Dying for Chocolate Page 15

  16.

  General Bo offered to let me shower first. Since one of the odd things about this luxurious house was that only one person could command the hot-water supply at a time, I told him to go ahead. I would be up after I checked on my culinary domain. I washed my hands in the hall bathroom and went into the kitchen, where Adele was deep into a phone conversation whose bad vibes were readily apparent. A crisis had erupted with a pool fund-raiser set for August, a fifty-dollar-per-seat showing of a film featuring George Rumslinger in a supporting role.

  “Doesn’t anybody at that school know him?” she demanded into the phone. She looked regal in a navy-and-white silk shirtdress and spectator pumps, a dress suited more for a yacht-club luncheon than a day in Vail. With one hand she held the phone; with the other she leaned slightly on the cane, as if she intended momentarily to use it as a weapon. I giggled and devoutly hoped it was Joan Rasmussen who was getting the third degree.

  I wrote her a note: “I know the foreman.” She nodded, smiled, and held up one finger, as if to say, I’ll be off in a minute. I wrote, “Do you have any bandages?” She pulled her mouth into an astonished O, then shook her head. “Do you need help?” she whispered. I shook my head and walked stiffly through the pelting raindrops back out to my van, where my trusty safety kit yielded an Ace bandage. I wrapped up my arm, pulled out Marla’s copy of the Mountain Journal, and went out to the deck. I decided against taking a painkiller. For the moment. The headline jumped out at me.

  NO LOVE AT THIS FIRST BITE!

  In her latest culinary adventure, Ms. Goldy Bear (yes, folks, you read that right), the divorced proprietor of GOLDILOCKS’ CATERING, WHERE EVERYTHING IS JUST RIGHT! (no joke there either), has declared herself a goddess of love. Our unmarried Venus claims to reign in the kitchen, where she supposedly prepares aphrodisiac foods.

  Contrary to die advertised amorous effects, no outbreak of love was in evidence at a dinner party for six at the elegant home of Brian and Weezie Harrington last Saturday night. Quite the opposite, in fact. The hostilities between the host and hostess began somewhere between the mussels and the quiche, and continued on through the undercooked pork chops and dry chocolate cookies.

  How long must Aspen Meadow endure such pain to the palate? Think if Goldy Bear had to cater a peace conference! The U.S. would be nuked before the lemon meringue pie. Since Ms. Bear obviously has no demonstrable skill in the culinary arts and no successful experience in the love department, this reviewer recommends that she try something she’s good at. Like carpool.

  Until next time, discriminating diners, I am ever your

  Pierre

  Mussels? Quiche? Pork chops? Carpool?

  Why was someone doing this to me? Who could be so cruel? My pain was like that of a fish when he’s gutted alive. A blade of agony ripped through my psyche. To be skewered so publicly, so unfairly. . . it was beyond belief. The hurt flared into rage. I wondered what my chances would be with a libel suit. Thing was, every time I called my lawyer, it cost me hundreds of dollars to hear that whatever it was I had in mind was not a good idea.

  Adele arrived on the deck. The rain had turned to hail, and I had not heard her cane over the rapid-fire thudding on the roof.

  She saw the newspaper in my hand. Her eyes clouded sympathetically. “I’m so sorry you saw that.”

  “So am I. Who could it be? Someone who was there? Someone who heard about it and got the menu wrong?”

  Line One began to ring. I rose to get it. Anything to be away from the newspaper.

  “Mrs. Farquhar, please. This is the headmaster of Elk Park Preparatory School.”

  Obviously he did not recognize the voice of the caterer who’d bailed him out of a sixty-plate-brunch problem only the week before. I told him to hang on and brought the portable phone out to Adele.

  I closed my eyes, listened to the hail thud on the deck roof. I wished Pierre—whoever he was—were outside.

  Naked! Dying! Pummeled by hail and then hit by lightning!

  I groaned. The air had turned cold. I felt each thud of hail directly on my heart. You’d think that after being married to an abusive husband you would learn to take abuse. But until you find a way to pull yourself away from the abuser’s opinion of you, it still hurts. I was going to find a way to pull myself away. And I was going to find out who had it in for me.

  Adele was saying to the headmaster, “I don’t understand why nothing goes right in this town. . .”

  Tell me about it.

  I slipped into the living room for a couple of Lindt Lindors. When I came back out to the porch I picked up the periwinkle-and-white crocheted afghan, moved to a cold but dry wicker chair, and wrapped myself up. I opened a chocolate and popped it in my mouth, then allowed the sinfully dark, soft creaminess to melt on my taste buds and make me feel much better. After a moment I took a deep breath of cool air and opened my eyes to see the hail falling in massive vertical sheets to the meadow. Here and there splashes of white speckled the lush green.

  In addition to feeling things will go right in a move to the mountains, people often mistakenly believe that in the midst of such natural beauty, there will be an absence of honking traffic, backstabbing gossip, and cruelty in general. I ate the other chocolate and allowed my eyes to travel around the deck, to Adele shaking her head at the headmaster’s distress, to the table with the hateful newspaper review, to the panel of security buttons on the wall. Security, it seemed, from physical intrusions only.

  Arch came out to the deck and beckoned. The hail was so loud I had not heard Julian drive up or the two boys come inside. In the kitchen I automatically began to prepare hot chocolate, Arch’s favorite drink on snowy days.

  “Mom,” he said as he looked into the pan of milk, “it’s not snowing. Hey!” He pulled back and stared at me. “What happened to you?”

  I gazed at him: freckles, eyes full of concern behind glasses, hair damp from being hatless in the hail. I assured him I was okay, just had a little slip in the café and ended up falling. I shrugged it off. With my assurance that things were fine, he pressed his lips together in a grin, opened his eyes wide, and raised his eyebrows.

  Something was wrong with the way he looked. I had to keep staring at him for a minute to figure out what it was. This morning he had left without my checking his sweat suit. Now he was wearing baggy black pants and a white oxford cloth shirt, both about four sizes too big for him. While I was contemplating this bizarre turn in personal style, the milk boiled over.

  “What are you wearing?” I asked as I reached for a sponge.

  He said, “Clothes.”

  “Whose clothes?”

  He glanced down at the pants, then gave me an innocent look. “Julian gave these to me. They were too small for him.”

  I dumped out the scalded milk and scrubbed the stove. I thought, Let go of it.

  “Listen,” he said. “Julian and I want to go swimming in the hail. We think it would be really cool.”

  “Do you want to get pneumonia?”

  “No,” he said, “I want to show him that I can get out of the handcuffs under water.”

  “Forget about it. No to all of the above.”

  “Jeez, Mom!” His voice was furious. “You never let me do anything! No money for magic stuff! No swimming, even though the pool is heated, in case you hadn’t noticed! You always think I’m going to get hurt! But who’s wearing a bandage, huh? Is there anything I can do?”

  And before I could answer he turned, narrowly avoiding Adele, and stomped out of the kitchen.

  Adele was rubbing her forehead with the hand not holding the cane. She said, “The headmaster says we should show another film, since the print with Rumslinger is unavailable. We’ve already sold the tickets. Of course, he has no film in mind.”

  I scrubbed scalded milk off the bottom of the pan and made guttural sympathetic noises.

  She sighed. “I’m going into the study where I can hear myself think, and call Paramount.”

  If you ha
ve money, I guess you can do anything. I was the last person to try to talk her out of doing battle with Hollywood. I couldn’t even make hot chocolate.

  She said, “What’s wrong with Arch?”

  “He wants to swim. Says the pool is heated, so why not? Now he’s angry because I said no.” I rinsed the pan and dried it. “I hate to have him mad at me. He’s all I’ve got.”

  “Well,” she said in a sympathetic tone, “you know what the psychiatrists say. No matter what you do for your children, they don’t appreciate you.”

  In my many readings on parenting, this was not something I had ever heard.

  I said, “What psychiatrist said that?”

  “One who had to raise children.”

  I put down the dish towel and thought for a minute. “Well, actually,” I said with my best sarcastic laugh, “I never knew a psychiatrist who had to stay home and raise children.”

  “That’s what I mean, Goldy,” she said before she tapped off.

  With my arm wrapped, preparations for the Audubon Society picnic the next day proceeded slowly. The hail shower ceased with great suddenness. Piles of silver-tinged clouds dissolved like pulled-apart netting. Sunlight flooded the kitchen around four, as I sliced kiwi, cantaloupe, and strawberry for a fruit salad to go with the Farquhars’ Sole Fillets Silvestre. Julian had a date with Sissy and would be gone for dinner. Arch yelled through his door that he did not want to go to Tom Schulz’s for dinner and he did not want to eat fish that belonged in the ocean.

  “What do you want, then?” I had asked through the wood.

  “For you to leave me alone,” he said. “I’ll fix my own grilled cheese.”

  “Arch,” I pleaded, “don’t be angry. I just didn’t want you to get sick from swimming in the hail.”

  “Go away.”

  “Let me know if you change your mind about going to Tom Schulz’s.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind.”

  The heck with everybody, I thought as I put the strawberry pie in a container and walked out to the van. I had done the best I could. I strapped the pie container on a shelf with bungee cords, opened the security gate, and walked slowly back up the driveway. With my wrapped arm I could just manage to change the gears in the van. I ground into reverse and closed the gate. Then, pedal to the metal. I couldn’t wait to get out of that damn country club, even if I’d already been out for lunch.

  It would have been nearly impossible to find surroundings less like the tended lawns of Meadowview than the long dirt road to Tom Schulz’s place. He lived in a spacious three-room log house six miles west of Aspen Meadow. Of course, since Aspen Meadow was unincorporated (and proud of it), just about anything past two miles from Main Street was considered outside of town. In the absence of institutional government, real estate agents set the geographical boundaries.

  Light from the setting sun glinted behind wet aspen leaves. The trees looked as if they were hung with emeralds. Melting hail had made recent tire tracks shiny ribbons of mud. As the van bumped along, overhanging trees shed branchloads of ice on the windshield. I turned on the wipers. When I arrived at his cabin, Tom Schulz was shoveling hail from the stone walk.

  He scooped the last shovelful and heaved it over a gray rock outcropping that looked like a sleeping elephant. I unfastened the pie and carefully stepped out to avoid deep mud. The cool evening air was redolent with the sweet scent of chokecherry blossoms.

  Schulz leaned against his shovel. “Something wrong? What happened to your arm?”

  “Everything is wrong.”

  He put down the shovel and came over to help me.

  “I was attacked at Aspen Meadow Café.” I told him briefly about the mugging, including the admonition to let Philip Miller rest in peace.

  “1 can’t believe you didn’t call me.” Schulz took the pie from my hands and laid it on a rock. “I cannot believe it, Miss G.” Schulz hugged me tenderly, carefully, to avoid inflicting more pain. I loved the rough feel of his jeans against my legs, the freshly laundered smell of his Izod shirt that had been yellow once.

  When we disengaged, his face took on a puzzled expression. He said, “Where’s Arch?”

  “At home. Angry that I wouldn’t let him swim in the hail.”

  Schulz picked up the pie container, made appropriate mm-mm noises, then put his free arm around my shoulders as he led me up the stone path. “If you would take more care of yourself and less of Arch, everybody might be a lot better off, Goldy.” He looked down at me with an apologetic smile. “No offense.”

  I made a gesture toward the pie. I said, “You want to eat that or wear it?”

  “I’ll eat it, thanks,” he said as he swung it just out of my reach. “Come on in. I need to talk to you before we get into the business of food.”

  The door to the house sported an elaborate carving of a naked woman involved in some kind of dance. The sculptor who had had this place built had thought of the woman as his muse. The sculptor, long gone, had been caught for back taxes. The house had been sold at one of those 1RS auctions for a fraction of its worth, and Schulz had lucked out. I had always been happy that he lived here. After long days working homicide, an investigator needed a remote place with a big fireplace inside and a porch swing that looked out on the mountains. Smoke from the backyard barbecue drifted around front as I pushed through the sculpted door.

  It had been a while since my last visit. Stenciled lampshades shed warm light over the handmade cedar paneling and two-story moss-rock fireplace. Schulz knew quite a bit about antiques, and had furnished his house with a spare grouping of expensive pieces, including a cupboard that was called a sink. He had started to tell me about them, but I’d told him I still thought Chippendale were two chipmunks Arch used to watch in cartoons.

  While I stood admiring the living room, Schulz called to me from the kitchen. “I figured after all that fancy cooking you’ve been doing for the Farquhars, you’d be ready for a steak.”

  “Am I ever,” I said. He handed me a bottle of my favorite brand of nonalcoholic beer, then got one for himself. “Did you buy this especially for me?” But I knew he had. “Gee, am I ready for somebody to be nice.”

  “I take it you saw the paper.”

  “Change the subject, please. So we’re having steak? I thought you liked fancy cooking.”

  “I like so many things, you can hardly imagine.” He winked. “Let’s go sit.”

  I went back out to the porch and settled tentatively on the swing. It was one of the old-fashioned kind with slats.

  “Wait here a sec,” he said as he took my fake-beer bottle and put it on the deck railing. He returned with an alpaca blanket, which he unfolded and carefully tucked around me.

  I said, “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “Shut up and drink this stuff that means I don’t have to worry about you driving home.” He handed me the bottle and lowered himself to the other side of the swing.

  “You really are wonderful, you know,” I said without looking at him. The drink was cold and fizzy; my chest warmed in response. The scratchy alpaca felt snug and safe.

  “Yeah, aren’t I something. Goldy, I want you to report this attack, whether anybody saw the guy or not.”

  “Will do.”

  “You can bet we’re not going to let any aspect of this thing rest in peace now.”

  I nodded. Silence enveloped us as the sun sank behind the mountains. The air was gauzy from the melting hail.

  He said, “You’re still feeling bad about this Philip Miller fellow.” It was not a question.

  An involuntary tightness gathered in the area where my ribs ached. I said, “Sometimes. It seems like such a waste.”

  “Oh. I don’t think so.”

  “What do you know about it?” I sipped, looked out at the view.

  “Well, Miss G., as hard as it may be for you to believe, I had a girlfriend once. Went to high school together, all that. She was killed in Vietnam.”

  I was nonplussed. “I thought w
omen weren’t—“

  “She was a nurse. Hit in an artillery shelling.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. Point is, love is never wasted.”

  “Really. I wasted it for seven years on The Jerk. And I’m not sure I was in love with Philip Miller.”

  He let that pass. After a few minutes he said, “Feel like talking about him, then? In an unemotional kind of way? It involves people you know better than I do.”

  I swished the liquid around in its green bottle until it foamed. I said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “For starters, there’s Philip Miller and the people who live next door to you.”

  I said flatly, “I don’t know whether he was having an affair with Weezie.”

  “That’s the rumor I heard from four people. Also, if she’s so interested in aphrodisiacs, do you think she’d go so far as to use this Spanish fly? Might explain why Philip had it.”

  “I told you, I know the rumor about the affair. That’s it.”

  “Actually, I’m wondering if you know anything about the relationship between our good shrink and Brian Harrington.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Not that kind of relationship. Business. Rivalry. Philip Miller, the politically correct counselor, active in Protect Our Mountains, president of the local Audubon Society, and an opponent of development of ecologically sensitive Flicker Ridge. Which is owned by Mr. Harrington.”

  I said, “Show me a part of Colorado, even one rock, that somebody’s not insisting is ecologically sensitive.” I got up to hunt for another fake beer.

  “Okay, okay,” he said as he followed me back to his compact kitchen. “Let me do this,” he said as he took my bottle and rattled around in the refrigerator for another one. “I’m the host. I just wanted to know if you knew anything about it.”

  “Audubon Society, I don’t know. I’m doing a picnic for them tomorrow with the Farquhars. As to specifics, the only kind of birds I know about are the kind you eat.”

  “Can’t say that I blame you,” he said as he handed me another cold bottle. “Bring that out back so we can do the steaks. I need to talk to you about health food, anyway.”