didn’t complain.”

She sighed. “There was talk of it, but you know, who was going to bell the cat? Human Resources? Brandon Yuille is so terrified of losing his job that he wouldn’t even join in on our gossip. Poor guy, he had enough to deal with with his mother dying.”

“Was she covered by ACHMO?”

“Don’t know,” Amy replied. “Brandon talks a blue streak about food and always brought us goodies, but about his personal life he was extremely-closemouthed.”

“How about Chris Corey? Did he hate Suz Craig, too?”

“We all hated her, Goldy. She tormented Chris for being overweight and for being late on his deadlines. She used to say that this wasn’t a waiting room where he could be an hour late for all his appointments. And so on and so on. She was cruel and spiteful and manipulative. Plus she was ruining the HMO with the way she was handling cases like Patricia’s. She wanted us to find din on the people suing, without realizing how that kind of activity could backfire. An HMO can’t survive bad publicity. People just won’t sign on.”

“So if you didn’t leave when she refused to cosign your loan, why did you finally leave?”

“You know, I never could figure out if Suz wanted me to leave or wanted me to stay. If she wanted me to leave, why didn’t she just let me buy my store? If she wanted me to stay, why did she threaten to use the gambling issue in a way that would hurt me? I’m telling you, the woman was just mean.” She sighed. “The very last straw for me was when we had a team meeting and in front of all my colleagues, Suz told me I was over the hill, didn’t know the first thing about healing people. She even said I didn’t dress like a professional.”

I couldn’t help it. I eyed Amy’s shapeless, spangled dress - that-could - double - as - a - nightgown. She laughed.

“Don’t worry, Goldy, I didn’t wear this kind of thing to work. But I wasn’t going to wear short wool suits that came up to my behind and didn’t even keep my legs warm in a Colorado winter.”

“So you…” “I went home after the public dressing-down Suz gave me and I looked in the mirror, hard. I asked myself, ‘Are you happy?’ And the answer was such a resounding ‘No’ that I went in the next day.] and quit. Then she threw a fit about my quitting. J She swore she’d tell anyplace I applied that I had gambling problems and couldn’t hold down a steady job. ‘Who am I going to hire in your place?’ she wanted to know, after screaming at us for weeks that we were expendable. I just listened and kept telling myself, ‘In eight hours, Amy, you will never have to listen to this tyrant again.’ Because that’s what Suz was – a tyrant.”

“And so you just walked out.”

“Yup. Cleaned out my desk, took my two weeks of vacation as my notice, and that was it. I never looked back. I had some savings to tide me over, used my pension payout to buy the store instead of getting a loan, and now I’m doing what I love.” She smiled. “By next year I may even be showing a profit. I’ll start some new pension savings.”

I looked at the brightly decorated store, the sparsely filled shelves of herb capsules and poorly stocked freezer, the “health” magazines that included the soft-porn rag Macguire was finding so entrancing. But the place, like Amy, had… well … the place had an aura. And the aura was one of happiness. Aura! Yikes! Listen to me!

“You know what I’m talking about,” she insisted. There was a slightly accusatory tone in her voice. “You opened your catering business after being married to Or. Gorgeous. You must be ecstatic to be free of him.”

“It’s… well…” From the wall, the Maharishi beamed down at me. “It’s nirvana,” I admitted.

“Then you know what I’m talking about.”

“I do. But now Or. Gorge – John Richard has been charged with Suz Craig’s murder and my son is suffering like you wouldn’t believe. For my son’s sake, I need to find out if his father really killed her.”

Amy considered the green gingham curtains at the front of the store for a long time without replying. Then she said softly, “I believe in the forces of the universe, Goldy. He who has sinned will sin again. The truth will all come out. You need to trust.”

“I do trust, Amy. But to everyone’s astonishment, John Richard Korman is out on bail. He may come looking for you, want to ask questions, and then lose his temper. It’s the control freak in him. Very predictable. Anyway, I’d feel better if you weren’t alone. Can you get somebody to work in the store with you? At the very least, keep the phone handy in case you have to dial 911.” I reached out for her hand. “John Richard called me from jail. He wanted me to come over and investigate you.”

Amy pulled her hand away from mine. Her voice grew chill. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Amy, please. I know this man. I’m here to warn you. He was involved with ACHMO, you were involved with ACHMO, and most certainly you didn’t get along with Suz.” I paused. “John Richard thinks you might have killed her, and that you’ve set him up to take the fall for you. Believe me, he’s not a person you want to have gunning for you.”

She shook her head as she ran her fingers through her shiny red hair. “These people,” she muttered sadly. “I swear.”

19

Jake’s earsplitting howls greeted Macguire and me before the van turned into our driveway. The cause for this canine distress was the arrival of Donny Saunders. The investigator for the Furman County district attorney sat on the top step of our front porch. Well, well, it was about time.

Donny boasted slicked brown hair, a prominent nose and forehead, and an arrogant, horse-toothed smile he displayed whenever he stole the credit for a major bust. The closest Donny Saunders usually came to an arrest was sending seized material to a lab. Most recently, a uniformed officer had discovered twenty-five kilos of cocaine during a speeding stop. Donny Saunders had filed the report and then brayed endlessly afterward about making the biggest drug seizure in the history of the county.

At the sight of him, I took a deep breath. A good investigator would have been at my door no later than Saturday afternoon, right after I’d discovered the body of Suz Craig and been questioned by Sergeant Beiner and her assistant. Two days had now gone by. The fact that Donny was finally paying me a call was not a good sign that the crime was being efficiently investigated.

“Hey, Goldy, how you doing!” he greeted me. “Got anything to eat? I’m starving! And you better do something ‘bout that dog!”

I struggled to appear friendly even as I gagged at Donny’s Vegas-style suit of shiny blue fabric that shimmered and glinted as he swaggered toward us. I introduced Macguire, identifying him only as a houseguest.

“I’ll need to talk to you alone,” said Donny with his usual smug self-importance as I opened the front door. What a hospitable statement.

“Gosh,” murmured Macguire in a hurt tone, “that’s the third time today people haven’t wanted me around when Goldy Schulz talks to them. Do I have b.o. or something? Guess I’ll just go sit by myself. Wait till it’s time to take ten more herb capsules.” Before I could soothe his feelings, however, he plodded to the backyard to reassure Jake. After a moment the howls ceased. Unfortunately, my torment was just beginning.

“I’ve got a lot of cooking to do,” I warned Donny. “I’m doing a big event tomorrow.”

The enormous shoulder pads inside Donny’s sapphire suit rose ominously when he shrugged. “Not to worry! How would I bother you? Cook away, little lady! A woman’s place is in the kitchen! Ha! Ha!” His good-ole-boy tone made me grit my teeth. “But say,” he bulldozed on, “you got anything good to eat that’s, you know, ready?”

I closed my eyes, tried to count to ten but only got to four. I remembered my promises to Arch on the one hand and to Tom on the other. Maybe I could actually learn something from Donny. But I doubted it.

I suggested a cheese sandwich and Donny eagerly accepted. He quickly added that bread kind of stuck in his craw and he’d need three or four beers to wash the crumbs down. My hopes for our conversation sank to a subterranean level unavailable to geologists. But since the brioche had completed its first rising, I removed it from the refrigerator along with a six-pack of Dos Equis. I punched down the cold, silky mass of dough, set it aside for its second rising, and proceeded to make Donny a sandwich of thickly sliced homemade bread, pesto, fresh tomato, and chčvre. He asked for his second beer when I placed the sandwich in front of him. I handed him the cold bottle with the hope that it might loosen his tongue to share information I hadn’t heard yet. I dreaded to think, though, what my husband would say about my plying an investigator with brewskis in the middle of the day.

“Say, this is pretty good!” Donny mumbled, mouth full. He took another enormous bite and munched thoughtfully. “Whaddaya call this white cheesy scum”

“Chčvre.” His horsey teeth pulled into a wide grin. “Nah, Goldy, that’s a truck.”

I forced a smile. “What do you want to talk about, Donny?”

“Okay,” he said seriously, wiping his mouth and then using his napkin to blow his nose. “Few things.” He swigged the beer. “Suz Craig. You found her.”

“Yep.” I decided I’d better cook. Otherwise the temptation to lose my temper might be too great. “I sure did find her.” I took out a cutting board and a zester and ran the tool down the side of a lemon. Zest strands curled outward, sending a fine, pungent mist of lemon oil onto the board. “I saw her in a ditch as I was driving down the road just before seven last Saturday.”

“And she was your ex-husband’s girlfriend.” “She was, indeed.” I minced the zest, then retrieved a coffee grinder that I used exclusively for pulverizing fruit zest and nuts. “Haven’t you read my statement?”

He gestured with the now-empty beer bottle and unsuccessfully repressed a belch. “I took a look at it. Now, what we need to establish here is John Richard Korman’s prior patterns. You know, his similar activity. How he used to beat you up. How he almost killed you. That’s the way I’ll build my case.” He eyed the Dos Equis carton longingly, but I ignored him. “Goldy,” he continued, gushing with sincerity, “I’ve seen lots of criminals like this before. Once they do it, they get a taste for it. They keep doing it. Until they kill somebody.”