The Grilling Season Read online

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

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

  Oh, brother. Every bone in my jaw ached from being clenched. I leaned against the refrigerator and glanced longingly at the fish fillets. Should I pretend I didn’t know what was going on? With my husband? Actually, ladies, my husband is a cop who spent the afternoon running errands. That is, after he arrested my ex-husband.

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

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

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

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

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

  “What do you mean?”

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

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

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

  “The other person she fired is Amy Bartholomew?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What … ?”

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

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

  “Who’re you?” I managed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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