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I eyed the shrunken Frisbee of cake, then checked my new index card with its list. The ingredients were the same. “To hell with Nora’s cake. Let’s whip up Old Reliable.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Julian began creaming the butter while I assembled the dry ingredients. During my years at boarding school, Old Reliable had been a staple of our bake sales. To buy new sticks for the field-hockey team or fund a field trip to Chancellorsville, the day students would bring in platters of cookies and cakes that we boarding students would then slice and sell after lunch. I had a vivid memory of girls carrying paper napkins topped with huge slices of tender yellow cake that had been slathered with chocolate buttercream icing. Those Southerners knew how to cook, I’d give them that. Maybe our school bake sales weren’t on the level of some of the fancy fund-raisers we did at St. Luke’s Episcopal, but the principle of “You Can Eat Blamelessly if You’re Raising Money” was identical.

  If we did indeed cater Donald Ellis’s birthday party, I would need to double the ingredients, I realized, as I printed out my old recipe. I worked the math and wrote up the proportions, then handed the paper to Julian to make sure I’d done it right. He recalculated the ingredients and found I’d only failed to double the baking powder. Agh!

  “You’re distracted,” Julian said encouragingly. “I can’t believe you’re trying to…well, I can believe it, given everything you’ve told me about that law firm. Let’s boogie on this cake so you can pick up Arch and Gus on time.”

  I sifted the dry ingredients, then creamed the sugar into the butter while Julian separated eight eggs. Julian rarely complained, and he took to his tasks with determination, eyeing each yolk and white carefully to make sure none of one mixed in with the other. Working with him in the kitchen was like skiing with someone you’ve known forever. He goes one way, you go the other, and no one skis over anyone’s toes.

  We put the cake pans into the oven and observed the batter’s progress through the glass, as anxious as parents watching their own kid ski down a slope for the first time. But the cake rose beautifully, and emerged puffed and golden.

  After we’d placed the pans on racks to cool, Julian frowned at Charlie’s cake recipe, or rather his recipe for cake failure.

  “It really was not like Charlie to do this incorrectly,” Julian said, his voice stubborn.

  “Well, let it go for now. Julian? Sally Routt has asked me to look into Dusty’s death. Just tell me, how did Dusty seem to you, when you were going to school together? I mean, was she friendly, standoffish, smart, not so smart, what?”

  Julian turned, leaned against the counter, and folded his arms. After a moment, he said, “She was smart, yeah. I mean, Elk Park Prep gave her a full ride, until everything fell apart.”

  “We’re talking about before the Routts moved in across the street.”

  “Yeah.”

  Julian pointed to the espresso machine and raised his eyebrows, as in How many shots? I thought, To hell with my doctor, and said, “A couple. With some cream, if you don’t mind. Thanks. Whenever I do get to bed, I’m going to sleep no matter what.”

  Julian’s sneakers squeaked as he moved quickly around the kitchen to fetch demitasse cups, whipping cream, and to refill our bowl of sugar, which he had emptied. He pulled the shots, doused mine with cream, and placed the cups on the kitchen table. I sat down and, as usual, averted my eyes as he proceeded to ladle obscene amounts of sugar into his coffee. Why did he have such perfect teeth? I wondered.

  “What do you mean,” I prompted him, “until everything fell apart?”

  “Okay,” he began, after taking a preliminary slurp, frowning, and dumping in another dose of the sweet stuff. “You have to remember, this was before teachers started being held accountable if they had sex with students. It’s hard to think of a time when the student got blamed, but that’s exactly what used to happen. Anyway, that’s certainly what went down at Elk Park Prep when Dusty had an affair with the drama teacher, Mr. Ogden. Ogden was totally pathetic. He kept moaning about how his acting career was being foiled because his wife was so jealous of the time he spent on his work. Everybody felt sorry for him. Or at least, the girls did.”

  My stomach churned, and it wasn’t from the espresso, which was actually excellent. Men could be just as manipulative as women, thank you very much.

  “Nobody felt sorrier for him than Dusty,” Julian went on. “And then she got pregnant, even though Ogden told her he’d had a vasectomy! Dusty told me later that she really had thought Mr. Ogden would leave Mrs. Ogden and be with her, but forget that. Next thing anyone knew, Ogden was going to the headmaster, claiming Dusty was a slut who was falsely accusing him of fathering her child, which he could not have done, because he’d had that vasectomy. And also, Ogden insisted, Dusty needed to be expelled because she was with child, and that had violated the terms of her scholarship.” Julian finished his coffee and made a face. “Anyway, that lily-livered son of a bitch headmaster did expel her. Ogden’s version of the story came out in the papers. You didn’t see it? Dusty had falsely accused a teacher of impregnating her, blah, blah, blah.”

  “No, I never saw that. Poor Dusty. Couldn’t she have insisted on a paternity test?”

  Julian held up a stubby finger. “While Dusty was studying for her GED, she had an early-term miscarriage. This was while the Habitat house was being built. Then Dusty’s family moved in across the street from you, and she started to work for Mignon Cosmetics. She was determined to put Ogden behind her, and she became really focused on getting ahead, being ambitious. Remember?” I nodded. “After another cosmetics company hired her, she thought she was on her way up, but that cosmetics company went belly-up. So then Dusty got her associate’s degree down at Red Rocks. It just took her eighteen months, if you can believe it. And then Dusty’s uncle, Richard Chenault, joined the law firm in Aspen Meadow, and felt sorry for his niece. Supposedly. Anyway, he hired her and is paying for her tuition bills at the Mile-High Paralegal Institute.”

  I sipped my coffee. “Do you know anything about this brother, Edgar?”

  “Just that he died in custody after being picked up on a DUI. He got beaten along the way, but nobody seems to know exactly what happened. Yeah, right. When I was going out with Dusty, Mrs. Routt could not stop talking about Edgar’s death. She was, like, obsessed. Then one day, she said she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, because it was making her totally nuts, and she needed to pay attention to the present. She didn’t tell you about that either, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t.” I stared out the window at aspen leaves being blown off the trees at the side of our house. “Still, no wonder Sally Routt hates the police and the press.”

  Julian said, “Yeah, no wonder.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Julian offered to clean up. He said it would help him deal with how ticked off the story about Dusty always made him feel. When I thanked him, he nodded, his face still flushed from his outburst detailing Dusty’s problems. Even though the lovely scent of baked cake was a tempting reason to stay and try to chat some more, I thought it better to make a quick exit. When I stood up to help Julian gather dirty bowls, beaters, and pans, he stopped me.

  “C’mon, let me do this by myself. You remember I’m cooking dinner for Marla and spending the night over there, right?”

  Right, right, he had told us this. Marla was, in fact, Julian’s aunt by blood, and I was always happy to see them getting together. Julian promised to be back in the morning to help me finish the prep for Donald Ellis’s birthday party.

  That was the thing about Julian, I reflected, as I bounded up the stairs to wash my hair. He was reliable and he was kind. And there was something else. There’s a stereotype embedded in people’s mind, and it runs through literature, movies, and TV. And that is that men are unemotional, logical, and analytical. Living with Arch, Julian, and Tom, I’d concluded that nothing could be further from the truth. Okay, so none of them was prone to teary outbursts. But they felt injustices, cruelties, and loss
just as severely as any female I’d ever met.

  I thought about poor Dusty as the warm water poured over my scalp. Everything she’d tried to have—a career, money, a relationship, a good education—all these had come to naught. And then she’d been killed.

  A rock formed in my throat as I blew my hair dry. After I pulled on a sweater and denim skirt, I felt dizzy, and sat on Tom’s and my bed. I was severely sleep-deprived. But I was also suffering from finding a corpse the previous night.

  Work, business, activity, forward movement—all these were needed to help me get going again. I had to pick up Marla at the Creekside Spa, then dash down to Denver to collect Arch and Gus. And I was determined to grab a recipe booklet and look at the collection of Charlie Baker’s paintings at CBHS. Were all of his recipes screwed up, or just Nora’s? I wanted to know, doggone it.

  I headed up Main Street, now festooned with crepe-paper ghosts, skeletons, and pumpkins. Ordinarily, I loved Halloween, chiefly because it marked the beginning of the big party season. Most caterers—and I was no exception—made the bulk of their profit during the two months between Halloween and New Year’s. I already had a slew of events scheduled to take place at the Roundhouse, which was situated beside Cottonwood Creek several miles before the spa. If I could ever get the doggone plumbing completed…but I veered away from that thought.

  I had already booked a designer to come in and decorate the Roundhouse for Christmas. My throat again closed up, thinking of the five thousand dollars it was going to cost me to transform the place into a garlanded indoor forest twinkling with “millions”—so said the decorator blithely—of tiny colored lights. But that was what well-heeled clients expected these days for a Christmas party, and I’d transferred the cost of the decorations into the contracts for office parties, wedding receptions, family-and-friends dinners, and ladies’-clubs holiday luncheons. So far, the only one who had blinked was yours truly, and that was because the plumbing was running me another ten thousand bucks.

  When I passed the conference center, I steeled myself to have a look, since the head contractor had told me firmly not to come by anymore, as all my questions slowed down his workers. Happily, despite the cold weather, I saw half a dozen men in heavy work outfits plodding across the ground outside the hexagonal building. Several trucks in the lot were parked at odd angles, and one of them boasted a winch. Did that mean pipe was being laid? I certainly hoped so. I hadn’t had an event for the last couple of weeks, as people didn’t seem to want to get married or be otherwise festive in the latter part of September and early part of October. Up until today, I’d been thankful for my breakfast-meeting contract at Hanrahan & Jule.

  Yes, I thought as my hands gripped the steering wheel. Up until today.

  At twenty past two I pulled into the parking lot of the Creekside Spa and eased my van with its painted logo “Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right!” between a gold Mercedes and a black BMW. I waited in fear for a slender, imperious receptionist to come out and tell me to move my vehicle to the service entrance! Now! This had happened more often than I cared to remember. But I still wasn’t quite used to it.

  I turned off the van’s engine. It grumbled and shook, then sighed to silence. Across the street, Cottonwood Creek, swollen with snowmelt from the first mountain storms, surged over a clump of rocks, then flowed placidly farther on. On this side of the road, I could just make out the grumble of earthmoving machines and the beep-beep-beep of tractors in reverse. Peering to the edge of the parking lot, I saw tractors and dump trucks moving and smoothing dirt, one more example of the relentless construction that always seemed to envelop Aspen Meadow.

  My skin prickled with gooseflesh. This was the first time I had been alone, really alone and able to think, since I’d tripped over Dusty’s body. I swallowed. Then again, maybe I didn’t want to think. Maybe I didn’t want to get myself all depressed. After all, I still had to pick up Arch and Gus.

  Gus. The story of Gus, Arch’s half brother, was what made the memories of death come up anyway. It seemed that when he’d been married to me, Dr. John Richard Korman’s endless list of sexual conquests had included Talitha Vikarios, daughter of Ted and Ginger Vikarios, who now lived in Aspen Meadow. Talitha had become pregnant by the Jerk, and, in a supreme act of putting others before self, had left home rather than risk destroying our family. When Talitha died in a freak car accident in Utah, her son Gus came to Aspen Meadow to live with his grandparents. With him, he brought a letter to me from his dead mother, telling the truth of Gus’s paternity and begging me to forgive her and to be compassionate toward her son. Which, of course, I’d been happy—more than happy—to be.

  Arch, taken aback at first with the prospect of having a living, breathing half brother, had slowly come to welcome Gus. The two boys looked so similar, they could have been twins. Following the advice of a counselor, the Vikarioses had sent Gus to the Christian Brothers High School, where Arch was a sophomore. We had Gus to dinner at least once a week, and to sleep over as much as he wanted. At fourteen and a half, Gus, confident and outgoing in a way that Arch was not, had adjusted quickly to his new environment. He laughed and joked with Arch’s friends and worked hard at his school assignments. Despite the hippie atmosphere of the Moab commune where he’d grown up, Gus was fiercely competitive for grades. Gus also excelled at soccer, where he had quickly become a much-valued member of the CBHS junior varsity.

  As far as my predator-bird mom eyes could tell, Arch was not jealous of ninth-grader Gus’s popularity at CBHS. Instead, my son was in awe. It even seemed that Gus truly cherished Arch. He regaled us with tales of life on the commune, and was always eager to invite Arch to his grandparents’ house to play games or watch movies. An unexpected by-product of all this affection was that Gus was being baptized at our parish, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, this Sunday. “Because it’s important to Arch,” Gus had solemnly told me. But how could it be important to Arch, who had stopped going to church? Another question for the ages.

  The only problem with all this as far as I could see was that the christening was being done by Bishop Sutherland. Yes, Father Pete was still recovering from his coronary, and yes, we’d all agreed that the bishop should do the honors. But hearing Julian’s stories had suddenly made me wary.

  The biblical adage “Speak of the devil, and he doth appear” stunned me out of reverie. Tall, slender, white-haired Bishop Uriah Sutherland himself, wearing (yes!) a purple polo shirt that said “Bish! Bish! Bish!” along with stylish white shorts and expensive running shoes, was standing next to my van, panting. His coarse-featured face was flushed and matched the purple shirt. Had he been jogging? Hadn’t he moved here from Utah because he had heart trouble? Was running up Cottonwood Creek Road, which rose from eight thousand to nine thousand feet above sea level, really a good idea? I didn’t have time to contemplate these issues, because Bishop Sutherland was using his big bishop’s ring to rap on my window.

  I pressed the button to lower the window and gave him what I hoped was a cheerful, inquisitive expression.

  “Hi there!” he said, placing an icy hand on my forearm.

  “Hi!”

  “Could you move your van, please?” he said. “I can’t back out.” He continued to grip my arm. Did he need help? Was he having a heart attack?

  “Uh, sure, I’ll move it. No problem. Sure. Sorry!” But I couldn’t drive the car if he didn’t let go of my left arm. I cleared my throat. “Uh, do you remember me? I’m…a relative of Gus Vikarios, whom you’re baptizing on Sunday.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” He let go of my arm to wipe his brow. Then he walked around to the driver side of the black BMW. As I put the van in reverse and eased out of the space and up into the lot, I wondered if he had on one of those medical-alert bracelets, and if he had a cell phone in his car, or what was probably actually his daughter’s car.

  What is he, your kid? I could hear Tom’s voice admonishing me. I sighed as the BMW shot out of its space.

/>   “Was he running?” Marla demanded as she slid into the van’s passenger seat. “Don’t you think that’s dangerous if you have a weak heart? And do you think St. Luke’s is paying him enough to buy all his fancy duds, or did Donald and Nora foot his bills?”

  “Yes, running is not a good idea if you’ve had cardiovascular problems, and I don’t know who finances his lifestyle. Let’s just go get the boys.” I drove out of the lot and onto Upper Cottonwood Creek Drive. I had barely noticed the trees on the way up to the spa. But a breeze had picked up, and a sudden shower of golden leaves dappled the windshield. Marla and I squealed with delight as my windshield wipers smacked off the aspens’ detritus. We commented on how thick the clusters of lemon-slice leaves were this year, how they quivered and quaked above the trees’ thin white trunks. Why does the beauty of nature hurt after the loss of someone you care about? Dusty would never see these forests, would never feel the sweet-scented breeze of fall in Colorado again.

  “Have you heard anything about Dusty?” Marla wanted to know.

  “Not a word. Tom’s down at the department now, so he should find out something. But it looks as if Nora Ellis might go ahead with the party for Donald. She’s going to call me back after she talks to him.”

  Marla shook her head. “I made some inquiries at the spa, after my facial and before my massage. Everyone wanted to know what had happened, so I told them. I also said you were looking into it, because Sally Routt was so broken up, she asked for your help.”

  We rounded a curve where stands of blue spruce hugged the road. I tried to think of how to tell Marla that I really didn’t want people to think of me when someone was killed, just because I was married to a homicide investigator and helped him out from time to time. When I finally told her as much, she shook her head.

  “More than time to time, girlfriend. Anyway, some of the gals did give me wary looks, like they wanted to tell me something, or at least they wanted to know dark things about Dusty or the law firm. So I wrote my phone number on little pieces of paper, and handed them all around, and said if anyone had some hot gossip, I was the one who could relay it to you. Hope that’s okay.”