The Main Corpse

THE MAIN CORPSE DIANE MOTT DAVIDSON

Prospect Financial Partners Luxury Beer and HorsD’Oeuvre Party

EURYDlCE GOLD MINE

IDAHO SPRINGS, COLORADO SATURDAV, JUNE 5

Chinese Shrimp Dumplings Tomato-Brie Pie Crab Quesadillas Giant Mushrooms Stuffed with Chicken Sausage Bacon-Wrapped Artichokes with Dijon Cream Assorted Beers, Ales, Wheats, and Stouts White Chocolate Truffles, Gold Foil-Wrapped Fudge Bars French Roast Coffee

1

Sometimes you’d kill for a booking. I was ready – I’d had a rotten spring. The lack of business meant I spent afternoons frantically scrolling through my client files. Wasn’t the Hardcastles’ daughter supposed to get married? Didn’t they want me to do the reception? And what about the Garden Club brunch, Newcomers’ picnic, and Kiwanians’ First-of-Summer barbecue? In terms of scheduled events, these last two months were the worst in the five years since I’d become a professional caterer. It wasn’t just a rotten spring: It was disastrous.

The problem, everyone said, was the weather. From the middle of March until now, the beginning of June, maddening, endless rain and snow had assaulted the Colorado high country. The Audubon Society announced that birds migrating north had overflown the state completely. Drownings were up, landslides were up, catered events were way, way down. The clubs had all canceled their outdoor events, and the Hardcastles’ daughter was on Prozac.

I set aside the dumpling dough I was kneading and looked out my kitchen window. Morning fog shrouded the mountains of the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. In a recent empty moment – I was having lots of those lately – I’d read an article in which a psychiatrist claimed people actually eat more during long bouts of depressing weather. But if folks dig into whole grilled swordfish and soup bowls of chocolate mousse during gray-day melancholy, then caterers should hit the jackpot when it pours, right? Reading the article, I’d known in my heart the shrink’s argument was wrong. Now, I finally had the bank statement to prove it. I rolled the dough to razor-thinness. It wasn’t the lack of income that bothered me so much. After all, I’d been married to a man with a regular paycheck for just over a year. But second-time-around connubial bliss was one thing. Financial independence was another. Since I’d had five years of being on my own, to have my business fail would be mortifying. I whacked the next batch of dough with my rolling pin. To lose Goldilocks’ Catering would be unthinkable.

Thank goodness my best friend had come to the rescue – bless her large, recovering-from-cardiac-arrest heart. In her midforties and ultrawealthy, Marla Korman was the other ex-wife of my ex-husband-known to both of us as the Jerk. When my business began to falter, Marla wanted to extend me a business loan. Very firmly, I’d said thank you, but no. Next she offered to have a venture capital firm – Prospect Financial Partners, in which she had more than a passing interest – analyze Goldilocks’ Catering as an investment prospect. To this I’d also given a polite no thanks. If too many cooks spoiled the broth, there was no telling what a venture capital firm could do to a catering business. But then Marla had the devious but brilliant idea of booking me to do a celebratory event for Prospect Financial Partners. How could I say no? So this afternoon, I was catering a heartwarmingiy profitable luxury beer-and-hors d’oeuvre affair for the venture capitalists- – t an extremely unusual site.

I eased up on the rolling pin and pictured the venue for the party: the portal opening to the Eurydice Gold Mine. Of course, the party wasn’t being held in the old mine, but under a tent erected at its entrance. And I was grateful for the last-minute booking, even if the firm had called on me in a state of panic. No question about it, Prospect Financial Partners needed a social bash. In the worst way.

The firm had been in an uproar the last few weeks over the unexpected death of their chief investment officer. In what I viewed as peculiar hard-heartedness, clients had flooded the firm with unsympathetic calls to find out how Victoria Lear’s dying would affect their portfolios. In particular, the clients demanded, would the fact that CIO Lear was gone to that great securities exchange in the sky postpone the scheduled reopening of the Eurydice? The partners had assured their nervous investors that plans to capitalize the reopening of the gold mine were absolutely on track, despite the unscheduled demise of Victoria Lear. But chaos and uncertainty are not easily quelled, especially when money is involved. Prospect’s clients were close to rebellion, otherwise known as pulling out.

Finally, Marla had convinced the Prospect partners that it would be marvelous fun – not to mention a break from the crisis atmosphere at the firm – to do a catered affair next to the Eurydice portal. Wine and dine ‘em, she’d said, and they’ll forget their uneasiness about Victoria’s death. And she, Marla, had the perfect caterer for the occasion… . With the temperature hovering in the low fifties and rain and hail threatening, it wasn’t a place I would have chosen for a party. But I assured the Prospect firm of my ability to adapt. When the rain arrived, I told them we could make like rich Arabs and huddle under our tent.

Marla had a large portfolio with Prospect. More significantly, she was in the fifteenth month of a rocky romantic involvement with Prospect’s financial whiz, Tony Royce, one of the two partner-owners of the venture capital firm. Clever, intense, and perpetually well-dressed, Tony had been with Marla constantly through the darkest days of her illness almost a year ago. But rumors abounded of how handsome, dark-haired Tony had dated other women before and after Marla’s hospitalization. The gossip mill even worked overtime spreading a kinky tale concerning Tony’s relationship with a certain Vegas stripper. A couple of months ago, Marla had heard of Tony’s wanderings. She’d told him she’d remain a Prospect client, but her heart couldn’t take him seeing other women. She’d ended their relationship. Secretly, I was glad. I didn’t want my best friend with another jerk.

In May, however, Tony had repented. He swore a very public, ceaseless devotion to Marla. Even I was impressed. I’d desperately hoped they’d celebrate their new togetherness with lovely, intimate dinners catered by yours truly. But no.

Ever one to combine business with pleasure, this last month Tony had taken Marla to every restaurant where the Prospect Partners were thinking of putting their money. Marla regaled me with stories about this panorama of eatery outings, where she would muse over the food – delicious, unusual, or just plain weird. Tony assessed each restaurant’s ability to attract diners. After the mine venture, Tony told her, Prospect was going to diversify by putting capital into a restaurant with regional expansion plans. But when Marla’s cardiologist had heard she was taste-testing hollandaise sauce and deep-dish pizza all over the state, he’d put an immediate stop to this particular type of financial analysis.

“Tony and I are in love,” Marla had confided to me when she made the booking. “It’s the real thing, Goldy.”

“Is he going to find someone else to do his taste-testing?”

“He says so,” she’d dreamily replied. “But he needs me now more than ever. For moral support. He’s so distraught over the firm’s loss of Victoria.”

I said nothing. I didn’t want to be reminded. I couldn’t think of Victoria Lear’s death without shuddering.

An avid off-roader, Chief Investment Officer Lear had lost control of her car while negotiating narrow, precarious Orpheus Canyon Road. Orpheus Canyon, two miles east of the Eurydice Mine, snaked through the mountains between Idaho Springs and Central City, another old mining town that now featured legalized gambling. The dirt road’s precipitous drop-offs frequently claimed drivers who made the smallest miscalculation of the road’s lethal curves. No one had seen Victoria Lear’s Toyota Land Cruiser dive off the mud-slick road. It had been a week before her body had been discovered within the gnarled wreckage. There had been little forensic evidence to recover. The constant rain on the dirt road had obliterated the Toyota’s tracks. Three days ago, the Clear Creek County coroner had ruled her death accidental.

“Prospect Financial needs to make everything appear normal,” Marla claimed over the phone. “That’s why they loved my idea of having the party up at the mine. To show the investors they’re in control.”

Pondering all this, I sighed and cut the delicate dumpling dough into squares. I sauteed morsels of fresh shrimp with scallion, water chestnut, and soy sauce. In control of what, I had wanted to ask, but had not. The mouth-watering odors of Chinese food filled the kitchen. When the shrimp had cooked to a succulent pink, I turned the mixture out to cool and started slicing thick slabs of tomato for the tomato-Brie pie.

Really, I reminded myself, I had enough problems of my own without worrying about Marla’s romantic and financial interests. With the Jerk leaving his medical practice to his colleagues so he could take a sabbatical – otherwise known as can’t-stand-the-Colorado-weather-need-lengthy-vacation-in-Hawaii – Marla and I had lost the person we loved to complain about most. And then there was my dear husband Tom, who had a whole plateful of problems all to himself, in which the death of Victoria Lear played a significant part.

I cut wedges of creamy Brie and alternated them with the tomato slices. Tom called this particular dish heart-attack-on-a- plate, so I would never serve it to Marla. I grated pungent Fontinella to sprinkle over the Brie. I wouldn’t give it to Tom either, as I was extremely worried that his current job situation might lead to heart-attack-at-the-office.

Tom had been an investigator at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department for more than a decade. His problem was his new boss. Five years from retirement, Captain Augustus Shockley was so paranoid he stayed locked in his office most of the day. Tom had taken to slipping his notes and reports under Shockley’s door. In his two months as chief honcho, the only thing Shockley had seemed able to do was to move totally incompetent people into positions where they swiftly managed to drive Tom insane. Shockley had also, as it turned out, placed his retirement savings with Prospect Financial Partners, and he’d become obsessed with Victoria Lear’s car accident. Check it out, Schulz! Go investigate the site! Shockley’s frantic memos to Tom had ignored the fact that the steep, rain-soaked crash site was virtually unreachable. The memos also ignored the fact that Idaho Springs was in Clear Creek County and outside of Furman County jurisdiction – thus, not Tom’s problem. Nevertheless, Tom had been in contact with his counterpart, the Homicide Investigator at the Clear Creek Sheriff’s Department. As a result, Tom had been one of the first people the coroner had called with his report. This isn’t very helpful, Shockley had scrawled across Tom’s summary of the fatal wreck. I often thought my handsome husband resembled a bear. Now, with Augustus Shockley to deal with, he was beginning to act like one.

But, I thought as I whisked eggs with whipping cream, I was looking forward to tonight, after the party. Tom and I would toast the financial turnaround Goldilocks’ Catering was making with the Prospect event. The party by the mine was going to be marvelous, I told myself confidently. I’d worked hard on recipes; I’d gathered mountains of fresh ingredients. Since my former in-house assistant, Julian Teller, had moved to upstate New York to attend Cornell, I’d hired another helper. Macguire Perkins had been one of Julian’s classmates at Elk Park Preparatory School. For the party at the gold mine, Macguire had ordered beers, ales, stouts, and wheats-brewed beverages for aficionados. And I’d begun to cook with gusto.

A rental company was setting up the tent early this morning. The electricity wired to the mine would provide power for a compact disc player and rented portable ovens, which the same workers would place behind a makeshift counter at the back tent flap, all ready to use when I arrived this afternoon. Getting up the narrow dirt road to the mine, which was situated five miles above Idaho Springs, wouldn’t be quite as convenient. High Creek Avenue did not wind and dip as dangerously as Orpheus Canyon Road, but first-time visitors to the mine were bound to be spooked. The invitations warned the guests to come in four-wheel-drive vehicles and to maneuver their vehicles with care. I prayed that the rental company folks had made it. The specter of Victoria Lear’s car catapulting off a cliff had propelled me to do a very slow dry-run trek in my van the previous day. Yesterday’s run, of course, had been anything but dry. To get from my house in Aspen Meadow to the mine – fifteen miles away – took Marla and me nearly an hour. We bumped across wooden bridges spanning rain-swollen creeks and rocked through deep mud on mountain roads. If the catering didn’t work out, I’d told Marla on our way back home, I could always become a Sherpa.

I wrapped spoonfuls of the shrimp f1lling in dough packets and set them aside. Then I quartered artichoke bottoms and skewered them with the bacon slices. These would sizzle and bubble in one of the portable ovens until Macguire and I served them with Dijon mustard judiciously thinned with whipping cream. I took a greedy whiff of fresh cilantro, then sliced a pile of it to go into the salsa for the crab quesadillas.

As I began to fold the quesadillas, I wished for the hundredth time that I, too, had been able to invest with Prospect Financial Partners. Marla swore she’d made a nest egg fit for a hen of any size. To prove it she’d bought, in addition to her Jaguar, a Mercedes that boasted four-wheel drive. When I doubted Tony would accept a client with so little money, Marla laughingly replied that I could always approach the other partner, Albert Lipscomb. Albert would take on anyone, as long as he or she listened to his reasons for investing in a company. All his reasons. Albert, she laughed, made life-insurance salesmen look like stand-up comics. I envisioned a public reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and said no thanks.

I smiled and topped the Fontinella with glossy dark leaves of aromatic basil, then poured on a lake of cream beaten with eggs. Prospect was struggling with its image, Marla was trying to cope, Tom had a horrid boss, and my business was faltering. But I was cooking. Big-time. As always, working with food soothed my nerves and made all mundane problems appear faraway, or at least on the other side of the Continental Divide. When I brought the spicy chicken sausage to sizzling and gently stuffed it into giant mushroom caps, I felt a rush of joy. I was so happy I whistled, which brought our new dog, Jake, loping into the room. At Jake’s heels was my son Arch, who had turned fourteen on the snowiest, coldest day of April. The dog skidded to a stop and bumped into my leg. I begged Arch to take Jake – a tawny, ungainly, oversized bloodhound – away. Jake’s claws scrabbled across the kitchen floor as he recovered his balance, raised his deeply furrowed brow, and gazed at me with droopy, bloodshot eyes that appeared deeply, deeply hurt. I shook my head. “Teach him to play dead, or something, while I finish the food for the Prospect shindig. Please.”

Arch straightened his tortoiseshell glasses on his freckled nose. His eyes were reproachful. “If you don’t want Jake to come, Mom, then you shouldn’t whistle.”

Tomato-Brie Pie

Crust:

1 ž cups all-purpose flour

ž teaspoon sugar

ź teaspoon salt

ź cup chilled lard, cut into pieces

6 tablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1 - 3 tablespoons ice water

Preheat the oven to 350°. Place the flour, sugar, and salt into the bowl , of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Process 5 seconds, then add the lard, process until the mixture is like cornmeal (10 seconds), then add the butter and process until the mixture resembles large crumbs (10 seconds). Add the water one tablespoon at a time, pulsing quickly just until the mixture holds together. Roll the dough out between sheets of wax paper to fit into a buttered 9-inch pie pan. Prick the dough and flute the edges. Bake the crust for 5 to 7 minutes, or until it is an even, pale gold. Set aside on a rack while preparing the filling.

Filling: 1 ˝ pounds (5 medium-size) ripe tomatoes, trimmed but not peeled, cut into eighths, seed pockets removed

5 ounces Brie cheese, rind scraped off; cut into small cubes

2 ounces best-quality fresh mozzarella cheese, cut into small cubes

1 ounce Fontinella cheese, cut into small cubes

1/3 cup chopped fresh basil

3 large eggs

1/3 cup heavy cream

1/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350 . Drain the tomatoes thoroughly on paper towels. Place the cheese cubes evenly around the prepared crust. Place the tomatoes on top of the cheese, and top with the basil. Beat the eggs, cream, and milk, and pour this mixture over the tomatoes, basil, and cheese. Place in the oven and bake 35 to 50 minutes, until center is set. Allow pie to cool 10 minutes before serving.

Serves 6.

I hugged him and apologized. When Julian Teller had been boarding with us, he had been like a big brother to my son. Now, Arch missed Julian more than any of us. The new dog, I told myself, was a welcome substitute for the much-admired friend. Despite my warnings about the weather, Arch and Jake took off on a long hike. Arch told me not to worry. He thought the sky was clearing. By early afternoon, however, icy raindrops fell in a chilling, slashing curtain. To arrive early enough for the Prospect party, I allowed an extra half-hour of travel time and secured pan after pan of the expensive appetizers into a Cambro, a heavy plastic stacking device that locks into place on my van floor. When I inched my vehicle onto Aspen Meadow’s Main Street, I winced at the sight and sound of Cottonwood Creek. Our normally placid, usually picturesque tributary of the South Platte River had developed into a roaring, turgid beast. In fact, the rain had turned our whole town into a mud pit. The shoulders of all the mountain roads oozed mire. Streamfront properties, usually highly prized, became disaster areas when the creeks had crested their banks. As the van rocked forward behind a line of cars, I fretted about the appetizers tilting inside the Cambro, not to mention the trays on the overhead racks. Cleaning up six dozen meticulously layered quesadillas from the floor of my van was not my idea of a good time.

Unsurprisingly, traffic in Idaho Springs was detoured. I prayed the bungee cords would hold the trays in place as I piloted my trusty vehicle over rocks and through silt to avoid a road crew. Sporting fluorescent life vests and calf-deep in mud, workmen pulled debris from a plugged culvert. I inched forward and tried not to imagine my platters of savory hors d’oeuvres skimming down the rapids.

At last, I pulled up to the sheds in front of the Eurydice Mine. No one else had arrived, so I parked the van and rushed through the rain with the first plastic-wrapped platters. Once under the tent, I scanned the dark interior until I turned on the tent lamps and spotted the portable ovens. I heaved the trays onto the makeshift counter, checked the ovens, then switched them on. I paused to look around. A string of light bulbs that went back as far as the eye could see illuminated the railroad track that led into the depths of the old mine. The light bulbs had been strung beside the track for the Prospect investors’ tour of the Eurydice in May. I fought off a shiver.

“There’s a superstition about women in mines,” Marla had told me after she returned from the tour. “We’re supposed to be bad luck. ‘Women prohibited for decades!’ they told us before we went in. Poor Edna Hardcastle showed why by promptly having a claustrophobia attack. Got fifty feet inside and threw up.”

Maybe I was better off with savings bonds. I pulled my eyes away from the dark portal of the mine, which seemed to leak cold, dank air, and nipped back and forth through the downpour to unload more trays. Ten minutes later, Macguire roared up in his Subaru. Lanky, acne-scarred, and endearingly unambitious, Macguire was the son of the headmaster of Elk Park Prep. Macguire was taking what was euphemistically called a “year off,” while he lifted weights, did odd jobs, and occasionally attempted to decide what to do with the rest of his life. He wasn’t too adept at the food biz. But he could carry heavy trays. And he liked people. From my point of view, that was half the battle.

“Hey, Goldy.” His tall body curled out of the Subaru and he smiled crookedly, squinting against the rain. He wore an unbuttoned, too-large, yellow plastic slicker he’d probably scrounged from the Elk Park Prep lost-and-found. But the gaping slicker revealed that he had remembered to wear black pants and a white shirt, a good sign. “The beers are gonna be late,” he informed me. He shook his short, wiry red hair. Droplets skittered through the damp air. “It was all the truck driver could do to get up Marla’s driveway. When she told him he needed to come up a dirt road leading out of Idaho Springs, he said, Forget that! So she bribed him to put a few cases into the trunk of her Mercedes. Tony could only get a couple into his Miata, and Albert’s going over to get the rest in his Explorer. Marla is not happy. But I told her, hey! You know, it’s like the bumper sticker, sh – “

“No,” I interrupted him. I put the covered platter of quesadillas I was holding down on the van floor and held up one hand. “Need to change your thinking, Macguire. Clients cuss. Caterers don’t.”

He grinned good-naturedly, released the lock, and heaved up the Cambro. “Your clients are going to cuss a lot if they get up here and don’t have anything to drink. Anyway, I really need to talk to Marla before the festivities get started. She here yet?”

Even as he spoke, we heard the distinctive growl of the Mercedes. Marla emerged from her shiny new car in a cloud of dark green silk dotted with gold. She shook her fist dramatically at the weeping clouds and struggled to open her new Louis Vuitton umbrella. Although she’d only lost about ten pounds since the heart attack, she swore she was exercising regularly, eating virtuously, and not losing her temper more than once a month. As she merrily trundled toward us through the downpour, I doubted all three.

“Darlings,” she exclaimed extravagantly once she was under the tent. She closed the umbrella with a flourish and shook it. The bright gold barrettes holding her unruly brown curls in place twinkled in the light of the rented tent lamps. She sniffed at the delicious aromas seeping from the ovens. “Let’s indulge! Correction: Let’s unload this designer beer, and then indulge. Ah, Macguire,” she trilled, “you left a message saying you had something for me?”

“I do,” he muttered. His face darkened with uncertainty. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“You don’t think she’s going to like what?” I asked as I whisked the mustard and cream for the bacon appetizers.

But Marla reopened the umbrella, walked with Macguire to his car, and ignored me. The rain continued to pelt down, so I couldn’t hear what the two of them were saying as they huddled next to the Subaru and spoke in confidential tones. Then Macguire ducked into his car and brought out a manila envelope. Marla tore into it and yanked out a sheet of paper. Under the shelter of the umbrella, she pored over it while he talked quietly, pointing here and there on the sheet. Marla scowled. Macguire appeared to be trying to calm her.

“Brau-au-au-gh!” she yelled, as the first of the guest cars crested the dirt road. I couldn’t help wondering what the problem was. Marla continued to stare at the paper in her hands. “I don’t believe this!” I heard her yell.

“What are you going to do?” Macguire said loudly, crossing his arms and frowning down at her. “Confront him?”

“Are you kidding?” my best friend shrieked. She crushed the paper and stuffed it into a silk pocket. “I’m going to kill him!”

2

Try as I might, I couldn’t discover what Marla was so angry about. When Macguire unpacked the crystal glasses – not real, of course, for an outdoor event – he mumbled that I’d learn soon enough. And then I became so busy loading the quesadillas and tomato-Brie pies into the ovens that I didn’t have time to ask again. I didn’t even notice when Prospect partner Albert Lipscomb arrived with the last of the cases of brew. The boxes of gleaming brown bottles just seemed to appear magically in the tent. I was briefly aware of tall, athletic Tony with an equally tall, but bald, man moving confidently in the direction of the large storage shed abutting the side tent flap. From their assured manner together, I figured the balding man had to be Prospect partner Albert Lipscomb, the most tedious man on earth, as Marla had called him. After a moment the two men emerged from the shed wearing miner’s hard hats complete with cap lamps. Without stopping to talk to the few clients who’d already arrived, they walked briskly into the mine.

I watched curiously as the two men disappeared down the dark-hewn throat into the earth. But I was even more interested in their mission. Before leaving they’d spoken with Macguire briefly, pointing at the middle of the tent. Macguire had in turn disappeared and returned with another man, whom I could see only from the back. With great effort, Macguire and his helper hauled a glass display case the size of a large coffee table back to the spot in the center of the tent that the partners had indicated.

“What’s going on?” I asked Macguire when I was by his side. He was dusting off his hands and muttering about having to wash them again before serving the food.

The man with him, whom I belatedly (and with a sinking heart) recognized as Captain Shockley of the Furman County Sheriffs Department, spoke first.

“Well, now. If it isn’t Mrs. Schulz.” Shockley, in his late fifties, towered over me. I took in his formidable paunch and green polyester suit. He had thin, ruffled black hair above an ominous, horsey face. Within a mass of crepey wrinkles, his bulging brown eyes glared at me. He looked like a boss. I just wished he wasn’t Tom’s boss. He said, “I wonder why Prospect happened to hire you to cater this event?”

Anxiety gnawed at my stomach as Shockley tilted toward me. His oversized teeth were set in a joyless grin as he waited grimly for my reply.

“Um, because my best friend is dating one of the partners?”

He turned back to the display case. “I figured as much.” He stared glumly into the empty glass compartments.

“What are you two doing?” I asked brightly. “I mean, I guess this table isn’t a place where we can put trays of dumplings.”

Shockley ignored me, and Macguire gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. Don’t ask. But I didn’t need to inquire again, because within a minute Tony and his partner reappeared at the mine opening, each with a knapsack slung over his back. When they approached the display table, Macguire tugged me aside.

“It’s supposed to be a surprise for the clients,” Macguire said in a low voice. “They made it a surprise mainly for security reasons,” he added. “The partners didn’t want anyone to know in advance about a display of samples from the mine safe.” I watched Shockley open the top of the glass case. Tony and Albert Lipscomb began to place chunks of streaked rock inside. “That police captain? Shockley? He said they’re doing a, like, before-and-after exhibit. You know samples of ore on one side, ingots of refined metal on the other. The partners are giving Shockley the key to the case. You know – for safekeeping during the party.”

The partners opened the second knapsack and carefully lifted out thick, gleaming bars of gold. For a moment, Macguire and I did not speak. We were transfixed by the sight of the precious yellow metal glimmering seductively in the light of the tent lamps. I was sure the bars were worth a fortune.

“But,” I said finally, “I thought they already gave the investors chunks of ore. Marla said she got one when they came up for their tour.”

When Macguire didn’t answer right away, I looked at him. The same uncertainty I’d seen earlier again clouded his face. “Maybe I just shouldn’t talk about it.” He gestured to the makeshift parking area that was bathed in icy rain. “Anyway, here come some more guests.”

And indeed, car after car was pulling into the parking lot. Macguire and I hustled off to the serving area and loaded up our trays with bottles, glasses, and napkins. Have a good time, I warned myself. Guests can always read your mood! So forget the weather and buck up! Unfortunately, a caterer’s worries are as contagious as measles.

But my apprehensions proved groundless. Despite the rain, despite the recent loss of the firm’s investment officer, the atmosphere among the partygoers soon vibrated with joviality. Wave after wave of guests extricated themselves from muddy Range Rovers and Jeep Grand Cherokees and greeted each other with loud cheers and high fives. We made it through the Red Sea, doggone it, and now we’re going to party! Just as heartily, they hailed Macguire and me with demands for drinks. We were happy to oblige.

Once the first batch of thirty-five-dollar-a-bottle Belgian ales was gone, the party became more like a bash at the end of exams than a dignified gathering of wealthy investors. Fine with me. I am ecstatic when rich people celebrate anything, as long as I supply the food. With these folks in such excellent humor, maybe I’d even be able to wangle a couple of July Fourth bookings.

Then again, I reasoned as I served another round of ales, these guests certainly had reason to whoop it up. Tony Royce and Albert Lipscomb had made them a bundle. Tony’s job was to come up with investment ideas and bring in clients. Albert analyzed the companies’ balance sheets and managed the money. The investment officer ran – or rather, used to run – interference between the clients and the partners. And they’d all done spectacularly. Year before last, Prospect had infused money into Medigen, a regional biotech company. This year, Medigen had gone public and made the Prospect clients a widely reported packet. Now they were trying something new. Contrary to their usual pattern, Albert Lipscomb had been the one who’d pushed the idea of investing in the Eurydice Gold Mine. A lifelong Coloradan, Albert had inherited the mine from his grandfather, who’d vehemently insisted up to his death that the mine contained untapped gold ore. Prospect had hired a geologist who agreed with the grandfather, and the high-rolling clients had piled in. Coloradans can’t resist gold. When they climb the peaks, they kick over rocks to search for untapped veins. When they picnic, they scan the creeks for shiny nuggets. Mention gold, and people go wild. Let them, I say, especially if it means they’ll need catered functions to celebrate their strikes.

Once everyone was flourishing a third or fourth crystal glass full of brew, I brought out the crab quesadillas with chili cilantro salsa. Macguire offered the hot mushroom caps stuffed with savory chicken sausage. Guests were all too happy to drool and consume. Fantastic! Scrumptious! Who cares about calories? We’re all going to get rich! It was great.

For a while after the display case was set up, I didn’t spot Mr. Magnetic, Tony Royce. Marla took time from her chatter with friends about her upcoming travel plans with Tony to wave me in the direction of bald Albert Lipscomb. With the miner’s hat and heavy jacket off, Albert appeared unexpectedly lithe and well-built. His slender chest was covered with a pale blue monogrammed shirt. His madras tie, seersucker jacket, yellow pants, and hand-sewn loafers couldn’t have screamed preppy more loudly if he’d been wearing a sign. While Macguire stopped to talk to Marla, I scooted toward Albert to offer the tray of quesadillas the first pass. Suck up to the high rollers, my cooking instructor had advised, or you’re going to have a brief career in catering.

“Marla tells me you’re recently married?” Albert said slowly after I’d introduced myself His light brown eyes regarded me seriously. “To a police officer? Is this true?”

I felt myself frowning. Was this a trick question? “Ah, yes. My husband works for Captain Shockley over there.”

Albert smiled painfully, showing small, even white teeth. “And will your husband be happy when Captain Shockley gets enough money in his Prospect account to retire?”

“Well… .”

“Never mind.” Again the pained grin. Lipscomb was trying, unsuccessfully, to find some common ground where we could banter. “So.” He took a deep breath. “Do you find yourself catering a lot of policemen’s picnics?”

“In this weather,” I replied sincerely, “I’d be happy to cater any picnics.”

“In that case… we’ll certainly keep you in mind,” he drawled, chuckling and giving me that same agonized smile. Kip yew ian mahnd. Although he was from Colorado and not the South, he apparently had picked up a southern accent during his years at the Citadel, where Marla mentioned Albert and Tony both had gone to school. Albert rubbed his free hand over his bald pate and droned on: “We’re always needing wonderful food like this. My grandfather was particularly fond of smoked meat. Is that Smithfield ham I smell?”

I mumbled something along the lines of “Not exactly,” and wondered if Macguire was listening to his Walkman instead of taking the bacon-wrapped artichokes out of the oven.

Albert Lipscomb moved past me to talk to Eileen Tobey, the new president of Aspen Meadow Bank and a loyal client of mine. Eileen winked at me and held up a glassful of raspberry-flavored beer in a silent toast. I smiled, nodded, and gave her a thumbs-up, even though I’d drink liver-flavored lemonade before indulging in raspberry beer. But I did treasure Eileen’s business. In the midst of my current downturn, she’d booked me for a small, regular catering job at her bank. If this Prospect party was a success, perhaps Eileen would want me to do a businesswomen’s luncheon event later in June… inside, that is… .

“Oh, Goldy!” gushed a nearby female voice. I turned from Albert and Eileen in time to see a gnarled hand reach out to stop me. “These Mexican pizza things are out pf this world! Did you make them? For someone with no formal chef training, you amaze me.” My heart sank. It was Edna Hardcastle.

Under the current slender-bookings circumstances, I decided to be eager to please. I turned a blinding smile toward Mrs. Hardcastle, a willowy, sixtyish woman whose swept-up henna hair and bright yellow polka-dotted suit with matching pumps were a vision of scarlet and yellow. Both the suit skirt and the pumps had become muddy en route to the tent. Her white-haired husband Whit – short for Whitaker, I’d learned when I catered at their cabin by Bride’s Creek last fall – shuffled uncomfortably and craned his long neck inside a I knotted tie that appeared to be decorated with spackling compound. On the other side of Edna stood a short, blond man I recognized as restaurateur Sam Perdue, the proprietor of Sam’s Soups in Aspen Meadow.

Sam’s Soups, a year-old eatery by the lake that I had not yet visited, must be doing awfully well, I thought. Sam had prepared the soup for the Hardcastles’ party in the fall, while the bulk of the preparation had fallen to me. But if Sam Perdue could afford to park his cash with Prospect Financial Partners, that meant he’d anted up the minimum investment of a hundred-thousand-dollars. Digging out my soup recipe file seemed suddenly appealing. “Sam?” I tried not to sound envious, merely curious. “Are you getting lots of orders for soup these days? I mean, because of the bad weather?”

“No,” he said softly. He didn’t appear to be eating anything, and his slender fingers held an iceless glass of water.

Mrs. Hardcastle, undeterred, raised her voice. “Usually the Prospect Partners have Cherry Creek Caterers. But… I understand CCC couldn’t make it all the way up here, so the partners called you, instead, Goldy.” Her tone made it clear who her first choice would have been.

“Oh, ah, well,” I started to reply apologetically, “actually it was Marla Korman…”

“On the other hand, you and Sam did such a lovely job last fall, catering the land preservation fund-raiser at our cabin. People are still talking about that roast pork with… whatever it was.”

“Cumberland sauce. I’m so pleased to hear this.” I tried to sound gracious, humble, and deserving of more bookings.

Mrs. Hardcastle went on wistfully, “The weather’s so dreadful this spring, I don’t know when we’ll get up to the cabin again… .”

Here it comes, I thought. You did a great job last year, but this year we can’t use you.

“It’s a lovely setting, Mrs. Hardcastle.” I wanted to say, Do the words Bride’s Creek make your daughter think of anything relating to her future? Instead, I assumed a concerned tone. “How is your daughter?”

“Let’s not talk about it, shall we?” Edna Hardcastle’s face twisted. “Let’s talk about…” Her pained gaze shifted to the mine opening, and she shuddered. She didn’t want to talk about investing in the Eurydice, either. Perhaps it was those nauseating memories of claustrophobia. She sniffed. “Oh, dear…”

“I’m sorry, I was just hoping that – “

“Goldy?” Edna Hardcastle’s voice was once again drenched with false cheer. “Are you an investor? I mean, do you invest in food concepts?” She paused, and her face became solemn. “Do you even understand food concepts?”

“Er, well, sort of.” I glanced at the gaggle of Prospect clients oohing and ahing over the gold bars in the display case. Maybe they hungered for some concept hors d’oeuvre. “It looks as if I might need to check the chafing dish and portable ovens – “

Edna dismissed my protest by waving a quesadilla in my face. “Tony Royce said you were going to taste the soups at Sam’s place. It’s a concept restaurant,” she said, with a knowing look at Sam Perdue. “And Tony’s thinking of bringing Prospect in. Have you done it yet?”

“Concept restaurant?” Sweat trickled down the inside of my caterer’s uniform. I knew the restaurant Sam managed was one in a chain. A very short chain, as in two. What was Edna talking about? This was not the time to figure it out, for the bacon smell was getting stronger. “Ah, no. Tony hasn’t mentioned my doing any tasting. Marla does his testing, anyway, or she used to –

“

I looked at Sam for help. He was obviously miserable. “I’m hoping the Prospect partners will take my chain public,” he murmured. “If Albert and Tony like my restaurant, it’ll mean I can stay in business.”

I nodded. So soups weren’t doing so well, either. I didn’t hold out much hope for Sam. Marla said people were always approaching Tony and Albert looking for investors. Which usually meant needing a quick cash bailout.

Edna quirked hennaed eyebrows that matched her hair. “I told Tony that food was a better investment than an abandoned mine!”

“Well, perhaps you should tell him again,” I murmured sympathetically as I scanned the tent for Macgulre.

“I did! I told him –”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “Mrs. Hardcastle? Thanks for the kind words and your… confidence in … food.” It was lame, but it was the best I could do. “I do need to be off now because I’ve really, really got something burning back here.”

With another sniff that didn’t speak well for my getting future bookings, Edna Hardcastle grasped one of Sam’s elbows, turned on the heel of one of her splattered yellow shoes, and strode away with Sam in tow. Whit Hardcastle patted his white hair, straightened his spackled tie, and waddled after her. Some rich people can’t abide it when a servant terminates a conversation, I’d found. They want the honor of doing that themselves. If I snubbed Mrs. Hardcastle, it would become town news. And I could not afford any bad news with my business in peril.

At the back of the tent, Macguire was cautiously removing the sheet of bubbling bacon hors d’oeuvre from the oven and muttering, “Uh-oh. I couldn’t tell how long they’d been in. There’s no timer on these ovens.”

“They’re okay,” I said as I eyed the glistening appetizers. I held up a paper-towel-covered platter. “Just use a spatula to scoop them out to drain.”

This Macguire did. I held a silver platter over the hors d’oeuvre, flipped the two trays, then handed the platter of wrapped artichokes back to him. He placed a bowl of the Dijon cream sauce in the center of the tray and lumbered off to the group gathered around the display case.

I visually searched the clutter behind the counter for the chafer I was going to use to reheat the shrimp dumplings. I had managed to sully the space with heaps of trays, pans of appetizers, and row upon row of beer bottles. To my surprise, I caught sight of Tony Royce. He was rummaging through the Cambro.

“Tony! Why aren’t you mingling with your guests?” Tony uncoiled his athletic body and frowned at me.

He gnawed on his perfectly trimmed bottle-brush mustache, brushed unseen lint from his khaki pants and khaki shirt, and smoothed his pouffed hair, which had not been flattened by the miner’s hard hat. He looked like Hitler with a blow-dry.

“Well, Goldy, they’re not all here, for one thing. For another, I don’t want to have to listen to Edna Hardcastle tell me how great Sam’s soups are. We’re going to look at the place, the clients know that. But Victoria tried them and she didn’t…” His voice trailed off, and his eyes darted back to the Cambro.

I wanted to be polite to Tony, since he was my employer for this particular shindig. I was also keenly interested to know what the late Victoria Lear’s involvement in food concepts might have been. But I had cooking to do and we were in the middle of a party. Besides, I didn’t want to argue with Tony – yet – about his appointing me to be Prospect’s taste tester to succeed Marla and the deceased financial officer.

“Look, can you help me?” His voice grew desperate. “I need a vodka martini to clear the mine dampness out of my head. I hate that god-awful place. Do you have a freezer back here with some Stoly? Am I looking in the wrong place?”

I smiled. The new test for machismo, I’d learned, was to take long draughts from an icy bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. Even more macho was to slug down the vodka while gobbling a plateful of jalapeno peppers. “Sorry, Tony. We’ve just got beer and coffee.” I finally spotted the chafer and hurried over to it. “What guests aren’t here?”

Tony frowned, popped the top off a bottle of stout, and took a long swig. Hey! I’m a guy, I don’t need a glass! “Who’s not here? Marla’s brother-in-law, for one thing. I’ve never even met the guy, but I sure have heard a lot about him.”

“General Farquhar?” I tried to conceal my surprise by opening the chafer cover in front of my face.

Tony paused with the stout bottle halfway to his lips and eyed me curiously. “Yeah, after the Medigen IPO got so much publicity, we had all kinds of people wanting to get into the Eurydice venture. Farquhar sent us a check and said he was too busy to come in.”

100 busy. Right. Too busy in jail. I pretended to be absorbed with the contents of the chafer. Thank heavens Macguire had already filled the bottom pan-the bain-marie—with hot water. Tiny bubbles floated promisingly upward. I heaved up the hotel pan with the shrimp dumplings and lowered it into place.

“Hey, Tony,” I said. “I need to borrow a watch. There’s no timer on the oven, and we almost burned the bacon appetizers.”

Bacon-Wrapped Artichokes

with Dijon Cream Sauce

5 artichoke bottoms (one 14-ounce can, drained)

10 slices center-cut bacon

3 tablespoons Dijon mustard

ź cup half-and-half or heavy cream

Preheat oven to 400°. Cut each artichoke bottom into 8 equal pie-shaped wedges. Cut each bacon slice into fourths. Wrap a piece of bacon around each artichoke wedge and secure with a toothpick. Place on a rimmed cookie sheet and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the bacon is crisp. Drain thoroughly. Combine the Dijon mustard with the cream and serve as a dipping sauce.

Makes 40.

Note: Occasionally cans of artichoke bottoms will contain 6, rather than 5 pieces. In that case, use 12 slices of bacon to make 48 appetizers.

Tony glanced at his gleaming Rolex. He said solemnly, “You’re not borrowing my watch.”

Okay, so his watch probably cost more than my van. I kept -my voice courteous. “Well, could you tell me when ten minutes is up?”

He nodded, swallowed the last of his stout, and popped the top off another. Albert Lipscomb’s bald head shone like an approaching beacon under the tent lights as he strode toward us. He put down a plate with a half-eaten quesadilla and leaned toward his partner.

“Tony, Captain Shockley wants to talk to us about Victoria,” Albert said in a low voice. Tony groaned and took a swig of stout from the new bottle. Albert persisted glumly: “He’s very upset. We need to talk to him.”

“My head’s full of damp air. He’s your friend. You talk to him.”

Albert sighed and rubbed his scalp. “Oh, all right.” But he didn’t have a chance. Marla strode up, pinched a wad of Albert’s madras jacket, and yanked him in the direction of the shed.

“I don’t want you to leave before we have a talk,” she announced. “About assay reports. Let’s go in here with the cap lamps and have a chat.”

Albert, dumbfounded, looked at Tony for help. Then his mournful eyes turned back to Marla. “I don’t understand what… what is so important – “

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Marla snapped. She let go of his jacket and put one hand on an ample hip. She shook her other hand in a furious fist under Albert Lipscomb’s nose.

“Wait, wait,” I implored, with a harried glance out at the center of the tent. “Don’t talk about this now. Don’t ruin the party. .

. .”

Tony was suddenly between the two of them. He lifted his dark eyebrows and bit his mustache. He murmured, “For heaven’s sake, guys, this is not the time…” He put his hands on Marla’s shoulders. “Please, sweetheart, you know you shouldn’t distress yourself. You could get sick – “

Marla shot him a withering glance and slapped his hands away. “I’ll talk to you later, Tony. This whole thing was his idea, not yours, and you’re being duped, too. So move back.”

Tony, aghast, took two steps away from them. Marla and Albert advanced in the direction of the corrugated metal shed. Or rather, that was as far as Marla could back Albert up. With a hasty glance at the guests, Tony followed them. I used tongs to move the dumplings around, keeping an eye on the confrontation. What had gotten into Marla? Couldn’t whatever it was wait?

“Absolutely not.” Albert’s voice rose in answer to something Marla had said. He laughed. The chuckle I’d heard earlier from him had been an awkward, uncomfortable one. The new one was derisive, as if Marla had told a particularly absurd joke. “You’re completely mistaken. The Kepler lab is well known, and totally reliable. It – “

“Oh, I don’t think I’m mistaken,” Marla sniped right back. “My source says the only reliable process is afire assay – “

Tony once more tried to intervene. “Marla, please. We can all sit down together – “

Albert snarled at Marla, “You bitch. What are you trying to do?”

She cried, “It is my money and my investment!” Macguire timidly knocked on the top of the dumpling chafer, as if that could gain him admittance to our uncomfortable little scene at the back of the tent. “Uh, that Captain Shockley guy doesn’t want to come back here and leave the display case out of his sight. But he just asked if there was some kind of problem – “

Tony must have seen Macguire and guessed his mission, for he hurried back over to the two of us. “No, no,” he said with a desperate wave to dismiss my assistant. “Nothing’s wrong. Tell anybody who asks that it’s about corn futures. Or something. Go pass around some more food. Please,” he added belatedly. Then he darted back to Marla and Albert.

I didn’t know if ten minutes had gone by, but I used the tongs to arrange a platter of hot dumplings for Macguire to distribute. At that moment, Albert adjusted the lapels of his madras jacket, lifted his chin, and shrugged mightily.

“And today I got the paperwork to prove it,” Marla shrilled. “But I had to have three glasses of that vile beer before I had the courage to come over here and confront you – !” Perhaps to make certain he was paying attention, she thumped his chest. Caught off guard, Albert dropped his glass, which shattered. Ale foamed across the tent floor. No, no, no, I thought uncharitably, I haven’t been paid yet.

“Look, guys,” Tony began again. “We need to postpone whatever discussion – “

“Shut up, Tony,” Marla snarled. I’d never seen her so enraged.

Albert Lipscomb turned away from Marla. Marla held up her index finger and continued to scold. A blare of sound erupted from the far side of the tent. The chink of glasses and babble of guest voices – not to mention the noise of this fracas – were suddenly drowned under the flood of violin music cascading from the portable speakers. Poor Macguire must have turned the volume way, way up. Over Vivaldi, I heard Marla yell, “And another thing!”

But Albert didn’t want to hear about the other thing. He stumbled past us, out into the rain. Marla stomped after him. Her crimped brown hair had shaken loose from the twinkling barrettes. Her green-and-gold silk dress drooped off one shoulder, and her bejeweled fingers were clenched. I rushed over to Tony’s side.

“Doggone it, do something,” I demanded.

“Like what? You saw how I tried,” he said sourly. “They won’t listen to me.”

The rain was changing to hail. With her recent medical history, Marla had no business being out in a hailstorm. I wiped my hands, now damp with fear, on my chef’s jacket. Surprised by the unexpected downpour of icy pebbles outside the tent, Albert Lipscomb wobbled on his pale loafers. Perhaps his sudden loss of equilibrium was owing to the beat of hailstones on his bald pate. He extended his long arms to get some balance, but the muddy road proved too slippery and he faltered. To my horror, Marla flew forward to try to catch him. He slipped from her grasp and careened sideways onto a car. Before he could stand up, Marla started yelling at him. The only word I could pick out was creep.

Tony smoothed his mustache and looked around to see if any guests were watching. He tried to appear nonchalant as he walked along the shed wall to the edge of the tent. With another cautious glance at the guests, he loped after his partner and his girlfriend. I doused the flame on the chafer and scooted around the counter. As inconspicuously as possible, I kicked the broken glass under the shed and headed for the edge of the tent. I needed this job: I was not about to let this party fall apart.

Out in the parking area, Marla reached into a pocket and flourished a sheet of paper at Albert and Tony. Tony talked rapidly while Albert stood with his arms crossed, his long, pale face a study in disgust. The three seemed impervious to the thickening wash of hail. Why, why, why? I wondered wildly, studying their furious faces. Albert snatched the paper from Marla’s hand and tossed it into the air. Hail thudded hard on the car roofs and the tent overhead. Oblivious, Marla and Albert continued to yell at each other.

Since Tony didn’t seem able to pry Marla and Albert apart, I thought I should try, but out of view of the guests. I yanked on the rope that would let down the tent flap. It wouldn’t budge. I signaled to Macguire to take over serving the food. A few guests were straining to get a glimpse of the contretemps outside, but thankfully, most were still looking at the gold, eating, drinking, and chatting.

I pulled again on the rope: no luck. I had to convince Marla and the partners to stop bickering, because it was not good for Marla to argue. Her excitable temper frequently got her into trouble, although she’d been doing better lately. One of her most notable fights, I recalled as I strode across the tent floor, had been with our violent ex-husband. When the Jerk had come at her with a rolling pin, she’d swung a hanging plant at him and dislocated his shoulder. But post-heart attack, she’d promised to stay cool no matter what the circumstances. I had to stay cool, too. No brawls, I promised myself.

I opened the storage shed’s flimsy door and peered into the dark interior space, as if I needed to search out more supplies. My footsteps gritted over the dirty floor as I rushed past rows of hard hats, wide belts, and what looked like cloth-covered flasks. When I opened the outer door, I gasped as hail hit my cheeks. I blinked and trotted through the jumble of parked four-wheel-drive vehicles. Attempting a shortcut, I headed through a mass of shrubbery and promptly got caught in a web of branches. Breathing hard and shivering, I untangled my damp skirt from several sandcherry bushes and considered dashing back to the tent. But the raised voices spurred me on.

“Don’t try to tell me what I don’t understand! You’re this mine’s promoter, Albert!” Marla’s normally husky voice cracked with rage. “I trusted you!”

Marla and Albert stood inches apart. Like boxers in the thirteenth round, both swayed slightly. Whatever their argument was about, it had exhausted them both. Tony stood off to one side, his head in his hands.

Marla’s wet dress was plastered to her body and her damp hair had slipped askew in weedlike clumps. Lean-built Albert Lipscomb staggered uncertainly. I suddenly wished I’d had the means to call 911 while I was under the tent. But Arch is always scolding me for overreacting. Marla and Albert hadn’t hit each other. They’d only been arguing. At least, I hoped they were only arguing.

“I swear… I swear…” Albert’s voice had hardened. Ah sweah, ah sweah … Without warning, he straightened. “The Eurydice is going to produce!” he yelled. The Yer-ih-dahsey. “You don’t understand, this mine was closed by the government during the height of its gold production! The assays show an average of two troy ounces of gold per ton of ore! Do you have any idea how good that is? When are you going to listen to me?”

Tony dropped his hands from his face and groaned. He said, “Could we please, please discuss this down at the office?”

Marla ignored Tony, ducked, and scooped up the sodden paper Albert had thrown into the mud, “But… but… look at this report!” she shouted. “The only way to test ore reliably for gold is to do a fire assay. This guy at the Colorado School of Mines says – “

“Oh, dear God,” Tony grumbled. “I do not believe this. Do not, do not. If you just would have let me – “

“What the hell is this?” Marla screeched, undeterred. She thrust the sodden, muddy sheet under Albert’s nose. “What difference does it make if you have the best geologist in the universe? You have to have a good assay! I want my hundred thousand dollars back, you scum! Tony says you’ve got it!”

“Do something!” I begged Tony.

Tony’s mouth hung open beneath his bedraggled mustache. His eyes were on Marla. He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Marla, will you listen to me?” Albert protested angrily. “That might be from the wrong – “

I’d had enough. “Okay, look,” I told Tony. “I’ll get : Marla. You get him.”

Tony snapped to attention and nodded. Tall and thin as a whippet, he strode obediently in his partner’s direction. I approached Marla, shaking my head. I couldn’t imagine what they’d say down at her cardiac rehab program Monday morning. Of course, it was unlikely that she would tell them she’d engaged in an ear-splitting dispute with her financial adviser. In a hailstorm, no less.

“Look, just go home,” Tony shouted to Albert through the spatter of hail. He glanced nervously toward the tent. He seemed suddenly frantic that this collection of guests – their best clients – not end in disaster. A few partygoers had gathered by the unbudgeable flap to watch the sideshow. Tony lowered his voice. “For heaven’s sake, look at you, Albert. You’re going to get pneumonia. So will Marla if I don’t take care of her. Please go home. We’ll talk later, okay?”

Albert yanked away from him and wiped hail off his bald head. “You’ve got a problem, Tony! And your problem is that lying woman! I am leaving this party, you bet! I will be delighted to leave!” De-lahted. And with that he tucked his wet blue shirt into his yellow trousers, straightened his tie, and slogged through the mud in the direction of his car. Tony shot after him.

I put my arms around Marla and murmured what I hoped were calming words. Her skin was cold and wet and she was shivering. Still, she wrenched herself away from my grasp and hollered after Albert’s retreating form. “I want to see you, you creep! Monday morning, nine A.M.! Do you hear me? And have a reliable assay report ready for me! Or else!”

Albert Lipscomb did not acknowledge her challenge. I looked back at the curious partygoers gaping at the quarrel. A huge argument, caterer in the middle, I imagined them thinking. Must be something Goldilocks’ Catering did wrong, don’t you think?

Marla screeched: “Nine sharp, Albert, at your office! With the paperwork! Have you got that? Nobody steals from me!”

“Some crummy idea this party was, Marla!” Albert flung over his shoulder. He was drenched and mud-spattered. Beside him, even handsome Tony didn’t I look much better. Albert added with vicious gusto, “You! Your friend! Weird beer! And who ever heard of crab quesadilla?”

The partygoers all burst out laughing. Hello, failure.

3

Pain descended on my head. Until Albert hollered his criticism, I tried to convince myself as I watched him stumble off, the party had been going well. No matter what he claimed, the guests had seemed to be enjoying the crab quesadillas, the tomato-Brie pie, even the raspberry-flavored beer. But when the clients’ attention became riveted to the parking lot, the festive atmosphere underwent a sea change. The Vivaldi ended and the pleasant chattering stopped. The only noise was the sifting sound of hail changing back to rain.

I gritted my teeth as Albert’s car engine caught and growled away. Tony hustled over to Marla and hoarsely commanded me to take care of the guests. Marla was gasping.

“I can’t seem to catch my breath,” she said. “I can’t…”

“All right,” I told Tony, “see if you can find some towels and warm her up in the large shed. You have a cell phone on you?” He mumbled something unintelligible as he held onto Marla with one hand and groped in one of the khaki pockets with the other.

When he finally handed me the flip phone, I tucked it into my apron and returned to the tent. The clients parted to let me through. Without Tony or Marla to query, they watched my every movement with narrowed, suspicious eyes. Whispers rose all around. What happened? they asked each other. What’s going on? What was the fight about? And chief among their questions: Is there a problem with the mine? To each person who tried to corner me, I replied cheerfully, “Oh, just a little disagreement. Something about corn futures, I think.” Ha. Serious and somewhat sullen, the clients reluctantly turned their attention to Macguire. He had assumed a blank expression and was dutifully serving ales to go with the dumplings.

I made a clandestine call to Marla’s cardiologist. The answering service replied that Dr. Lyle Gordon was in surgery but should be able to call back within half an hour.

Tony Royce reappeared in the tent and murmured to me that Marla was resting. His thin face was tight with strain. Marla’s breathing, he reported, was back to normal. Tony then moved through the crowd – touching arms, patting backs – like a politician visiting the site of a tornado. I could just hear his reassurances: Everything is fine, fine, there’s only a silly dispute about a stray piece of ore. Yes, that beer might muddle people’s thinking! And then, sadly, Oh, undoubtedly. Everyone’s on edge since we lost poor Victoria.

I heaped freshly ground coffee into the filter for the large pot, plugged it in, and set out paper cups. When I could slip away, I visited Marla. Wrapped in frayed, mismatched towels, she was sitting in front of a space heater in a tin-lined bathroom. Her limp green silk dress hung on a bent nail close to the heater. Near tears, she said in a thick voice that she didn’t want to talk about that damn Albert. That slime-ball! That bald buzzard! How dare he—! But no, she wasn’t going to talk about it. She gasped and plunged right back into talking about it. Me, Tony, everybody – we’re just being swindled! But Tony won’t listen! He and Albert have been friends since they went to that damn military school! I begged her to calm down. She took a deep breath and vowed that she would. She was going to leave as soon as the clients had departed and her accursed dress was somewhere close to dry.

When the appetizers were gone, Macguire trundled through the tent collecting debris. I poured the first cups of coffee and busied myself arranging a tray of white chocolate truffles and fudge wrapped in gold foil. Finally, Dr. Gordon beeped the cellular. I handed the desserts to Macguire. The good doc seemed not in the least surprised to hear that Marla Korman, the most irascible cardiac patient in the history of Southwest Hospital, had become involved in a blistering debate with a party guest. Didn’t I remember, he asked mildly, what had happened after the atherectomy? Marla, citing her generosity to the hospital, had demanded a private room, a private nurse, and meals sent in from a delicatessen fifteen miles away. Yes, I told her doctor as I watched Macguire circulate with the truffle tray, I remembered. And didn’t I recall that Marla had threatened to whack him, Dr. Lyle Gordon, with her IV if he didn’t let her out of the hospital earlier than he felt was advisable? Ah, no, I wasn’t there for that part. I merely had a vivid memory of the time she’d threatened from her hospital bed to cut off Southwest Hospital from future gifts.

That warning had produced both the services and the discharge her damaged heart desired.

Was Marla having chest pains or any trouble breathing now, Dr. Gordon wanted to know? I asked her; she was not. Make sure she gets rest, Gordon ordered crisply, especially since she’s taking this cockamamie trip to Rome with her art appreciation group next week. Right, right, I replied, I was taking her home to lie down. And make sure she’s taken today’s dose of lnderal. lnderal, I repeated. A beta-blocker, Dr. Gordon elaborated. She needed to have it every day. And make sure she has a little something to eat, but no artificial food colorings in any form. She had a food allergy, he reminded me. We didn’t want her heart revving up. I replied that I was well acquainted with the food allergy. Would she be in for her regular rehab appointment on Monday? Yes, yes, I said meekly, wondering whether that would be before or after the scheduled office confrontation with Albert Lipscomb. Make sure Marla doesn’t get into any more quarrels, Dr. Gordon concluded ominously. Fat chance, I said with a laugh that probably didn’t jibe with the cardiologist’s idea of comedy.

When the guests finally departed, Macguire and I worked rapidly to clean up the trash and pack up the soiled pans and platters. Marla reported that she felt better and that her dress was almost wearable. After some discussion, Captain Shockley and Tony Royce began to dismantle the display of gold ore and bars. Since I’d been too busy to examine the brilliant samples at close range, I brought my garbage bag over to the case.

“Come on and take a look,” Tony invited me. His brown eyes were merry. He looked as dapper as ever, and his anguish over the Marla-Albert conflict had evaporated. Maybe Prospect clients violently disagreed with the partners all the time, and he was used to handling confrontations. Smiling, he held a chunk of ore out to me. I put down the garbage bag and took it.

Thick gold streaks ran through the gray rock. I turned the lump over. The glittering bands widened on the stone’s other side. In grade school, Arch had learned about the history of mining in our state. When the Cub Scouts had visited the nearby Edgar Mine, Arch had been in heaven. Until the moment that I held that deliciously shiny chunk of gold ore in my hands, I had never felt even the slightest interest in Colorado gold mining. Suddenly, I was captivated.

“Nice, isn’t it?” asked Tony pleasantly. “Now take a look at a bar of unpolished doré gold. This is how gold ore looks when it’s been refined.”

He handed me a heavy, grainy-textured gold bar with a crusty, rippled underside. I found myself wondering how much it was worth.

“Hoohoo!” called Marla. Wearing the much-rum- pled green dress, she waved to me from behind the counter with the portable ovens. “I’m leaving!”

“Want me to follow you?” Tony called.

“No, no,” she cried back. “Goldy will!”

“It’s nice,” I said to Tony, and handed the pebble-surfaced bar back to him. “Do you mind if my assistant oversees this last bit of the cleanup? The rental company will be by within the hour to pick up the ovens, the tent, and the rest of the equipment. I know I’d feel better following Marla home in my van. To make sure she gets there safely, you know.”

“No problem,” Tony said as he loaded the last of the samples and bars into the second oversize backpack. He smiled. “You’re a good friend, Goldy. Tell Marla I’ll call her later.”

Captain Shockley grunted, “What kind of car does that woman own, that you have to follow her? Isn’t she a good driver?”

“She has a four-wheel-drive Mercedes,” I replied crisply. “But she’s had a heart attack, so – ” Wait a minute. Why did I feel I had to explain myself to this man?

“Four-wheel-drive Mercedes, huh?” said Shockley as he hefted one of the packs onto his back. His bulging eyes peered in the direction of the parking lot. “Where’d she get the money for that?”

I walked away. Let Tony explain Marla’s financial situation to Shockley. I’d had enough for one day.

Macguire promised to finish up. He’d be coming over in the morning, he said, to discuss a new job not related to catering. What new job, I asked. But he only put a finger to his lips. A secret. Great.

I guided Marla to her car, ignoring her fierce protests that she didn’t want to be babied. The van sputtered and coughed as I followed my friend’s taillights to her home in the Aspen Meadow Country Club area. At least the rain had finally let up. I fixed Marla some crackers and herb tea while she got ready for bed. When I went up to her bedroom with the tray, she was under the covers, looking remorseful and sorting a bright pile of cosmetics and jewelry. But I knew better than to get her riled up again by asking what had started the altercation with Albert in the first place.

“Did you take your Inderal?” I asked. When she nodded, I said, “Hey, I’m pooped. But it was a super party,” I added with false conviction. “Those folks drank a lot of beer. And you really looked gorgeous in the silk. Besides, I don’t think anybody’s really going to remember – “

“Oh yeah, it was just a marvelous party,” she interrupted, avoiding my eyes. “I didn’t have a thing to eat, and my new dress is ruined.” Pink plastic bottles and gold lipstick containers cascaded from her hands. “This pile is for the fishing trip I’m taking with Tony,” she said lightly. “We decided to move it up, to get a break, just the two of us.” She fingered a smoky white plastic bottle of cream. “But this large pile is for Rome, where I am going without Tony.” She exhaled in exasperation.

“He gave me your check for the party, Goldy, because I told him you needed it right away. It’s on the bureau. “Look, Marla, you didn’t have to – “

She stopped dividing containers and finally looked up at me with doleful, red-rimmed eyes. I felt a pang. She looked years older than she had when she arrived at the Prospect Financial party that afternoon. “Don’t start. Some people don’t honor their financial commitments. Tony’s not one of them, you’ll be happy to know. Neither am I.”

“I’m already aware of that fact. But – ” Her dark eyes flashed.. “That Lipscomb moron thinks I’m stupid. That’s the problem. Partner’s girlfriend? Got a lot of money? She’s ripe.”

“Can’t Tony – “

“No, Tony can’t anything. I tried to convince him that Albert’s up to something. He wanted to know who’d called the assay into doubt. ‘What makes you think there’s no gold in the mine?’ he asked me. ‘Our geologist is the most highly respected in the state.’ Now he wants to have all of the ore they’ve brought out analyzed by a different lab, in case the Kepler lab down in Henderson, Nevada, is some kind of fraud joint.”

“Whoa,” I said. “I know an assay is an analysis of ore that tells you what metals are in it, and what the concentrations are. So what’s the problem?”

“Gold is an element, my friend,” she replied. “You have to heat up the ore to separate out the good stuff. It’s what’s called a fire assay. Any lab that tells you they can figure out what’s in your ore without a fire assay is lying.”

I sighed. “But all these Prospect clients have put up a ton of money. I mean, they’re not dumb, are they?”

Marla went on: “I don’t know. I didn’t tell Tony I’d paid good old nineteen-year-old Macguire to get the copy of the assay analyzed by a student down at the Colorado School of Mines. Maybe Macguire’s friend doesn’t know enough about assaying yet.” Her forehead wrinkled. “I guess I shouldn’t have looked at the report before the party began.”

“Tony probably wouldn’t believe Macguire was your source. And you’re right, Tony and Albert will put even less stock in what a student says. I mean, over their fancy geologist.”

Marla deposited the jewelry and cosmetics into two plastic bags and fluffed her coverlet. “You think? Well, Tony promised me everything would be fine. They’d get it all sorted out. That mine was producing gold during the Second World War, and FDR had it closed down with that order of his, what was it, L-two-oh-eight?”

“I’m sorry, the Roosevelt administration is not my area of expertise, although I understand Harry Truman liked buttermilk pie.”

She sighed at my ignorance. “All nonessential mineral mines were closed. FDR wanted only copper, zinc, and lead. For bullets, isn’t that depressing? Albert’s grandfather swore the place was, well, a gold mine. So now Albert swears that with the discoveries they’ve made, by putting capital into the place to bring the mine back into production, we’re all going to be rich as blazes.”

I decided not to say, But you already are rich as blazes. -… In any event I didn’t resent her inherited wealth. She was generous, even carefree, about giving it away. Besides, to me, Marla’s riches were a very clear object lesson that money didn’t buy happiness.

“Anyway,” she went on, “if the gold thing pans out, ha ha, I may become Midas yet.” She frowned. “Except the student at the School of Mines says it’s a red flag when you get an assay that’s not a fire assay. Tony promised me that Albert will get it all worked out. Maybe the early ore samples weren’t as promising as Albert claims, or maybe the assay is from the wrong place… . Do you believe that?”

I didn’t know what to think, but I didn’t say so. It was getting late. I made sympathetic clucking noises and promised to call soon. Then I revved up the van and tried to put the party out of my mind. As I drove out of the country club, I turned on my wipers. The rain had turned to large flakes of snow that splatted on my windshield. Welcome to June fifth in the high country.

At home, my dear, wonderful husband Tom looked delighted to see me. His greeting was the first good thing to happen to yours truly all day. He grinned widely, opened the back door, and relieved me of the first box of dirty pans. I felt the anxiety of the afternoon slide away. Tom’s large body was encased in a sea green terry-cloth robe I had bought him for our first anniversary. It matched his green eyes, which twinkled in his handsome face. I scooted back to the van and brought the second box of pans through the softly falling snow. Tom was cooking, and I couldn’t wait to see what delicacy he’d put together. It is a truism of the culinary world that the caterer never has a chance to eat until all the food is cold, picked over, or gone. When I came back into the kitchen, Tom had set out two fluted champagne glasses and a large bottle of bubbly.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “The caterer doesn’t have that successful event look on her face.” He took the last load from my arms, set the carton on the counter, and wrapped me in one of his warm, tight hugs.

“Gosh, I need this,” I murmured into his warm shoulder that smelled of soap. “It was not only unsuccessful. It was horrible.”

He drew back, and I wanted to say, Lord, but you’re gorgeous, but decided to save it. He gave me a look of deep sympathy. “Weather ruin things?”

“No. Marla nearly got into a fistfight with the host.”

“Gee,” he said with jovial sarcasm. He let me go and squeezed my hand. “What else is new? Hold on a minute.”

I eyed the counter while Tom worked to open the champagne. He appeared to be making cookies. But what kind of treat contained whole wheat flour, nonfat dry milk, and liver powder? Something that went with champagne? I said, “I’m afraid to ask what you’re making. Health cookies?”

He popped the cork. “Not cookies. Homemade dog biscuits. For Jake.” He smiled.

“Oh, Tom, you have got to be kidding.” He put down the champagne bottle and brandished a large cookie cutter in the shape of a dog bone. He wasn’t kidding. As he poured, I glanced at the kitchen clock – it was almost one – and sank into one of our kitchen chairs. Tom had put out a crusty loaf of sourdough bread and a large wedge of Bel Paese cheese. He handed me a glass full of spritzy bubbles.

Jake’s Dog Biscuits

2 ˝ cups whole wheat flour

˝ cup powdered milk

˝ teaspoon garlic powder

˝ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon brown sugar

6 tablespoons margarine or shortening

1 egg, beaten

3 tablespoons liver powder

˝ cup ice water

Preheat oven to 350°. In a large bowl, combine flour, powdered milk, garlic powder, salt, and sugar. Cut in shortening. Mix in egg, then add liver powder. Add ice water until mixture forms a ball. Pat out dough ˝ inch thick on a lightly oiled cookie sheet. Cut with any size cutter and remove scraps. Bake 30 minutes. Cool before serving.

“Here’s to good work situations,” he said seriously, raising his glass.

I clinked my glass against his and sipped. “Speaking of which. I saw Shockley.”

“Please don’t ruin my cooking experience,” he said with the same jolly sarcasm. He turned enthusiastically back to the dog biscuit dough. “And before you say one word, I’ll tell you why I’m doing this. Jake needs to trust us. So we’ve got to pamper him. Show him that we care.”

“I certainly hope making homemade dog biscuits at one o’clock in the morning does the trick.”

Undiscouraged, Tom grinned again. “Besides that, Shockley made me so damn mad yesterday, I’m thinking of having his secretary give him some of these with his coffee Monday morning.”

I groaned. Would that idiot police chief never stop bothering my husband? “Now what?”

“First tell me about your party. The food turned out all right, didn’t it? Did the tent and ovens get there on time? How about Macguire?”

I briefly recapped the evening’s events, concluding with my worry that Marla’s erratic behavior might lead to another bout with heart disease.

“Trouble with an assay?” Tom frowned. “Why didn’t she ask Tony about it before confronting Albert?”

I sipped the champagne. “Discretion and tact have never been Marla’s long suits, Tom. Besides, the mine is Albert’s baby, not Tony’s. Anyway, I’m sure that now she wishes she had had a tete-a-tete with Tony instead of bawling out his partner in front of everybody.”

“This is going to put the captain in a foul mood,” Tom mused. “Glad he’ll have the rest of the weekend to think about it.”

“You mentioned that he had upset you.”

“Upset me? Upset me? You mean, after I’ve worked two months on the case against David Calvin, the fact that Shockley has ruined it for me has upset me? Nah.”

David Calvin had shot and killed his ex-wife not five miles from our home. Calvin hadn’t liked the fact that his ex was going out with somebody, so he’d shot the boyfriend, too. The boyfriend had been in a coma for two months. I knew that Tom had recovered Calvin’s murder weapon and vehicle, and had been confident about getting a conviction.

“Oh, Tom, don’t tell me. What did Shockley do now?”

Tom heaved a huge sigh and fingered his glass. “We have investigative keys. What that means is, say we know a guy was wearing a black shirt, that he used a thirty-two, that he shot the victim four times. Those facts are the keys. They are secret. Very, very secret. The reason we don’t divulge the keys is that we use them in questioning the suspect. Say we ask about the weapon, without being specific. The guy says, ‘But I don’t even own a thirty-two!’ Then we know we’ve got our guy.”

The kitchen began to fill with a savory, homemade-bread aroma. Lucky Jake. I cut myself a slice of sourdough, smeared it with the creamy cheese, and waited for Tom to continue.

“Shockley was so proud of all the work we’ve – no, wait – the work I’ve done, that he blabbed about it to a lawyer friend of his. The captain needs to impress people. Anyway, that attorney just became the court-appointed defense lawyer for David Calvin.” He took a last swig of champagne. “Good-bye, case.”

“No, no,” I protested. “You’ve got other evidence, you’ve got – “

“Trust me,” he said as he brought the sheet of warm bone-shaped biscuits out of the oven. “You lose the keys, you’ve lost the case.”

I rinsed our glasses while he set the biscuits on racks to cool.

“I’m going to take a shower,” I murmured in his ear. “And then I want to have some fun.”

“Oh, woman,” he said with a chuckle. “You better make that a quick shower.”

The snow turned back to rain that pattered on the roof as we made love. Afterward, I snuggled into Tom’s arms, my hair still damp from the fast shower. As I felt his warmth surround me, I pondered what kind of wonderful man would take the time to make biscuits for my son’s new dog after two months of work had been ruined and a killer might go free.

4

Sunday morning I was startled awake by an ungodly canine howl. At first I thought the sound was a dream. Maybe it was the Hound of Heaven’s wail, promising divine retribution. Or perhaps it was the bellow of the I Hound of the Baskervilles, on the trail of a hapless victim.

It was neither. It was good old Jake, the hound of Arch. Our much-desired-although-not-by-me canine pet had a problem with allowing people to sleep. Apparently Tom had already succumbed; I could hear the familiar clinking of dishes as he worked in the kitchen. I rolled over and covered my head with a pillow so I didn’t have to see the still-falling rain. I didn’t resent Jake, I told myself, because Arch loved him. And Tom was working hard with Arch to rehabilitate the dog. I knew I shouldn’t feel like Scrooge, but I did.

The sheriffs department had branded Jake an unreliable bloodhound. When the dog’s handler of many years retired, the new handler insisted Jake had lost the scent on three consecutive trails. Jake fell into disrepute, was released from his Furman County K-9 unit, and ended up in a kennel. When the hound lost weight and became despondent, an activist group of dog-lovers obtained his release from the department and put him up for adoption. Seizing an opportunity, Tom had brought Jake home last month. Brought him home gleefully. Unrepentantly. As if to mock me, Jake raised his howl an octave and several decibels.

I burrowed under the handmade king-size quilt Tom had presented to me on our first anniversary. Yes, I loved Tom, I 10ved him to pieces. I just didn’t love Jake, even if my good-hearted husband had brought him home because my son had been pleading for a pet from time immemorial. Now the two males in my life seemed to have found new meaning in nursing the wretched animal back to mental and physical health. Unfortunately, despite a layer of batting over my ears, I could still hear unreliable, untrustworthy, unhappy Jake. Perhaps he needed to share his misery.

He wasn’t the only one who wasn’t happy this morning. Depression surfaced. I wished Tom were back in our warm bed, so I could forget the feeling of defeat that inevitably comes on the morning after a bad catered event. Disrupted party, no bookings, sullied reputation looming. Not to mention the possibility of going out of business. I groaned. Even a bloodhound’s plaintive wail couldn’t drown out the memory of Marla screeching. Now, six too-short hours later, I was in no mood to order Jake-reincarnated-from-the-Baskervilles to be quiet. Not that the The Howler would pay the slightest attention to me, anyway.

As I hauled myself out of bed, I remembered I had a solitary booking for the day – an anniversary dinner for the Kirby-Joneses, buyers for a local gift store who had just returned from Kenya. Weddings and anniversaries were usually my bread and butter in June. This June, however, it seemed as if people either were not getting married, were getting divorced, or were celebrating their anniversaries in Fiji. Today’s job would be the perfect antidote for worry. I had been thankful for it, even though it had posed a few problems.

I stretched through my yoga routine and recalled all the fun Macguire and I had had planning the menu for the Kirby-Joneses. Twenty-five years ago, well-wishers at their wedding reception had so besieged the newlywed K-Js that the bride and groom had left Washington’s Congressional Country Club ravenous. So we drove and drove, and then we stopped and had this wonderful Italian food, Mrs. Kirby-Jones had wistfully informed me at our planning meeting. It was at a marvelous place called Guido’s on Rockville Pike. I wore my pink dress with the double-orchid corsage.

As it turned out, the Kirby-Joneses desired a menu offering Italian items that exactly matched the dinner they’d had right after their wedding reception. I’d promptly acquiesced. After all, most. food orders are emotionally based.

I moved from the yoga asana known as the Sun Greeting to some leg stretches. I recalled poor Macguire’s unhappy face when he’d reported back to me. His painstaking investigations had revealed that Guido’s-on-the-Pike in Rockville, Maryland, had gone out of business over a decade ago. Guido, now deceased, hadn’t bequeathed any menus to his heirs. Of course, I had not revealed these details to Mrs. Kirby-Jones. As I said, I was frantic for work. I just need to know what you ordered, I’d said confidently to my new client. Don’t give it a second thought, I’d maintained, we’ll ask the restaurant for their recipes and it’ll taste just like Guido’s. With what I considered promising resourcefulness, Macguire had located a single back issue of Gourmet that contained Guido’s-on-the-Pike recipe for Bolognese sauce. So now I was committed to serving pizza with goat cheese, ravioli in white wine cream sauce, lasagne verde with Bolognese sauce, tossed salad, Italian bread, and tiramisu to twenty people. But in April, when I’d booked the event, hoping we could serve dinner on the Kirby-Joneses’ expansive deck, I hadn’t figured on an incessant downpour on June 6. Maybe that was why Jake was howling. Somebody had left him out in the rain. I wanted to howl, too.

Coffee, I thought. I need coffee. I finished dressing for church and went in search of caffeine and the rest of the household. The only family member I could find was Scout the cat, a stray I’d adopted two years ago. He was crouched in a window well watching Jake bark. I would have sworn the cat was delighted to observe the dog’s misery. To date, Scout had made no sign of forgiving us for adopting the hound.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, and stroked his back. know you would have preferred a gerbil.”

Scout’s response was the scathing feline equivalent of hrumph.

“Mom?” came Arch’s voice from behind me. “Why I are you talking to the cat about rodents?”

My son’s appearance this morning was a jumble of tortoiseshell glasses magnifying brown eyes, freckles, tousled brown hair topped with a baseball cap worn backwards, sweatpants, and a too-long, crookedly hanging orange poncho. “Well, Mom?” he said in the reproachful tone he often took with me these days. He straightened his glasses on his freckled nose and waited.

“I feel sorry for Scout. Why is that dog howling, anyway?”

Arch peered out the window and adjusted his cap. “He’s not that dog. Jake’s just excited.”

“About what?”

“About going out with Tom and me.”

“Out where? Aren’t you coming with me to church?”

Arch frowned. “We’re going on a mission, actually. Tom took me to the five o’clock church service yesterday. Jake is feeling a lot better, and not acting so …you know, nervous. We wanted to see if he could get his trust level back.” He paused. When I didn’t protest his attempt to rehabilitate Jake, he plowed on. “Listen, General Farquhar called while you were gone last night. I told him about getting Jake. He wants us to come visit.”

“Who’s ‘us’?” I asked. I hated sounding like an interrogator, but when it came to General Bo Farquhar, there wasn’t much choice. The only guest who isn’t here is General Farquhar, Tony Royce had said. Says he’s too busy. Really. General Bo, who also happened to be Marla’s brother-in-law, had recently finished his prison sentence for possessing rocket-propelled grenades, a large quantity of C-4, Kalashnikovs, Uzis, and all kinds of other contraband. Until he became settled, the general was staying on the estate of some friends who were adapting military technology for law enforcement. I’d heard their thousand-acre spread west of Aspen Meadow was surrounded by closed-circuit cameras and a nine-foot electrical fence. Not the place you wanted to send your son with his untrustworthy dog for a pleasant afternoon romp in the pouring rain.

“Listen, Mom, General Bo says he’s real depressed. He was hoping you could bring him something made with chocolate, since the people who’re taking care of him don’t like it or don’t have it or something. His phone number’s down in the kitchen. Anyway. Gotta fly.” His high-topped black sneakers made squishing noises as he fled before I could raise any more objections.

“Arch, please tell me where you’re going. I won’t veto it. Even though it’s raining, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

The orange poncho rustled as Arch’s short legs hastened down the hallway. “Better ask Tom,” he threw back over his shoulder. “I have to go make sure we have everything. Jake’s getting impatient.”

No kidding. I glanced at my reflection in one of Tom’s antique mirrors, and wondered if what folks said about owners looking like their pets would come to pass. I was still a short, slightly chunky thirty-three-year-old with unfashionably curly blond hair and brown eyes. Jake, on the other hand, boasted a sleek brown body, a long nose, droopy eyes and ears, and a perpetually slobbery mouth. All these attributes, my son had enthusiastically reported, helped him smell better. I pressed my lips together. I wished I liked Jake more, since he made Arch so happy. When I’d divorced his father six years ago, Arch had started begging for a pet. But I was freshly single, financially shaky, and struggling to launch a new catering business, not to mention a new emotional life, and I couldn’t face the idea of tending an animal. I couldn’t picture tearing up endless heads of lettuce for guinea pigs or listening to hamsters race all night on their little wheels. Back then, it was all I could do to maintain myself and Arch and handle the food preparation for nervous clients.

I remembered the rainy day last month when Tom had arrived with Jake. The prospect of caring for an emotionally distraught and out-of-work bloodhound in addition to running my not-so-healthy catering business had been too much. I’d threatened to stick my head into the proofing oven with the cinnamon rolls. I was prevented from doing so by Jake’s enthusiastic scrabbling up the cabinet door. Then his not-always-reliable olfactory gland directed him toward the oven, and his powerful legs and body shoved me out of the way as he moved in closer to the rolls. Apparently, Jake loved the smell of cinnamon.

I sighed and entered the kitchen. The delectable smell of lemon and cherries mingled. Outside, Jake yowled away from his doghouse. Rain spat against the windows. My kitchen was warm and snug and smelled terrific. Still, my mood failed to improve.

Tom was setting a single place with a flowered Limoges plate. Hearing my sigh, he shot me an appraising look. Like Arch, he wore a tentlike fluorescent orange poncho. I couldn’t imagine what they were planning to do in the rain to restore Jake’s shattered ability to trust humans. Clearly, homemade dog biscuits were not enough. Tom gave me his usual jaunty smile. His sand-colored hair was damp. Perhaps he’d already tried to quiet the dog outside, to no avail. Seeing my forlorn look, his handsome face and green eyes softened.

“Morning, Miss G.” He pressed the button on the espresso machine while his other big hand reached for a diminutive cup. “Not feeling too happy? How about, some coffee cake? Be out in five minutes.”

I sighed again. “Sure.”

“Now, sit down and have some caffeine. We’re going to be going out pretty quick here. Marla called. She wants you to go down to the Prospect office with her tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, great.” I gratefully sipped the dark, crema-laden espresso he handed me. “I’ll be the referee between Marla and Albert Lipscomb. Sounds like loads of fun, huh?”

“You know, I’ve been thinking. I know I’ve heard of Albert Lipscomb,” Tom said pensively as he removed the golden brown, cherry-studded cake from the oven. The fruity, buttery-rich scent was indescribable. “I mean, you told me he’s Royce’s partner, but there was some other context. It’s been a while, though.”

“What other context?”

He frowned. “Did he invest in goats? Or goat cheese?”

I laughed. “Not to my knowledge.”

He sniffed the cake. “Listen, I just realized Arch and I won’t be able to help you pack up for your event this afternoon. I know it’s a big deal for you – “

“My dear, it’s the only deal for me until I take muffins to the bank on Friday.”

“No, no, you had two other calls besides the one from Marla.”

I sighed once more. “Arch already told me about General Farquhar.”

He slapped the cake onto a cooling rack and rummaged in his back pocket for his trusty spiral notebook. “People named Trotfield, they’re Prospect Financial investors who say they loved your food at the mine yesterday. They’re friends of Tony’s or Albert’s, I think. They need you for a dinner party this week. The husband is flying to Rio for five days, and they want to give him a big sendoff. They need you because their chef, an illegal alien from Sri Lanka, skipped.” He gave me a wide grin. “I didn’t tell Mrs. Trotfield I was from the sheriff’s department. Didn’t want to jeopardize your booking. Here’s their number.”

I took the sheet from him. “Yeah, I know them. He used to be a pilot for Braniff, wife has the money, now he flies charters. Thanks loads. What else?”

“Aspen Meadow Women’s Club. Dinner meeting on home improvement, tomorrow. The club president, Janelle Watkins, called. She wanted your cheapest chicken dinner, keep it under twenty bucks a head. I said I thought you had a standard menu and Ms. Watkins begged me to fax it to her with a contract. Seize the day and all that. Didn’t want her calling some caterer in Denver.” He handed me two slick pages from the fax machine, one with my chicken dinner menu, the set prices, and contract stipulations – all signed by Janelle Watkins – the other a photocopy of Janelle Watkins’s Visa.

I said admiringly, “Very good, Tom. But why the short notice?”

“Well, the club vice president was going to make the food, but seems she had a tiff with President Janelle yesterday. Veep huffs off saying the only way her home could be improved was if Janelle resigned from their club. I should have offered her a job working for Captain Shockley. Anyway, Madame President Janelle is paying for the dinner herself, says it’s worth the price to be rid of that bossy veep who drove everybody nuts anyway.”

I grinned. “Fix me another espresso, lawman. I think my luck is changing.”

He laughed and ground more Italian roast beans. “Okay, look. We’re doing a trail with Jake this morning. Arch is out getting a piece of scented clothing from the trail-setter right now.”

“You’re what?” I said, incredulous. “Doing a trail? With a bloodhound who was fired because he couldn’t smell his own dinner if his life depended on it? And in this rain?” I wailed.

“Best time. Scent’s stronger when it’s damp. Arch’s friend Todd has already hiked up to a spot we agreed on, behind a big rock in the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. He’s waiting for us. We’ll start at the beginning of that four-wheel vehicle path. It’s not more than three miles.”

“You and my son are going to hike a trail with Jake the retired hound dog for three miles, in the pouring rain? Do you know how much more chance you have of being caught in a rock slide with all the moisture we’ve been having?”

The second espresso hissed into the flowered Limoges cup. Tom clicked the tiny cup down in front of me and stooped to kiss my cheek. “Come on, don’t ruin our fun, Miss G. Arch is dying to do this.”

“Just listen, okay? Think of a cake with frosting. The frosting is the soil and loose rock we have in the mountains. Underneath is fractured rock-the cake. All this rain has added extra weight to the soil-frosting and could make it slide right off the underlying rock-cake. Got it? The land is especially unstable where streams have undercut banks. That’s how you get major rock slides. And then – ” I caught sight of his bemused expression and said, “Would you at least promise to be very careful?”

“Yes, Miss G. And would that be butter cream or meringue frosting?”

“With this weather, Arch is going to come home sick.”

Tom grinned. “Oh, so first he wasn’t going to come home at all because of the frosted-cake rock slide, and now he’s going to come home with a cold. We’re doing better. Anything else?”

Well, great. Tom had never had children and was not burdened with the worry that accompanied every foray into mountainous terrain. Nor did he know that taking a child out in wet, cold weather led to countless hours spent poring over old magazines in a pediatrician’s office. These hours would be followed by countless pink teaspoons of Amoxicillin. Strep throat, ear infections, bronchitis, sinusitis… the man had a lot to learn. On the other hand, he did have a kid’s own enthusiasm for going on adventures, and Arch treasured the time they spent together. I could just hear Arch if I vetoed their expedition. C’mon, Mom, I’m not going to get pneumonia! Sure. I sighed for the fourth time, sipped the espresso, then took a bite of Tom’s coffee cake to keep from saying more. The delectable taste of lemon and the richness of cherry preserves infused the moist sour-cream cake. I narrowed my eyes at Tom, but he laughed.

“Delicious, huh? Be nice to your favorite cop and you can have the recipe.”

There was a pounding at the back door and Arch traipsed through. “Here I am!” he announced as he joined us. His poncho and face were slick with rain. I suppressed a groan. “I’ve got Todd’s T-shirt!” He held up a plastic bag containing a crumpled piece of grayish-white cloth.

Tom appraised the bag. “Not in the laundry? Not contaminated with other scents? Nobody else in the family touched it?”

Arch shook his head vigorously; the wet baseball cap slipped down over his forehead. He straightened it. “Can we leave? Please? I’m getting worried about Todd. You know, out in the rain. He has a poncho to keep him dry, but he is my friend.”

“We’re ready.” Tom picked up a thermos backpack bulging with what I guessed to be sandwiches, trail mix, and (of course) homemade dog biscuits. He pointed to a tangled piece of leather on the counter. “Hey, buddy, can you hold on to your plastic bag and bring the working harness out to the car? You’re going to be amazed at Jake, Arch. Bloodhounds are renowned for their intelligence.” Tom held up one hand in farewell, winked at me, and opened the back door. The rain beat down. Jake’s howling increased in volume. “You know the word we don’t use prematurely? Remember, Arch? Don’t even use it in conversation?”

“F-i-n-d,” my son spelled knowingly, then dashed out after him.

“Don’t get near the creek edge!” I yelled after them, but I doubted they heard me.

Moments later, Jake fell abruptly silent. The blessed I absence of barking was followed the dull roar of Tom s Chrysler. I looked out the rolling room window and saw the dark blue car move slowly past. In the backseat, Arch and Jake pressed their noses against the rain-smeared window. Both looked gleeful.

5

When I returned from the first service at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and a quick visit to the grocery store to pick up supplies for the Aspen Meadow Women’s Club dinner, I found Macguire Perkins sitting on my doorstep. Rain still washed across my waterlogged front yard and ran in rivulets down the sidewalk. Yet Macguire wore no rain gear, and his hair was as sopping as his sweatshirt and torn blue jeans.

“Macguire,” I said impatiently, “why don’t you put on …” Oh, forget it, I thought. It was hard enough trying to be mom to one kid who did his best to ignore me. I unlocked the door and disarmed the security system – needed protection against the Jerk’s periodic rampages – and shooed him into the house.

Macguire snuffled, tilted his head backward, and shook his hair. Raindrops sprinkled across the room. Taking lessons from Jake, apparently. “I’m okay.” He snuffled again. “The rain’s not too bad, you don’t really need a coat.” His long strides propelled him, camel-like, toward the kitchen. “Besides, I brought my uniform stuff in the car. It’s not wet. In the car, I mean. I’ll be all right.”

Well, fine. We had work to do. I put vats of thick, tomato-rich Bolognese sauce on for a last simmering. Macguire washed his hands, grated hillocks of gold-threaded Parmesan and creamy fresh mozzarella cheeses, then looked around for more work. The pizza dough I’d taken out to rise before church had come to room temperature. He carefully punched it down. As the Bolognese sauce began to bubble, the phone rang. Mrs. Kirby-Jones, no doubt. Clients invariably feel duty-bound to call on Sunday morning. They want to make sure you’re not sleeping in. They expect you to be slaving away in the kitchen for their evening shindig. In fact, they expect you to have been working there since dawn.

“Goldilocks’ Catering,” I said with agonizing sprightliness as I reached for a package of the frozen green lasagne noodles I’d made the week before. “Where everything is just right!”

“It’s me,” Marla said morosely. “I’m in hell. I feel so damned guilty. Tony just phoned, and he’s on his way over. I am about the farthest thing from just right that you could possibly imagine. Matter of fact, I’m sitting here thinking about what I’m going to say when I get a call from Albert Lipscomb’s lawyer.”

I cradled the phone against my ear and tried to un-wrap the noodles. Whenever Marla plunged into precipitate action, she ended up in exaggerated remorse. “For heaven’s sake,” I soothed, “why do you feel so bad? Didn’t Tony talk to Albert?”

“Oh, I doubt it. Tony went straight to the Aspen Branch Bar after the party and got plastered. Now he’s nursing a hangover. He has a conference tomorrow morning, so he can’t be in on our meeting.” I heard her bite into something. I hoped it was one of the lowfat lemon muffins I’d given her. I also prayed her use of the term our meeting didn’t mean she was counting on me for tomorrow’s confrontation with Lipscomb. She went on: “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m worried about with Albert. He throws around those terms like year-over-year and same-store sales and technical support. Now he’s all ticked off, so he’ll probably treat me like a dummy.”

“But how can year-over-year data or same-store sales have anything to do with a mine being reopened?”

“Ooh, Goldy,” she whined, “I don’t know. I guess I should have just hashed it out with Tony, or called my lawyer or the state consumer fraud people, or somebody, instead of going after Albert like that yesterday. It’s just Episcopal guilt. You know, you worry about how you’re handling your money.”

“Wait, wait,” I said with a glance at the clock. By the time we got through a litany of her worries, hours could pass, and I only had ninety minutes to finish the preparations for the Kirby-Joneses. Much as I loved Marla, I didn’t have time for a party postmortem now. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Please, please tell me that it’s going to be later, as in tomorrow morning later,” she pleaded between bites. “As in, when you come down to the Prospect office with me?” I tried to block out the vision of Marla and Albert squabbling viciously in one of Prospect Financial Partners’ plush Cherry Creek offices. “Please, Goldy? Don’t say no.”

I opened a plastic container of fresh basil leaves and inhaled their flowery scent. “Oh, Marla, I’ve got this new booking for a dinner to do tomorrow night – “

“Come on, you can help me stay calm. It’s bad for my health to get upset. We won’t be there for an hour, even. We’ll go have brunch afterwards – my treat.”

“But why do you want me there?” I measured out olive oil, Parmesan, and pine nuts and prayed that I could do my pesto recipe from memory. “The only thing I know about business is that I don’t have much at the moment.”

“I’ve invested a hundred thousand dollars just in the mine venture, Goldy. With that money, I could have put my dear nephew Julian through Cornell. Twice.” Her husky voice cracked.

“You’re already putting him through,” I reminded her gently, and started the food processor whirling.

“Yes, but still, a hundred K!” she fumed. “I could have… well, let’s see, I could have… put in a few new windows at the cardiac rehab center. Then I’d have a nice view of the hospital grounds while I’m on that damn treadmill.”

And wouldn’t Lyle Gordon, M.D., have loved that, I thought. The pesto ingredients had turned into a brilliant green, fragrant paste. “Marla, please. I need to cook. Are you feeling okay?”

Ignoring my question, she demanded, “Remember what I did to John Richard’s shoulder? Think Albert knew about that? Maybe I intimidated him.”

I groaned. My assertiveness was a behavior I’d learned only after my disastrous marriage to Dr. John Richard Korman ended. But Marla had stood up to him, and consequently had managed to be married a lot fewer years, and with much less grief, than I.

I said truthfully, “You didn’t actually hit Albert yesterday. You just yelled at him and called him names. There’s a difference,” I added, sneaking another look at the clock. Macguire was almost done punching all the air pockets from the dough.

“Okay, look,” she said reluctantly, “I know you’re busy. In addition to crying on your shoulder and begging you to come with me tomorrow, I just wanted to tell you that Tony and I are leaving for our fishing trip on Friday night, and we were hoping you could do that other favor for us before we go.”

I began to slice fat vine-ripened tomatoes thinly, removing the seed pockets as I went along. “What other favor?”

“Oh, didn’t he tell you? Tony was really hoping you’d do a taste-test for Prospect. Could you manage it? I think he’d pay for your time …”

I barely avoided slicing my index finger. “You’re not serious, are you? I don’t want to be paid to taste someone else’s food. Besides, I thought you got out of analyzing restaurants. How does Tony think I can possibly help?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m the dumb broad who can’t even read an assay report,” Marla said blithely. “And as for tasting – well, Tony just doesn’t trust his own taste buds. What he’ll do is watch the traffic in and out of Sam’s Soups there by the lake. He’ll talk to people, maybe conduct exit interviews, like that. Albert will crunch the numbers. All you have to do is sample Sam’s menu and tell Tony if there’s any way that soup will be the next food craze. You know he’ll appreciate it, he’ll have you cater Prospect’s next big do. Please?”

“Friday lunch,” I agreed reluctantly. Whether Tony would have me cater Prospect’s next big affair was something I doubted very much, given yesterday’s fiasco at the mine. But Marla was my closest friend, and I couldn’t bear to disappoint her. Besides, it was the only way to get her off the phone. “I’ve made a couple of unexpected bookings, and Friday’s the first time I can manage. Now please, I have to – “

“What, go feed the dog? How come I can’t hear the mighty canine? Usually he’s in the background singing away.”

“He’s out with Tom and Arch.”

“In this weather?”

“Don’t remind me.” I removed the wrappings from several packages of milky-white chevre and started to cut it into small cubes. “No, I’ll let you go if you’ll just promise you’ll come to Cherry Creek with me tomorrow morning. Be the buffer at the Prospect office.”

I inhaled deeply, turned away from the chevre, and stirred the dark Bolognese sauce. “If I come with you, promise you won’t lose your temper again with Albert Lipscomb.”

“I’ll be like Mr. Rogers. On Librium,” she added, and signed off. As the former wives of a doctor, Marla and I always laced our similes with drugs.

“Okay, look,” I said to Macguire, but stopped. “Macguire, what are you doing?” I cringed as a large chunk of dough just missed the ceiling. “Macguire!”

Macguire held his hands out for the dough, but it landed on the counter. “Oops.” He gave me a sheepish look. “You know how you see those pizza guys…” He scooped up the dough and began to press it into a jelly roll pan. “Never mind. How’s Marla? Has she recovered from that big argument? Did that guy explain what he was up to?”

Provencal Pizza

1 ź ounce envelope active dry yeast

1 cup warm water

˝ teaspoon sugar

˝ teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons olive oil

2 ˝ to 3 cups all-purpose flour

˝ cup prepared pesto

12 ounces ripe tomatoes, thinly sliced and seed pockets removed

3 ˝ ounces chevre

4 ounces best-quality fresh mozzarella, grated

In a large mixing bowl, sprinkle the yeast over the warm water. Add the sugar, stir, and set aside 10 minutes, until the mixture is bubbly. Stir in the salt and olive oil. Beat in 2 ˝ cups of the flour, then add as much extra flour as needed to make a dough that is not too sticky to knead. Knead on a floured surface until the dough is smooth and satiny. (Or place the dough in the bowl of an electric mixer and knead with a dough hook until the dough cleans the sides of the bowl, (approximately 5 minutes.) Place the dough in an oiled bowl, turn to oil the top, cover with a kitchen towel, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 425°. Brush a little olive oil over the bottom and sides of a 10-by 15-inch pan. Punch the dough down and press it into the bottom of the pan. Spread the pesto over the dough. Lay the tomato slices in even rows over the pesto. Dot the surface evenly with the chčvre, an sprinkle the mozzarella over the entire surface. Bake for 15 to 25 minutes, or until mozzarella is bubbly and dough has cooked through.

Serves 6.

“No, he’s doing that tomorrow morning.” I let water gush into my pasta pentola and set it on the stove. “I’m going down to the Prospect office with her and try to keep things sane.”

He stopped reading the pizza recipe and gave me a look. “The two of you are going down there together? Alone? Are you taking a referee’s uniform and a whistle? Can I come?” He was hoping for fisticuffs, apparently.

The phone rang again and I begged Macguire to : answer it so I could start on the salad. Instead of giving my customary greeting, however, my ever-helpful assistant barked, “Yeah, this is Goldilocks’ Catering! What do you want?”

Even across the room I could hear Mrs. Kirby-Jones’ hysterical voice over the wire. I gestured desperately for the phone.

Macguire cupped his palm over the receiver and opened his eyes wide. “I’m never going to learn how to handle people if you don’t let me handle them. Go make salad. If she hangs up on me, you can call her back and say some weird teenager just broke into your kitchen – Excuse me? What?” he said into the phone.

I held my hands up in mock surrender and returned to the counter to tear radicchio to shreds. Just when you think you’re getting a handle on things in your personal life, your business life intrudes with a crisis. Or vice versa.

“Oh, my. Mm-hmm,” Macguire said with unsettling empathy. “No. How many people, again? What? Oh, yes, we’re completely mobile.” I felt my heart lurch. What was he promising? Macguire furrowed his brow and watched me rip into a head of arugula. “We can move around the African decorations in your dining room, that’s absolutely no problem at all. Oh, no, you don’t know who you’re talking to. This is Goldilocks’ Catering –”

His blithe assurances were interrupted by more hysterical objections that threatened to rise to a shriek.

“What?” he demanded, cradling the phone under his ear and reaching for the pizza dough again. I cringed, envisioning another attempt at spinning it through the air. “Oh, pull~leeze! What did he say?” I waved the sauce spoon, trying desperately to get Macguire’s attention. But he was staring at my shelves of cookbooks. Knowing him, he wasn’t reading any of the tides. “Vegetarian burritos? For twenty people? In the next two hours?” He hesitated. “Oh, no. No way. We’re having green lasagne the way Guido used to make it, lady! I mean, uh, Mrs. Kirby-Jones.”

The voice on the telephone rose precipiously. . Please listen to me, Mrs… . er … “ Macguire faltered. He clutched his throat with his free hand, and stuck out his tongue. I’m being strangled by Mrs. Kirby-Jones! The shrill protests had changed to pleading. “Please,” he repeated. “Will you listen? I did the research myself I called Guido’s-on-the-Pike. I don’t care what your husband says he remembers… . You didn’t eat at Taco Tita’s. They even remember you at Guido’s. You were wearing that gorgeous pink dress with that wonderful corsage… . Nope, you were at Guido’s, not Taco Tita’s, that’s for sure. The whole staff gets teary-eyed every time they think of it. You were the most beautiful bride they’d – ” I signaled violently. Macguire turned to me, finally. And winked.

Oh, Lord, I prayed, please get us out of this mess. “Yes, ma’am. Talked to them myself. Talked to Guido, as a matter of fact. Who, me? Who am I? Why, I’m Goldilocks’ researcher. Macguire Perkins. Yes, the same Perkins.” Macguire smiled and rolled his eyes. “Yes, my father is the headmaster of Elk Park Preparatory School. What, me? I’ve already graduated. Oh, Harvard. Next year.”

I pictured Macguire’s father in his large, airy office with his gilt-framed degrees and his large, airy ego. I didn’t want to imagine how he would react to this string of lies that was growing more fanciful by the minute.

But Macguire was all smiles. “Oh yes, we can be there early to set up. Are you going to wear pink again? Wonderful. Pink is definitely your color. Yes, your husband is wrong. There’s no way you ate at Taco Tita’s that day. But don’t make a big deal out of it,” Macguire advised solemnly, the world’s sagest marital counselor. “It is your anniversary.” He hung up.

“I don’t believe this.” I dotted the pesto-slathered pizza dough with the bright red tomato slices and creamy cubes of goat cheese. “What if she finds out Guido’s been dead all these years?”

“Hey,” said Macguire. He reached over to preheat the oven for the pizzas and then pulled out a kitchen chair. He missed the rungs and the chair fell on its side. “Oh, sorry, sorry… listen, everything’s going to be okay!”

“What if she learns that restaurant went out of business ten years ago?”

Macguire widened his eyes in mock astonishment. “Oh, Mrs. Kirby-Jones,” he shrilled in uncanny imitation of our client’s neurotic tones, “you must be thinking of the Guido’s on Connecticut Avenue!” He grinned. . “Y’see, I knew that junior-year trip to the nation’s capital would payoff some time. It sounds like’ I actually know something about Washington.”

I sprinkled mozzarella over the pizza. Give up, I thought. It seemed Macguire could be perceptive or deceptive, as the occasion demanded. Still, the kid did have a way of leasing a place in your heart. Aloud, I said mildly, “I don’t know why I ever thought you wouldn’t be able to handle Mrs. Kirby-Jones.”

“Yeah, most people think I’m pretty stupid if they meet me,” he agreed cheerfully. “Just barely graduated, no college. But if I talk to them over the phone, then they think I must be like my supereducated, golf-groupie father, the prep school headmaster – “

“Macguire! I didn’t mean – “

“Oh, it’s okay.” He set the chair upright and flopped into it. “Hey, listen. I felt real good doing that investigation into that ore for Marla. It was like a head trip – I mean, there they are at this big financial party having a big, loud fight over something I’d researched! Man!” He hopped up to slide the pizzas into the oven. Then he crossed his arms, leaned against the oven, and gave me a look of triumph. “I finally found something I’m really good at. I’m a great investigator.” He paused. “So I’m thinking about going into law enforcement. Tell Tom Schulz I want to talk to him. I want to be a cop.”

“Oh, come on. I’m not sure this is something you want to consider seriously… .”

“Chill, Goldy! Who do you think would miss me if I got shot by a bad guy?”

“Macguire!” “I’m kidding, kidding.” He sat back down and stretched out his legs. His sneakers looked sopping wet. “It’s just that I don’t think I’ll ever go to like, some university. So I’m thinking of my future. I really do think I’d be good at cop work. Everybody figures I’m dumb, so they’d trust me and like, tell me stuff.”

I finished tearing up the lettuce and stirred the Bolonese again, then tasted it. The dark, spicy sauce exploded with flavor. I tried to think of how to say what I thought I needed to. “If you decided to be a cop, you know your father would have a fit.”

Macguire’s grin split his face. “Hey, that’s the best part,” he said heartily.

6

The Kirby-Joneses’ house was a massive log-and-glass building that reminded me of a ski lodge. The architect had tucked a kitchen on one end of the first floor as an afterthought. Lucky for us we found the back entrance right away. As we hauled in our boxes, all I could see beyond the kitchen counter was a forest of tropical trees crowding the interior space. A banner announced the decorative theme of the party: “Marriage is a Safari.” Italian food for an African motif. Well, I’d had weirder assignments.

In the great room, Macguire and I bustled between fake palm trees and huge containers of ornamental grasses to set up the bar. I was thankful we hadn’t been asked to wear safari hats or explain how to make lasagne in the outback. Macguire, thank heaven, didn’t broach the topic of a career in law enforcement again. Which was merciful, because within half an hour we were very preoccupied with guests. Macguire tossed salad, passed pizza, stirred ravioli, and served perfect cheese-glazed wedges of lasagne with an enthusiastic smile. I rejoiced that none of the guests were dieters. Everyone dug into the dishes with relish. At the end of the meal, Macguire and I moved smoothly around large ceramic elephants hung with ornamental lights to offer trays of gold-lined coffee cups. While we were finishing the dishes, Macguire shyly complimented Mrs. Kirby-Jones on the radiance of her skin, She handed him a fifty-dollar tip. He volunteered to split it with me, but I told him to keep it.

The rain had finally eased when Macguire and I parted around eleven that night. Tired, but happy with the successful evening, we decided to meet at four the next afternoon to prep the easy-to-cook Women’s Club dinner. With any luck, I told myself as I luxuriated in a very hot shower at home, I could spend the morning helping Marla resolve her business problems, get her over to her cardiac rehab for a late appointment, and cook for the Women’s Club without a hitch. Tom welcomed me into bed with a warm hug.

“You seem pretty pleased with yourself, Miss G.,” he whispered.

“Well, I am. If I can get through tomorrow, I’ll be in good shape.” I nestled my head into his shoulder. “Man, how come you always smell so good?”

“Maybe it’s because this woman I’m married to keeps buying expensive guy soap they don’t stock down at the sheriff’s department.” He stroked my hair.

“How did you and Arch do with Jake? Did those homemade dog biscuits improve his accuracy?”

He groaned. “Not exactly. Todd climbed up a tree. His pool scent was at the bottom of the trunk, of course, but they don’t teach dogs to look up. So Jake couldn’t find him.”

“Great.” “At least we found the kid before he got bronchitis.”

“I won’t say what I think about your idea of a fun-filled outing.”

He grunted noncommittally. “Speaking of which, I suppose you’re going down to Prospect Financial Partners tomorrow with Marla.”

I pulled the covers over his shoulder. “Tom, listen. If they really have a problem with that investment, her heart could go ballistic. There’s an awful lot of money at stake.”

“Yeah, well. Try not to get into trouble.”

I nestled into his arms and murmured, “If marriage is a safari, would you say you’re a hunter, a guide, or a lion.”

“What?”

I found his ear and whispered into it. “Never mind. Just let me get a whiff of that high-class soap.”

“You are asking for it, caterer. You know that, don’t you?”

“Well, now, I guess I do.” I suppressed a giggle as his large hands reached out for my body. If marriage was a safari, I didn’t ever want to come back.

The next morning, fog like gray wool pressed down on the peaks of the Continental Divide. For the moment the rain had ceased. But a steamroller of dark mist churning toward Aspen Meadow promised to change that. I saved drinking my double espresso until I was following Marla’s Jaguar down Interstate 70. That way, the caffeine couldn’t fire up my brain until it was too late to turn back. I remembered Tom’s words: Try not to get into trouble. No problem. I took a sip of coffee. There was no way I was getting into trouble this morning. Except for Marla and Tony, I didn’t even know the folks at Prospect Financial Partners. Or care about them, for that matter. I was just there to referee.

The fog swallowed Marla’s Jaguar just below the Genesee exit. I slowed my van, slugged down a little more espresso, and reconsidered. Actually, I did care. The sudden death of Victoria Lear in Idaho Springs, the problem Marla had presented at the party, the vehemence of Albert’s denials – all these had piqued my interest. But Tom would not be pleased if I angered Albert Lipscomb or anybody else in Prospect management. I’d already backed into involvement-Captain Shockley would have called it interference - in several of Tom’s investigations. The last thing I wanted was to upset Shockley by raising hackles at the venture capital firm where the captain had his retirement account. Still, with Marla’s temper so volatile and so much money at stake, I certainly didn’t want my best friend blowing a fuse at the Prospect office without me there to calm her down, did I? Of course not. I smiled, finished the last drop of the rich black espresso, and pressed the accelerator. Within moments the van was paralleling sudsy, swollen Cherry Creek.

We turned on Third Avenue and passed designer boutiques, supertrendy cafes, experimental restaurants, and a host of offices dedicated to making money to support the folks who patronized the expensive shops and eateries. After several blocks I parked in front of an elegant two-story building with square gold letters announcing the offices of Prospect Financial Partners. The modern facade of polished bloodred granite was threaded with veins of black and gold that glimmered in the clouded light.

Marla met me on the wet sidewalk. The last time I’d seen her wearing her subdued navy blue suit and double strand of pearls had been at my wedding. I felt out of place in my black pants, sweater, and old raincoat. Marla waved a dismissive hand and quickly briefed me on how she was going to handle the encounter with Albert.

“Okay,” she said, “say Albert says assays are too complicated for women to understand. Then you say he needs to explain it or I’m going to have a heart attack. Then he says he’s too busy to take time for us, so I clutch my chest – “

“No,” I advised sternly as I stepped over a mud puddle. “We wouldn’t want to precipitate the real thing.”

She defiantly shook her higgledy-piggledy hair, glanced up the street, and reluctantly reshaped her strategy. “Okay… if I ask him to show me the Kepler – ” She gripped my arm. “That car looks familiar. Isn’t that Macguire’s Subaru?”

I glanced down the packed row of parked cars. “I sure hope not.”

But it was. Even as I spoke, Macguire Perkins unfurled himself from the battered blue wagon and gave us a shy grin. “Look,” he called before we could utter a word, “I’m here to help you.” In three long strides, he was suddenly at our side. He wore a collarless, but-ton-up black shirt and black pants, the kind of outfit rock stars wear when they’re being interviewed. “You and Marla really shouldn’t try to do this alone,” he said earnestly. “I mean, I’m the one who got that assay report analyzed, and I even know somebody who works here. You know – a contact.” He ran his fingers through his perpetually damp hair. “She went to Elk Park Prep a couple of years ago. She used to be a snob, but somebody said she’s turned out kind of nice – “

I shook my head. “No, no, no. Go back to Aspen Meadow, Macguire. Please. What are we going to do, invade Albert’s office and say, ‘Hey, here we are, one client and two bodyguards!’? We just can’t – “

“Oh, sure we can,” Marla announced with another toss of her head. She linked one arm through mine and another through Macguire’s. “You can help us storm Albert’s office. And Macguire, introduce me to your friend if you see her. I love reformed snobs. There are so few of us.”

Dread filled me as we pushed through the first of two sets of heavy glass doors. I want to get this straight, I could imagine Tom saying with one sandy-colored eyebrow lifted. Without an appointment, the three of you breezed into a multimillion-dollar financial firm, one of you faked a heart attack, and then the other two crashed into the partner’s office? And I’d reply, Something like that. And he’d say, And you were surprised when they kicked you out?

“I’m here to see Albert Lipscomb,” Marla proclaimed to the receptionist. “He’s expecting me!” I assessed the dark-suited woman behind her tall rosewood desk. She seemed to be the first obstacle in a succession of battlements.

“Well, Ms. Korman, it’s good to see you,” the receptionist replied pleasantly. Her black hair was cut severely around a face painted with ultrapale makeup. After giving Marla a hundred-watt, brown-lipsticked smile, she cast a disdainful glance at Macguire and me.

“They’re with me,” Marla told her. “friends of Albert.”

The receptionist glowed again. “Well, then. Why don’t the three of you just go on back?” I guess caterers weren’t the only ones taught to suck up to the high rollers.

We followed a muted purple, green, and coral tweed carpet down a coral-painted hallway bisected with rosewood wainscoting. Phones rang; noises burbled out of open-doored offices; harried, well-dressed assistants rushed to and fro. One strikingly quiet spot, was the closed door to an office with the metal panel removed from the orangey-pink wall. The door’s gold lettering still read Victoria Lear, C.F.A., Chief Investment Officer. She’d died in Orpheus Canyon, near the mine that Marla was now questioning. I couldn’t help myself: I surreptitiously grasped the handle. As I turned the knob, I imagined Tom shaking his head. But the door was locked.

Albert Lipscomb’s secretary, a gorgeous platinum blonde who informed us her name was Lena Pescadero, wore a low-cut red dress that made Macguire’s mouth fall open. Personally, I was transfixed by her hair, which was stylishly teased into a voluminous, tangled cloud. Lena turned away from greeting us to announce matter-of-factly into the phone that Albert was in conference and would return the call at his earliest convenience.

“Albert’s expecting me,” Marla said chummily when the secretary had hung up the phone. “We mad a nine o’clock appointment over the weekend.”

Lena Pescadero raised a thread-thin eyebrow. “You did?” She made a note on a pad and tapped the computer keys to bring up Albert Lipscomb’s schedule.

“Hmm,” said Lena as she stared at the screen. “I wish someone would tell me what’s going on.”

Marla rolled her eyes at us, then turned back to Lena. “Albert’s not in conference?”

“No.”

“Well, where is he?”

“I don’t know, but he’s had a lot of calls,” Lena replied. She chewed on her lip and considered Marla thoughtfully. “What’s going on with the clients? Did Medigen’s antiviral drug get rejected by the FDA over the weekend, and nobody told me?”

Taken aback, the three of us were silent until Macguire piped up with, “Uh, I don’t think the FDA works over the weekend.”

Marla sighed. The phone on Lena’s desk buzzed again and she answered it.

“No, no, not yet, Mr. Royce,” she said. “Print out what?” She turned to the computer screen. “Okay, one moment, please.” She tapped a few keys and lowered her voice. “Excuse me, but are you all getting a lot of… No, no, I’m sorry, sir. Charts for Sam’s Soups, yes, certainly. Opportunity for margin expansion, and what was the other… oh, recurring revenue base. Yes. Right away. No, I don’t know if she was the only other one who had it in her database before she… before the… yes, sir. Just as soon as he gets here.”

I murmured to Macguire, “Let’s go look for your friend.” To Marla, I said, “We’ll be back.” Once Macguire and I were out in the hall, I said, “What’s your friend’s name? How long has she worked here at Prospect?”

Macguire blushed. “Bitsy Roosevelt.” His acne-scarred forehead wrinkled in thought. “She’s been here a year or so. I think.”

“Would you be willing to ask Bitsy if she knew this Victoria Lear person? See if Victoria was doing anything with the Eurydice Gold Mine?”

Macguire began, “Sure, but why do you – ” but I grasped his arm and shook my head.

Brightly, I said, “Looks like we’re not the only food folks here today.”

Shifting his weight nervously next to the massive reception desk, Sam Perdue seemed to have utterly lost the serene composure he’d exhibited at the mine party. There, his blond hair had been neatly combed over what I now saw was a bald spot, and his pale face had been unemotional, almost ethereal. This morning his thin hair splayed out from what looked like a monk’s tonsure. His flushed face appeared miserable. His tie stuck out at a cockeyed angle, and one of his shirttails hung from his pants like a dishrag. Not surprisingly, the receptionist was resisting admitting him.

“I want to see Tony Royce right now!” I heard him demand. “It’s about unit expansion. He knows all about it.”

“You’ll have to wait, please,” the receptionist chanted as she pressed buttons on a telephone.

I greeted Sam with, “Hi, there. Are you doing all right?” I gave him a sympathetic look. “You seem upset.”

He looked at me with disbelief. “Goldy? Goldy Schulz? Are you catering another party for them already?”

“No, no, we’re just down here… with a friend.’” Behind me, in his sweetest voice, I heard Macguire ask the receptionist about Bitsy Roosevelt.

Sam sucked in his thin stomach and nudged the shirttail into his pants. “Are they going to invest in your catering business? You can tell me the truth, Goldy. Maybe I’m just wasting my time here.”

“I promise they’re not investing in me,” I replied heartily. The receptionist had hung up the phone. Carrying a load of papers, Albert Lipscomb’s secretary whisked down the hall to our right. A short, pear-shaped young woman in a beige suit entered the lobby and squealed with delight on seeing Macguire. Bitsy Roosevelt, no doubt.

“You’re married to a policeman, aren’t you?” Sam asked me uncomfortably. Albert Lipscomb’s question. Sam straightened his tie, but his face was still pinker than the walls.

I nodded and said cautiously, “Sam, are you sure you’re all right?”

He cleared his throat. “A woman fell on the steps going up to my restaurant at eight o’clock this morning and broke her ankle. We weren’t even open. It’s a bad break, and she was supposed to go by ambulance to Lutheran Hospital. I wanted to follow the ambulance, of course, to see if she was all right. But…” He paused and gazed at the massive rosewood desk. He seemed to have lost the thread of his story.

“And was she?” I prompted him. “All right?”

His face wrinkled with pain. “I don’t know, because there’s a picnic area that was washed out… you know the one just as you’re coming into Aspen Meadow?” When I nodded, he continued, “A child fell into the water this morning and nearly drowned. The parents flagged down the ambulance, and the ambulance stopped. The EMT gave the kid mouth-to-mouth and CPR.”

“What?”

“The ambulance… they have to do that, I guess, when’s it’s a matter of life and death, but the broken-ankle lady wasn’t very happy… . The kid’s okay, but they had to take him to the hospital; too… and I knew I was going to be late getting here… .” He blushed even more deeply and groped for words. “And then I couldn’t find a place on this street to park – “

He was prevented from telling me more of his sorrowful saga by the receptionist’s announcement that he could go back to Mr. Royce’s office. Sam excused himself and rushed away.

Bitsy told us she had to go take the minutes of a meeting, “like right now,” so Macguire and I started back toward Marla.

“Bitsy says she didn’t work with Lear,” Macguire told me under his breath. “But she has a few people she can talk to. Says she has to be discreet, though.”

“Great.”

“I told you I’d make a good investigator.”

I sighed when we walked back into Albert’s reception area. There, Marla sat nonchalantly at the secretary’s desk copying words from the computer screen. Make that two good investigators.

“For heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed without thinking, “what in the world – “

“Fantastic, you’re back.” She scribbled intently. “Keep a lookout for Lena, will you?”

Macguire squinted at the corridor, clearly delighted at an opportunity to conduct surveillance. I felt surrounded by lunatics. “Let’s leave,” I said, hoping to persuade them of the folly of their ways. “It’s quarter after nine. Albert’s not coming.”

Marla tore the top paper off the pad. “No way. I wanted to see who phoned our friend Albert this morning. Guess what other clients are worried besides me? He’s had twelve calls including the Hardcastles once and Sandy Trotfield twice.” Anger spiked her ” husky voice. “All Eurydice Mine investors. I scared a few folks, wouldn’t you say? Maybe Albert had more to hide with that assay report than he let on. So he’s playing sick to avoid everybody.”

“She’s coming,” Macguire reported, in a low growl that I suspected was heavily influenced by Humphrey Bogart. Marla tapped a few keys to bring up another screen.

“Everybody get on the couch,” I begged. . Lena entered looking as if she’d seen the proverbial ghost. “Who just talked?” she demanded. “Who said to get on the couch?”

“I did,” I replied. Heat flamed up my neck. Lena recovered and stared at me. “You have no idea how much you sound like… oh, never mind.”

I didn’t question her, just settled onto the couch by Macguire and Marla, who were earnestly flipping through investment magazines. Lena phoned Albert’s house and left a message on his tape. Fifteen minutes later, she dialed his cellular. No answer. Calls from Eurydice investors continued to pour in; I recognized their names from the Saturday night guest list. At ten o’clock I tried to convince Marla to go to her cardiac rehab. Instead, she got on the phone with Southwest Hospital and rescheduled.

At eleven, Tony Royce, looking as handsome as ever, rushed into Albert’s waiting room. Today he wore a camel blazer and dark brown pants that matched his perfectly groomed mustache. “He’s not here yet?” He addressed Lena. “What the hell is going on?”

“He’s had twenty-two calls;” she snapped. “And, no – he has not called, written, or E-mailed his whereabouts.”

“Yeah, tell me about the calls.” Tony lowered his voice. “Marla, everybody seems to want to know about your little problem with the assay report.”

Marla exhaled loudly but did not reply. Tony’s energetically roving dark eyes took in our morose group. He asked if anybody wanted lunch and we all said we were staying put. When he returned an hour later, he bore bags containing two cold grilled cheese sandwiches for Macguire and grilled tuna and polenta, along with a raspberry-custard tart, for Marla, Lena, and me.

“I probably shouldn’t eat this tart, but I really was very upset,” Marla grumbled as she forked up a bite dripping with berries and cream. “It’s all Albert’s fault.”

Lena said sympathetically, “If he’s not here in a couple of hours, I’ll drive up to his house to see if he’s hiding out.”

“I’m coming with you,” Marla said firmly. Unfortunately, we were all still there at three o’clock. In a convoy of four vehicles, Marla, Lena, Macguire, and I headed back up the mountain toward Eagle Mountain Estates, a swank development west of Genesee and east of Aspen Meadow. Once we were off the interstate, the large houses loomed in the mist. I felt a stab of worry about the Women’s Club dinner. I would give this expedition another forty-five minutes, and no more. We meandered along neighborhood streets until Lena pulled her Toyota up in front of an oversize A-frame of the genus mountain contemporary.

We rang. We knocked. We called. The front door was locked, as was the back. Marla traipsed around to a wall lined with windows.

“Albert! Albert Lipscomb!” she shouted. The more Marla called, the sicker Lena looked.

“Isn’t there something else we can do?” Macguire asked me. “The neighbors are going to call the cops if Marla keeps hollering like that.”

“I have a key, just wait a minute,” said Lena. She pawed through her purse and pulled out a key hanging on a chain decorated with a red plastic heart.

Within two minutes, we were all through the front door. Macguire loped up the stairs as if he owned the place. After a moment, he returned, smiling uncertainly.

“I don’t think there’s anybody here,” he reported to us.

As we walked through the first-floor rooms, I tried to calm Tom’s voice in my inner ear, something along the lines of not getting into trouble.

“Albert!” Lena called. “Al! It’s me!” There was no answer.

“Everybody wait here,” said Lena. “I know this place and I … know where Al keeps his things. If anyone’s going to pry, it should be me.”

Marla and I settled in the living room, which was decorated in brown, black, and beige. Along one wall were shelves full of books with fancy names like Driving Venture Capital on the Information Highway.

“Don’t touch anything,” Marla warned.

“We’re already in trouble, just for being here,” I informed her sourly. After the stunts she had pulled in the past few days, this hardly seemed the time for her to advise caution.

Macguire gazed out one of the floor-length windows. “The neighbors came out, anyway. They’re all gathered around like there’s been some kind of accident. Man, people are so nosy,” he said without a trace of irony.

Lena returned, looking even more anxious and ashen-faced than she had outside. Her blond cloud of hair appeared deflated. “He’s gone.” Her voice was vacant. “His suitcase, his clothes…” Her voice cracked. “His passport. We … he and I … He’s gone.”

“What?” Marla shrilled.

Wordlessly, Lena sank into a chair. I walked out to the kitchen, retrieved a Waterford glass from a cabinet, and filled it with water. Maybe I should have filled it with whiskey. Upon my return, Lena looked closer to fainting than when I’d left. She took an absentminded sip of the water, then said: “His closets are empty. His suits are all gone. Ditto his suitcases.”

Macguire interjected with, “Oh, man. I mean, can you believe this?”

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, gone? How do you even know where he kept his suitcases?”

“We… used to go to Estes Park together… .” Lena’s voice trailed off:

Marla addressed me tersely. “Call Tom.”

I gave her a helpless look and tried to think. Albert’s clothes and passport were gone? Where was he? “I will call Tom,” I said, “but I can tell you what he’s going to say. The cops won’t take an official missing person’s report yet. They have to wait forty-eight hours.” It was just shy of four o’clock. If Macguire and I didn’t hustle back to my kitchen right now, the Aspen Meadow Women’s Club would be out of luck.

A car honked out front and Macguire leapt to check the window.

“It’s Mr. Royce.”

Marla greeted Tony at the door and gave him the bad news. He choked and then he howled and insisted we were being ridiculous. Albert had to be somewhere around, he said firmly. Lena managed to struggle to her feet and confirm that Albert had absconded.

Tony looked wildly around the room. “There has to be a reason!” he cried. “This is absurd! He must have left a note or something!”

“You and I should go,” I said to Macguire. “We have an appointment to do food.”

“Well,” my ever-committed assistant protested, “who’s going to call the sheriffs department? They should jump right on this.”

I exhaled patiently. No question about it, Macguire was romanticizing police work. Once he spent a couple of months trying to track down drivers’ licenses and reports of missing persons’ vehicles, he’d change his tune.

When we came out to the stone foyer, Marla was slumped on the floor next to Tony. Both faces were studies in misery. Lena kept murmuring into a cellular phone about Albert being gone.

“I’ll call you,” Marla promised me. But she did not. At least, not for the rest of that day, Monday. Macguire and I were so busy with the chicken dinner for the Women’s Club, I didn’t have time to talk anyway. On Tuesday Marla did phone and say Lena had gone through Albert’s files at the office and the house. His datebook revealed nothing unusual planned, except for the partner meeting with Sam Perdue, which Albert missed. Tony confirmed that Albert’s passport and all his best clothes were indeed gone. Albert appeared to have packed and departed in haste. His Explorer was gone. None of the neighbors saw him leave. They hadn’t heard anything either, but of course it had been raining. Probably nobody even wanted to look outside.

Marla didn’t call again on Tuesday. I hoped her silence meant she’d spent most of the day at the hospital doing her rehab, the way she was supposed to. In any event, on Tuesday I was tied up preparing a last-minute vegetarian picnic for the board of the Audubon Society – under porch eaves, because of the rain – and came home so totally wiped out I slept for twelve hours straight. On Wednesday morning, Jake got loose. Arch and I spent several pleasant hours traipsing through damp pines and over soggy grass locating him. On our return, I pondered grinding up his dog biscuits in the disposal.

Marla showed up on my doorstep late Wednesday afternoon. Her frizzy hair was unkempt, and she was not wearing makeup. She was wearing a denim skirt and flowered T-shirt. Both her outfit and her appearance were totally atypical. Her skin, usually peaches and cream, was pale. I was afraid to ask if she was again short of breath.

“May I come in?” Instead of her usual bounciness, she sounded frighteningly subdued.

I invited her to sit down and gave her a glass of Dry Sack. The hand she took it with was trembling. For once it was good to have no jobs. I asked her to stay for dinner. She declined and drank her sherry in silence.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said finally.

Arch was in the next room. I told him we were leaving. Even though the sun was finally shining intermittently through towers of white cumulus clouds, I put on a slicker, tossed Tom’s raincoat over Marla’s shoulders, and picked up two umbrellas. It would be good for Marla to walk. We emerged into the cool, wet-scented air.

I waved to a few neighbors as we moved down the sidewalk. Now that the rain had momentarily let up, the entire neighborhood, it seemed, was either out in their gardens putting in flowers, or out on their decks trying to soak up a little sun, dermatologists be damned.

“I feel totally depressed,” Marla offered glumly as we rounded the corner and started up a graveled foopath put in by some earnest Boy Scouts about ten years previously. The path was lined with pine trees and white-barked aspens, their buds still tightly closed because of the late spring. A sudden burst of sunshine made raindrops glisten sharply on each pine needle.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Albert Lipscomb ever show up?”

“No.” She chuckled bitterly. Her fingers brushed pine needles and sent a shower of drops onto the gravel. “No indeedy. Tony filed the missing person report. this morning. The cops started looking for credit card usage, the usual. The Denver police department is mobilized now, too.” She took a deep breath, then moaned, “Oh, God.”

I tried to think. Had Tom mentioned anything unusual going on at the department? He had been tied up testifying in a forgery case he’d been working on for over a year. But I hadn’t heard a thing about what was going on at the department except for the usual complaints about Captain Shockley.

“The Denver department?” I asked. “Why?”

We came to a wooden bench, also placed by the Scouts. Marla said, “Goldy, will you sit down?”

I brushed raindrops off the cedar boards and obeyed. The sun slipped behind a billowing cloud; the sky darkened ominously. Next to me, Marla shivered as a raindrop fell. She said, “Before he left, Albert Lipscomb cleaned out the partnership account. Three and a half million dollars.”

“Judas priest… . How did he do that?”

“Well, he went to the central bank location. First of the Rockies, downtown Denver. Ordered the cash out of the account on Monday, picked it up on Tuesday. Apparently he charmed the teller, too.”

“Some charm job.”

“Must have been,” Marla said with eerie calm, “because she disappeared with him.”

7

Marla did not elaborate on Albert’s and the bank teller’s disappearance as no details were known. She did report that Tony was in a state of shock. He kept saying, “We have to make everything look normal. This is just a glitch. The work got to him. He’s just holed up in a motel with the girl. Maybe they’re in the Caymans.” The partnership would not immediately go under; they had a small escrow account as well as modest equity positions in Medigen and other companies. “It’s going to be okay,” Marla said Tony kept repeating like a mantra. “We just have to believe it’s going to be okay.”

This was not the case at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department.

“I don’t know how the cops reacted to the 1929 crash,” Tom told me as he patted an appreciative Jake that night. Tom shook his head. “But it couldn’t have been much worse than the way Shockley is handling this. He calls Prospect every hour on the hour. He calls the Denver P.D. every hour on the half, to see if they’ve found that teller yet. He’s handling the Missing Persons on Lipscomb himself.”

I looked up from my recipe file. I’d promised to take a chocolate care package to General Farquhar the next day. “The captain is handling the Lipscomb search personally? What happens to all those rapists and murderers out there while Shockley searches for his missing money?”

Tom chuckled. “Not much. Law enforcement in this county has been put on hold, you can bet that.”

When I made incredulous noises, Tom wagged a finger at me. “You gotta keep the distance in this job, Goldy, it’s the only way to stay sane. Besides, I want Prospect to get straightened’ out. If Shockley doesn’t have enough money to retire, I’m going to have a heart attack myself.”

“Has he found anything?”

Tom shook his head. “First place he sent his team was to Orpheus Canyon Road, to see if Lipscomb had pulled a Victoria Lear – you know, maybe had a car crash. He hadn’t. Why would you risk escaping across Orpheus Canyon Road, with all that money and a cute bank teller? Then he sent guys to that damn mine, where, if you’ll excuse my saying so, he didn’t exactly strike pay dirt either. The place was totally deserted and all locked up. It’s not in his jurisdiction anyway. This Lipscomb? If he changes license plates, doesn’t use his credit card, and doesn’t get stopped for anything, it could take forever to find him.” He rumpled Jake’s ears and gave me a serious look. “I gotta tell you, Shockley called me in and asked about Marla.”

“Marla? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Tom replied slowly. “Shockley’s secretive and paranoid as hell. He asked how long I’d known Marla, did she seem entirely stable, did I know how much she stood to lose if Prospect went under. He implied her little argument with Lipscomb at the party might have turned sinister at a later point.”

“Good God. That’s ridiculous. Marla couldn’t hurt a soul.” If you didn’t count the Jerk, that is. And he had deserved it.

“I was very offhand, said Marla’s bark was worse than her bite, a wonderful friend to you for many years, all that.” He sighed. “But I have to tell you, Miss G., I didn’t feel good about the conversation. At all.”

Neither, of course, did I.

The next morning, I suggested Arch take his dog far from the sounds and smells of my kitchen while I prepared General Farquhar’s chocolate treat. If Jake loved cinnamon, there was no telling how he’d flip for products made from the cocoa bean. Arch was only too delighted to lead Jake up to his room. Gleefully, he vowed he was going to teach the hound the difference between fake blood and the real thing. Although I was not eager to know the details of this lesson, Arch assured me he had a whole bottle of fake blood left over from his Halloween disguise, and he’d just use a pin-prick of his own blood for contrast. How comforting.

So, while Arch and Jake played with blood upstairs, I sifted dark European cocoa with flour, and thought back to when I’d worked for General Bo Farquhar. Two years ago he’d been married, strong, utterly confident. A battalion commander in his 1960 class at West Point, he had distinguished himself in the Special Forces in Vietnam and been promoted early to the rank of general. He’d become the army’s ranking man in the study of terrorists. To his superiors’ eventual chagrin, however, Bo developed his own idea of who deserved to share his military know-how. A group of Afghans facing Russians who refused to retreat – had found a friend in General Bo Farquhar. While the Carter administration insisted the Russians withdraw, the Afghans scored a few hits with suddenly acquired state-of-the-art weapons, smuggled to them by none other than General Bo. When the story broke, the general had been forced to retire. Undeterred, he’d settled with his wife Adele, Marla’s sister, in a huge house on Sam Snead Lane in the Meadowview area of Aspen Meadow Country Club. There he’d experimented with his cache of goodies, with the unfortunate conclusion that while I was working for him, things and people had blown up, including Adele. Although he had not been charged with killing anyone, the general had ended up at the Colorado state penitentiary at Canon City for illegal possession of explosives.

I beat unsalted butter with brown sugar and remembered bringing Bo brownies while he was in prison. I’d visited him there twice. Each time he had asked about Arch; he’d wanted to hear all the details of my son’s checkered school life at Elk Park Prep. Bo had wanted to know about Julian, too. But most insistently, the imprisoned general had questioned me about Marla. I’d always replied she was fine. He’d looked at me expectantly: Would Marla ever come to visit?

There was no chance of that, unfortunately. illogical as it was, Marla still blamed Bo for the death of her sister, despite the fact that he’d had nothing to do with Adele’s demise. Marla had said as much to me last fall, when we’d visited Bride’s Creek, the spot where Adele Farquhar’s ashes were scattered. General Bo, ever heroic, still loved the deceased Adele himself. The fact that Marla refused to see him pained the general deeply.

As I scooped out dark balls of the rich, chocolate-chip-dotted cookie batter, I tried to imagine the general’s new hosts. What kind of deal had Bo Farquhar hatched with these guys to get free room and board at a luxurious, privately owned ranch? Mind you, these former military-industrial-complex honchos didn’t call it a ranch, Bo had told Arch when he’d called to let us know he was back. They called it a compound. And I had no clue what Bo was doing out there that kept him so busy. I melted luscious, creamy white chocolate over the stove and resolved not to worry. General Bo was astonishingly good at survival. At least, he had been before he’d been sent away.

I tasted one of the triple-rich chocolate cookies and shivered with pleasure. The warm chips were seductively gooey inside the dark chocolate dough that was robed in white chocolate. If these didn’t give General Bo his desired chocolate fix, nothing would.

Oddly enough, I was looking forward to seeing General Bo again. I didn’t have any catering to do until this evening, when I visited the Trotfields, formerly served by their Sri Lankan chef. The food for that sumptuous dinner in Meadowview was mostly prepared. I smiled; the Trotfields did not live far from the Farquhars’ old estate. But our family had no emotional link to the Trotfields – nothing like our connection to General Bo. Not only had I worked for General Farquhar at a time when I’d desperately needed a job to support Arch, but he had wormed his way into our hearts: Arch’s, Julian’s, mine, even Tom’s. Of course, Tom had not been enthusiastic about my visits to the general when he was behind bars. Still, I reflected as I greedily licked my chocolate-smeared fingertips, eccentric as he was, General Bo was a friend.

Chocoholic Cookies

2 cups rolled oats

2 cups (1 12-ounce package) semisweet chocolate chips

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature

1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

˝ cup granulated sugar

1 ˝ cups all-purpose flour

˝ teaspoon baking soda

˝ teaspoon salt

ź cup unsweetened cocoa, preferably Hershey’s Premium European-Style

2 large eggs, slightly beaten

1 tablespoon milk

1 ˝ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

9 ounces (3 3-ounce bars) “white chocolate,” preferably Lindt Swiss White Confectionery Bar

1 ˝ tablespoons solid vegetable shortening such as Crisco

Preheat oven to 350 . Butter 2 cookie sheets. Do not alter the order in which the ingredients are combined. In a large bowl, combine the oats and chocolate chips; set aside. In another large bowl, beat together the butter and sugars until creamy. Sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cocoa, then add to the butter mixture, stirring until thoroughly combined. The batter will be very stiff. Stir the milk and vanilla into the eggs, then stir this mixture into the butter mixture until thoroughly combined. Add the chips and oats; stir until well mixed.

Using two-tablespoon scoop, drop batter 2 inches apart on cookie sheets. Bake 9 to 12 minutes, until cooked through. Cool on pan 1 minute; transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

Melt the white chocolate with the solid vegetable shortening in the top of a double boiler over simmering water. Holding a cooled cookie between your thumb and forefinger, dip the edge into the warm white chocolate to cover the top third of the cookie. Place on a rack over wax paper to dry completely. Store between layers of wax paper in an airtight container in a cool place.

Makes 5 dozen.

Tom, however, had been skeptical when we’d discussed my plans.

“There’s nothing unusual about the general not having to serve his whole sentence,” Tom announced that morning, before leaving for his sixth straight day in court. “I checked with his parole officer. Bo doesn’t need to work because he has an income. From the army and the sale of what was left of his property, because the land underneath the house that blew up was valuable. I guess he invested the proceeds of the sale.” He frowned. “But the guy’s a nut case, Goldy, you know that.”

“He’s just… odd,” I’d replied cheerfully. “He doesn’t think things through the way most folks do. He gets all passionate, demands to be in charge, and that’s what gets him into trouble. But I promised I’d go see him and I’m going. Anyway, with his wife dead and Marla refusing to see him, who knows how many friends he has left?”

“Oh, he has plenty of friends. I checked on that, too.” Tom chuckled. “Friends who managed his financial affairs while he was in jail. Friends who have oddball radio programs. Friends who would plan the invasion of Saturn if they thought there’d be a payoff in it.”

“Please, no cop paranoia, all right? I’m just taking the man some cookies. That’s all he wants. Okay?”

Tom shot me a skeptical look. “I’d feel better if Macguire or somebody went with you. I’m not sure I like the idea of you paying a house call on a convicted felon and surrounded by those paramilitary wackos.”

I’d sighed, but said nothing. Who was there to go with me? Not Marla. And if I asked Macguire, the would-be law enforcer, to be my bodyguard at an army-type compound, he would probably show up in battle gear juggling a brace of hand grenades. No gasoline needed on that particular fire, thank you very much.

I took the second batch of chocolate cookies out of the oven, set the cookie sheets aside to cool, and reflected on what I hadn’t told Tom: that the general had instructed me to come alone. Sometimes you just had to act on your gut instinct. I was keeping my mouth shut and going unaccompanied. Like most caterers, the gut is the only organ I trust, anyway.

Arch pelted down the stairs to report that he was taking Jake over to his friend Todd’s. I didn’t ask about the blood test. Fifteen minutes later, I’d packed the cookies and revved up the van. Time to see just what was going on out at that thousand-acre nonranch.

Despite the fact that it was the tenth of June, fat snowflakes mixed with rain splattered softly on my windshield as I drove along the wet streets of Aspen Meadow. The water in Cottonwood Creek was so high that it no longer flowed under the main bridge in town, but instead hit the concrete at midpoint and created a turbid backwash the length of the cross street. I turned and headed toward the small mountain town of Blue Spruce, five hundred feet above and fifteen miles west of Aspen Meadow. Actually, it was fifteen miles on the main road, General Bo had said, then ten miles meandering on dirt roads that were sure to be treacherous with snow and mud. I couldn’t wait.

Just west of town, traffic had been diverted because of yet another washed-out bridge. Sam Perdue’s dishevelment and frustration at the same type of crisis earlier this week made me resolve to go slow. The van bumped precariously over the makeshift bridge. Here the creek was particularly tumultuous, like dirty laundry water in a wild washing machine. But also dangerous. It made me nervous to look at the culverts, which had obviously not been designed to swallow so much liquid. Each concrete cylinder I passed was clogged with stones and brush. Above the culverts’ rims, thick, wet sticks protruded like skeletons.

The van wheezed and climbed, topped a hill, and descended into a deep valley. I passed Carl’s You-Snag-‘Em, We-Bag- ‘Em Trout Fishing Pond, High Country Auto Repair, which looked abandoned, the equally decrepit Aspen Grove restaurant, and finally the minuscule Blue Spruce fire department and even tinier Blue Spruce post office. I wheeled the van right on what I hoped was the first dirt road Bo had described. Another road and then another deteriorated into rutted pathways, where it was all I could do to avoid stony fissures and puddles the size of small ponds. The muddy pathway with its central ice-crusted grass strip did not appear promising. Just when I became convinced I had gone the wrong way, the bumpy road abruptly ended at a gate and a high chain-link fence that extended in both directions through thick pine trees. There was a freshly painted white guard shack at the gate. Within moments of my approach, a tall man in a hooded green slicker came out to the van. He held a clipboard covered with plastic.

“Yes?” He was light-skinned and dark-haired, with sparkling espresso-colored eyes.

I told him who I was visiting and why. The guard politely demanded that I open the back doors of the van so he could inspect it. Moving methodically, he used a flashlight to peer along all the racks, under the seats, into the glove compartment. He even asked that I uncover the platters of chocolate cookies. He tapped the bottom of each platter and eyed the enticing contents dispassionately. So much for everyone being a chocoholic at heart.

He motioned for me to recover the plates, then squeaked the gate open and impassively waved me through. The van rocked upward as the rutted dirt road became smooth pavement without warning. Five minutes later, I pulled up in front of a massive, styleless stucco house that looked more like a barracks than a dwelling. Parked outside were three camouflage-painted trucks. Two camo-suited men greeted me at the heavy wooden entrance. Just inside, a closed-circuit camera monitored my movements. One of the men wordlessly took the keys to my van. The other ushered me into a room decorated with a long mahogany conference table and another surveillance camera.

A short, white-haired man in a beige suit soundlessly entered the room. He had pale skin and white hair, and a quiet, assured air. I couldn’t decide if he was a CEO or a yogi.

“Mrs. Schulz,” he said serenely, as if he were greeting me after a church service instead of here in paramilitary purgatory. He extended his hand and I shook it. He did not introduce himself. “You have brought food for our friend. The kind of food he craves, he tells me.”

“Yes. I … used to work for him, and … he loves chocolate. We … have been friends for several years,” I added carefully, as if to explain that I usually didn’t meet the general’s buddies under circumstances like these.

“I see.” He gestured and we both sat down. He steepled his short fingers. “We are extremely worried about General Farquhar. He is being treated for depression by one of our doctors. He is also finishing an important project for us here. We do not think it wise for him to leave the compound.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

His colorless eyes regarded me somberly. “We would be very happy if you could help him in any way he asks.”

I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable, but merely mumbled, “Well, sure.” What I thought but didn’t add was, We’re not talking about illegal or immoral help here, are we? The pale man stood: I was dismissed. I was led by Greeter Number One down a joyless, undecorated corridor to a long, windowed room that resembled the day room of a hospital. The guard opened the door and waited for me to pass through, then stationed himself by a window, sentrylike.

In the far right corner, General Bo Farquhar was slumped in a turquoise plastic chair. When he heard us come into the room, he moved slowly to get up. He turned to face me, then held out his arms. I walked forward and hugged him. He smelled of fresh detergent and starch.

He pulled back and assessed me. “I’m so happy to see you, Goldy.” His voice seemed gravelly with disuse. Tears filled his eyes. “It has just been too long.”

In the months since my last visit to the correctional facility at Canon City, General Bo’s hawklike features had gone distressingly slack. His skin had grayed and his expression was distracted. After he had dabbed them with a handkerchief, his blue eyes – eyes that had always reminded me of equal parts of ice and sky – were cloudy. When I’d first met him, his hair had been so close-cropped that it was hard to determine its color-ash blond or white. In prison it had looked like an unevenly mowed hay meadow. Now the general’s hair had grown out in loose, pale yellow waves. I found myself wondering how this compound could have a shrink but no barber. Bo’s muscle-hard constitution had registered at least a fifteen-pound gain since the last time I’d seen him. He still looked fit, but the olive green uniform he wore hugged the new folds on his stomach and splayed out over his hips like pajamas.

“Let’s go for a walk.” Again the dulled voice surprised me. In fact, everything about him – his painstaking movements, perplexed expression, lack of focus – made him look twenty years older than the fifty-five I knew he was.

“Will they let us?” I whispered. “We could just stay here and have cookies.” His expression immediately turned crestfallen, and I was sorry I had suggested hanging around. To tell the truth, this place gave me the creeps after just ten minutes. It was no wonder Bo was depressed. “Why don’t we go for a walk,” I said cheerfully. “I’m dying to see the sights at this place.”

He managed a pinched laugh. “Let me get us an escort, then,” he said. He ambled over to the man who had brought me into the room and murmured to him. The guard disappeared. When he came back, he brusquely nodded and gestured to a side door.

One thing about hiking up a Colorado mountain: Unless you know the trail very well, it’s hard to talk while you’re doing it. I huffed up the dirt path at the general’s side. If you’re not as surefooted as a mountain goat-and it was questionable that I possessed any such balance – all you focus on is getting to where the hiking stops. Conversing is out of the question. With clouds still threatening overhead, and our guard close on our heels, we veered to a narrower, steeper path and entered dark woods. I was very glad I hadn’t brought along Arch and Jake.

The general took long strides over the rocks ahead of me. For all his extra weight and unhealthy look, Bo was hiking without effort. Behind us, our dark-haired guard, who clearly could have won a speed-walking race to Vail, easily kept pace with us. After about a quarter mile of this torture, the general decided to ask, “So, how is everybody, Goldy? Arch? Julian? Tom? You didn’t invite me to your wedding,” he said accusingly.

“Yes,” I panted. “I got … married.” What was I supposed to do, send him an invitation in jail? “Arch is fine. Has a new dog.” Another mile of this, and I’d be dead.

“I heard. And Marla, how is she? I sent her flowers when she had the heart attack… .”

“Fine.” My own heart was pounding. Would he send me flowers if I collapsed? “Everybody’s great. Marla’s got a boyfriend. He’s with that firm you’ve invested in – “

“I know, I know, that’s why I invested in it, so I could see her sometime. I would love to get together with her, Goldy, if you could arrange it,” the general interrupted, his tone very serious. “When I was in prison all I could think about was reconnecting with Marla. She’s my only connection to my dear Adele… .”

My shins were on fire. Ahead, the trees thinned to reveal a grassy area. To the left, a sudden view of overcast sky indicated that we were on the edge of an overlook. In the distance, I could hear roaring water.

“Please,” I panted, “let’s… stop.”

“Keep going,” was the barely audible command from our dark-haired companion.

Oh, marvelous. I fastened my eyes on the ground, put one foot in front of the other, up, up, up, and tried to think about energy, white light, and running the bases in softball when I was ten. These did not help.

“Look, let’s take a break,” the general said finally. He stopped and put his hands on his hips. “It’ll be okay,” he told the guard. “Let’s go to where we can see the creek. It’s across from the spot where we’ve been doing some testing – “

“Not a good idea, sir,” countered the guard. “There’s a full moon…”

Bo gave him the ice-blue gaze I knew of old. “I don’t think we’re in any danger.” The guard looked away. I guess Bo got whatever he wanted from everybody. And why should a full moon matter, anyway?

We threaded through the trees until we reached the rocky overlook. Water roared close by. Where were we? I held out both arms to keep my balance as I teetered between granite boulders the size of elephants. I inadvertently stepped into a mud puddle and quickly hopped out. The ridge lay ten yards ahead.

Thunder cracked overhead. Or was it an explosion nearby? To my astonishment, the earth seemed to be moving, crumbling under my feet. The enormous rocks on either side of us skewed sideways.

“Rock slide!” the guard cried as he vaulted back. I swerved instinctively and caught a glimpse of General Farquhar’s grim face. I grabbed his large hand and we leapt. I cried out to him, but my voice was lost in the clamor of exploding earth.

Together we somehow scrambled in the direction we’d come. The deafening noise of snapping trees filled the air. Behind us, rocks thundered on their way downhill. Move, move fast, I commanded my feet. Instead, I slid in deep mud. Mud, mud, everywhere. And rocks. My hand held tight to General Bo’s. We both bounded up, up over rocks and cracking earth. A final fast hurdle brought us onto solid, but still shaking ground. We fell down, gasping. Miraculously, we had been on the very edge of the slide. Thank God. Another five feet forward, and we could have been killed.

How much time had gone by? Ten seconds? I shivered uncontrollably. Beside me, the general winced and cursed softly. I glanced back. Where we had been standing was air.

“General Farquhar, sir!” our guard shouted. The general croaked a response. The guard appeared from within a stand of pine trees. There was mud on his face and uniform. He pulled out a radio and began hollering into it. There was another reverberating ka-boom: A last boulder tumbled into the stream. The same stream that had so treacherously undercut the bank we’d been climbing, no doubt. Again I cursed my own idiocy. After all my warnings to Tom about being careful on the trail! I shuddered. The radio crackled and a high, excited voice showered the brand-new silence with coded questions that sounded like Alpha Bravo Charlie, et cetera, ten four.

The guard spoke into his radio, then told us to stay still, HQ would be bringing a stretcher. Very, very carefully, I touched Bo’s left leg. He cried out with pain.

“It’s just a sprain,” he insisted. He looked appreciatively at the guard. “I should have listened to you.”

The guard turned his glittering dark eyes on me. “During a full moon,” he explained to me in a curt tone which indicated that every moron already knew what I didn’t, “the lunar gravitational pull acts on rocks in the continental crust the way it does on the ocean. Rocks rise in a tide, up to a foot. Plus we’ve had all this rain, and we’re working with explosives nearby, which makes the entire area, especially above a stream, unstable.” He shrugged.

I was soggy with rain and slick with mud. What I needed was a long hot bath – and this guy was giving me a geology lesson. I murmured, “Good Lord.”

“The full moon adds to the earth’s instability,” our guide concluded knowledgeably.

So does explosives testing, I added silently.

A four-wheel-drive vehicle cracked through the undergrowth. The two camo-suited men I’d seen earlier hauled out a stretcher and loaded a protesting General Bo onto it. Then we all climbed into the all-terrain makeshift ambulance.

When we got back to the compound, Bo didn’t ask me to stay, which was fine with me. He was in a great deal of pain and needed attention. And as I said, I needed a bath.

“Call us,” I urged. “Let us know how you are.”

“The ankle will be fine,” said Bo with a rueful smile. His voice turned pleading. “But Goldy, could you please have Marla call me? I want to talk to her about the Eurydice Gold Mine, about any old environmental studies that have been done of that area. Also, I’m wondering about this guy who did the geological study that their ore projections are based on. I’m too tied up to look into these details myself. Would you get her to call?”

“I’ll try.”

He studied my anxious, filthy face. Chocolate cookies, a military compound, weird people, explosives nearby, and a rock slide. Normal excitement for him, maybe, but not for me. His look became indulgent. “Poor Goldy. Ready to go back to Aspen Meadow and your kitchen?”

I decided not to reply.

8

As my van splashed home, I had a hard time blocking out the memory of the ground giving way abruptly under my feet, or the din created by the fall of boulders and trees. I tried instead to concentrate on the swish of the windshield wipers. When I’d left the compound, the dark, lowlying clouds had delivered a furious downpour of icy rain. At least it wasn’t snow. I ran from the van to our porch steps and pushed inside, my heart thumping.

Arch was in the kitchen heating pizza. I was so happy to see him I rushed over and gave him a hug. Jake’s tail whacked the floor happily in greeting. His red-rimmed eyes, furrowed brow, and long, floppy ears made even an old cat-lover like me smile. Jake panted excitedly, and, it seemed to me, smiled back. Maybe we were bonding after all.

“Gosh, Mom, where have you been?” Arch eyed my filthy jeans and jacket. “I thought you hated hiking. Is that where you went with the general, that you wouldn’t let me come because you wanted to check it out first? Hiking? I swear, Mom, you look like you fell into a mud pit.”

“I did, sort o[ And you’re right,” I replied, “I do hate hiking. Unfortunately, that’s what I had to do with Bo Farquhar. Sort of hiking and sort of climbing.” And sort of scrambling for our lives.

“In this weather?” It was hard to ignore his friendly mimic of my voice, but I did. Upstairs, I quickly stripped out of the muddy clothes and ran the bathwater. And to treat myself, I poured in double the amount of perfumed bath salts.

Soon I was back in the kitchen, sipping piping hot Formosa Oolong, snugly wrapped in Tom’s green terry-cloth robe. I tried to think. After a few minutes, I put down my teacup and dialed Tom, only to get his voice mail. I left a message. Somehow I couldn’t imagine going out on my evening catering assignment alone. Not right after I’d survived a natural disaster that had very nearly deprived my son (and his dog) of a mother. Which gave me an idea.

“Arch,” I said. “Macguire can’t help me tonight – “

Arch swallowed his last mouthful of pizza. “Why not?”

This was no time to get into a discussion of why Macguire had chosen this evening to watch all the Die Hard movies so he could learn how to be a policeman. I rushed on with: “Would you please shower and get into a black-and-white outfit so you can come help me tonight? I’ll pay you.”

After we’d negotiated a suitable salary and fed Jake, : we quickly packed up the ingredients for the shrimp pilaf I was preparing for the dinner at the Trotfields’ mammoth house on Arnold Palmer Avenue in the Meadowview area of Aspen Meadow Country Club.

The rain had turned back to mist by the time we set out. On the way over, I asked Arch if anyone had called while I was gone. He said no and wondered suspiciously why I was asking. Of course I wasn’t about to tell him that I wondered how the general was recovering from his rock slide injury.

“Jake wasn’t outside barking, if that’s what you’re getting at. The neighbors weren’t complaining. He’s a good dog, Mom. After what he’s been through, he just needs a lot of affection.”

“I know, I know. That’s why I let him stay on your bed while we’re gone.”

“He probably misses me already.”

“We’re only going to be away a few hours.”

“With Meadowview clients?” Arch huffed. “You’ve got to be kidding. Cook this, clean up that. Call so-and-so and get more chardonnay delivered. Oh, better make that six cases, looks like we’re running out. Then go take Mrs. Smith some aspirin, because she’s got a terrible headache and is upstairs lying down. And you just want to say, ‘Well, if she hadn’t drunk all that chardonnay – ‘ “

“Arch! That has never happened.”

“Just about.” We swung through the elegant stone entryway to Meadowview. Large, pale houses sailed past in the dusk. “These people have too much money,” Arch said. “They are too stuck-up.”

“The Farquhars used to live over here,” I reminded him.

“They were different. The general was doing cool bomb experiments and he had all that nifty security. And he wasn’t stuck-up.”

Crazy, maybe, but not stuck-up. Thank goodness for small blessings. I wheeled the van onto Arnold Palmer Avenue. “The place where we’re going has good security.”

Arch shot me a fierce look. “I bet they’re not guarding a batch of state-of-the-art explosives.”

“No, they have paintings. You know, art. The husband flies all over the world, but the wife’s the one with the money. She uses it to buy paintings by famous artists.”

He snorted. “See, I told you. They’ll have a teensy-weensy yard that their kids can’t even play in. And then they’ll have a great big house filled with gross paintings. There’ll be pictures of people with horses, people with dogs, horses with dogs, dogs with – “

“Arch, please. You’re acting prejudiced against these people, and you don’t even know them. Besides, with the money you earn tonight, you can buy some rawhide for Jake. And if you want a portrait of him, you can paint it yourself.”

He hrumphed. But he was right about the area where we were catering. Less than twenty years old, Meadowview is a posh development that features enormous houses that resemble yachts anchored to small grass lots. The lots might boast one or perhaps two pine trees. But the heavy demand for the residences in this expensive mansionhood had come from East Coasters and Californians fleeing high crime rates and even higher living costs. These new Coloradans could now look forty feet across their property and find themselves peering into their neighbor’s bedroom. Would that make them feel perfectly secure, I wondered? Probably not.

“Gosh, this is valuable?” Arch asked half an hour later, when we were setting up the buffet. “This is what they have all that security for? Do you suppose somebody meant to paint this way?” He was staring at a large Motherwell canvas on the Trotfields’ foyer wall. In the dining room, Amanda Trotfield had hung Giacometti and Henry Moore sketches. A Franz Kline and a de Kooning graced the living room. The Motherwell that Arch was regarding so skeptically featured a large section of blue, with a fragment of a cigarette painted in one corner. Not a painting I would have chosen for the entryway to a smoke-free house.

“I don’t know, honey, but yes, I think the artist probably meant to paint that way. At least it’s not people on horses. Let’s serve the appetizers and then we’ll be able to take a break.”

While Arch passed trays of filo-wrapped spinach triangles, I tossed fat, juicy strawberries with chilled, steamed sugar-snap peas in a light vinaigrette. It was a delicate, unusual salad that would contrast well with the Plantation Pilaf-a rich-tasting lowfat dish featuring succulent shrimp bathed in sherry and tomato juice. Marla had told me she was invited tonight, and I was eager to see her again. She had looked so bad when she’d told me the news about Albert absconding with the money that I was deeply worried about her. I hoped she’d have some news about either the teller or the missing money tonight. Then again, maybe someone else would have news. The Trotfields were Prospect Financial investors; Sandy Trotfield had called Albert Lipscomb’s office the morning the infamous partner hadn’t shown up for work. According to Tom, the Trotfields were friends of Tony, Albert, or both. Tony Royce himself as well as the Hardcastles, would be in attendance tonight, too. One of the guests ought to know something.

I loaded a tray with ice and liquor bottles. Perhaps I could ask a few questions that would help Marla find out what was going on with that mine. Then again, maybe I was just being nosy.

Sugar-Snap Pea and Strawberry Salad

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

2 teaspoons raspberry vinegar

ź teaspoon Dijon mustard

ź pound (1 cup) sugar-snap peas, including pods, strings removed

1 pound (4 cups) ripe strawberries, thickly sliced

Combine the oil, vinegar, and mustard in a small bowl; whisk thoroughly and set aside. Steam the sugar-snap peapods for 30 seconds or until bright green but still crunchy. Remove them from the heat, drain, then quickly run cold water over them to stop the cooking, and drain again. Combine the sugar-snaps with the sliced strawberries. Whisk the dressing again and drizzle over the peapods and strawberries. Serve immediately or chill for no more than one hour. Serves 4.

As soon as the hors d’oeuvres and drinks were well in hand, I advised Arch to take a break. He had just poured himself a soft drink when Marla popped into the kitchen.

“Hey, guys!” Her cheeriness seemed forced, and her complexion was splotched. She was wearing a shiny royal blue Princess Di sort of dress, only she looked more like a young Queen Mother. “These abstract paintings destroy my appetite,” she grumped. “Why can’t the Trotfields at least buy a few Warhol soup cans?”

“Oh, stop it,” I said. “Go have fun with the guests.”

She made a face. “Oh, sure. The cops have been around questioning all the Prospect clients, and nearly everyone here tonight has invested with Prospect, as you probably know. Did we know this about Albert Lipscomb, do we know that? Tonight we’ll hear everyone’s theories on what really happened to Albert. Sort of a replay of last month, when I had to endure everybody’s theories on what happened to Victoria. Was she depressed, was she a bad driver, was she forced off the road, did she have car problems?” She lowered her voice. “Tony says the clients don’t know about the missing three and a half mil yet, so mum’s the word, Goldy. The clients suspect Albert took a wad of dough, though. And not a word tonight about the mine. Tony’s in his act-normal mode. It’s boring as hell.” I muttered a silent curse. So much for sneakily questioning the guests. Marla winked at Arch and said, “Hey, guy, got any chocolate? I’m desperate.”

Arch laughed. “You haven’t even had dinner yet.” I poured tiny amounts of glistening olive oil into two wide frying pans. “What’s the act-normal mode?” Marla scowled. “Oh, don’t get me started on Tony and how he’s repressing his hysteria. I used to think he needed me. Now I think he needs an IV full of Demerol, a straitjacket, and a padded cell. Make that an IV full of Thorazine. I’m so tired of the man I could spit.”

“Well, don’t do that,” I said as I shook the pan of sauteing onions. They sizzled invitingly. “Listen, Marla. There’s something I need to ask you…” But what was it the general had said? I inhaled the rich scent of caramelizing onions and tried to remember.

Plantation Pilaf

3 tablespoons olive oil

8 ounces (1 ź cups) onion, halved and very thinly sliced

3 garlic cloves, pressed

1 ź cups rice

2 cups homemade low-fat chicken stock (recipe is in KILLER PANCAKE,) or use 2 cups canned chicken broth

ž cup tomato juice

ź cup dry sherry

1 ž teaspoon paprika

˝ teaspoon salt

1 quart water

1 tablespoon Old Bay seasoning

24 medium or large raw “Easy-Peel” shrimp (8 to 10 ounces of frozen raw shrimp)

1 cup canned pineapple chunks, thoroughly drained and patted dry on paper towels

1 cup frozen baby peas

In a nonstick skillet, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil over medium heat. Add onions and cook until they are translucent. Add garlic, stir, and lower heat. Cook very briefly, only until garlic is also translucent. Do not brown the onions or the garlic. In another wide skillet, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Add rice and saute until golden brown. Add cooked onions and garlic, stock, tomato juice, sherry, paprika, and salt. Cover the pan and cook 20 to 30 minutes, or until juices are absorbed.

While the rice is cooking, bring the quart of water to a boil. Add the Old Bay seasoning and the shrimp. Cook just until the shrimp has turned pink. Drain immediately and discard seasoned water. Do not overcook the shrimp. Peel, devein, and set the shrimp aside until the rice is cooked. Remove the cover from the rice and add the shrimp, pineapple, and peas. Raise the heat to medium and cook, stirring, until the peas are just cooked and the mixture is heated through. Serve immediately.

Serves 4.

“When am I getting rid of Tony? The sooner the better.”

“Marla, please.” I showered grains of rice into the remaining pans. On the other side of the kitchen, Arch was banging cupboard doors open and shut. “Oh, yes. General Farquhar was wondering if you knew the fellow who did the geology for the Eurydice. He also said to ask you about environmental statements. You know, like inspections of the mine.”

Marla’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Why does he want to know? He’s a right-winger, he doesn’t give a damn about the environment.” When I shrugged, she exhaled impatiently. “Tell him they don’t do an environmental impact statement when they’re reopening a mine. And ask him why he cares, anyway, okay?”

“Chocolate-covered jelly beans,” Arch announced triumphantly. He held up a glass candy jar that he’d somehow uncovered in one of the Trotfields’ cabinets. “Want some? Wait, let me check the ingredients.”

“You’ve trained your son well,” Marla remarked with a wink.

“Marla,” I said, “don’t eat candy. Please. What in the world am I fixing a lowfat pilaf for if you’re going to snack before dinner?”

Arch frowned as he read from the jar’s label of contents. “Uh-oh. Artificial food coloring. Just a second, there it is. Yellow No.5.”

Marla raised her eyebrows. “Maybe Tony would more willing to break up with me if I broke out in hives.”

I sighed. Tony called Marla from the other room, and she disappeared. The rice sputtered with the garlic andonions as I drizzled dry sherry, tomato juice, and homemade chicken stock over it. I gently swirled the ingredients and put on the cover. Cocktail refill time. For the guests, that is.

While I poured drinks in the living room, Edna Hardcastle declared to the other guests that Albert Lipscomb must be in Argentina. That’s where all criminals ended up, she maintained. Whit Hardcastle overruled his wife. She must be thinking of Colombia. Tony Royce somberly told them that the police thought Albert was in California. This prompted Sandy Trotfield, a slender, strawberry-blond fellow who wore a collarless cotton shirt and designer pedal pushers, to observe loudly that he thought California was where all criminals ended up. He guffawed while the guests laughed uneasily. Marla rolled her eyes at me.

I joined Arch in the kitchen. Friendship notwithstanding, Sandy Trotfield had called Albert’s office not once but twice this past Monday morning, presumably over possible problems with the mine assays. Now that Albert had absconded, though, Sandy appeared oddly blustery. Why would you be in a panic one day, and be making forced jokes about your money manager’s disappearance four days later? It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Then again, maybe Sandy Trotfield was just a jerk.

The Trotfields’ calendar was posted on the side of the refrigerator, and I surreptitiously looked it over while drinking a glass of bubbly water. Sandy had flown to Johannesburg a month ago, stayed five days, and come back. Three weeks ago he’d flown to Puerto Vallarta and stayed for another five days before returning. He was off for Rio tomorrow and would be back next week. Apparently pilots with rich wives managed to worry about their money, recover, laugh about it over spinach hors d’oeuvre, and then take off for extensive globe-trotting without a blink.

The doorbell pealed softly. Mrs. Trotfield had greeted her guests herself, so I felt no compunction to answer it. Arch didn’t even hear the bell. He was listening to the Walkman he’d borrowed from Macguire while rocking unrhythmically but enthusiastically in front of the cookbook shelves. Suddenly he tore the earphones off his head.

“Receipts?” he cried as he reached for one of the books. “What’s a book of receipts doing in with Julia Child and all that?”

I said, “Let me have a look,” as the doorbell rang again. Why, indeed, would the Trotfields have a money book inserted between the food volumes? My heart sank, though, when Arch handed me a green publication entitled Charleston Receipts. “Oh, honey,” I said as I flipped through the famous Junior League cookbook, “this kind of receipt means recipe – ” I stopped talking as the book fell open to the title page. A handwritten inscription read: “For my new friends Sandy and Amanda Trotfield, from an adopted Charlestonian! Best regards, Albert Lipscomb.”

Hmm. The Citadel, I remembered, was in Charleston, South Carolina. More significant, though, was the fact that the Trotfields and Albert were not just friends, but new friends. How new; and what would they do for a new friend?

The doorbell rang again. I flipped the cookbook closed and peered out the window over the sink. It had started to rain again. All I could see through the curtain of wetness was a line of fancy cars and four other Arnold Palmer Avenue houses. When the bell chimed the third time, I had come out to refill the platters on the buffet. The glistening, ruby-colored pilaf steamed invitingly and the guests ooh-ed. Dingdong, a fourth impatient ring through the loud riffs of Dave Brubeck’s Jake Five. The rat-a-tat-tat of precipitation on the fashionable blue tin roof was so loud, Mrs. Trotfield had turned up her stereo.

I retrieved the smooth, pink raspberry mousse pies from the refrigerator. When I started to whip the cream, I tapped my electric mixer against the side of the steel bowl in time with Gene Krupa’s Maori-inspired drumbeat, which filtered through speakers the Trotfields had installed above the custom-made maple cabinets. Unfortunately, the doorbell rang again as I was starting to spoon heaping mounds of cream on each pie. Whoever was at the door was not going away. Amanda Trotfield, a slender, fortyish woman with translucent skin and black hair spiked outward in a fashionable punk, appeared in the kitchen. She announced that everyone was here who was supposed to be here, that the ice was just getting broken, metaphorically speaking, and would I please get rid of whoever was at the door? She wanted her guests to enjoy their expensive food.