Dying for Chocolate Read online

  I began driving again, slowly, up toward the pool construction site. Warning signs—Building in Progress. Keep Out!—were enough to make me swing wide of the chain-link extravaganza. No more speed bumps, I thought with glee, as I pressed the accelerator.

  “Jeez, look out, Mom,” Arch yelled as I roared into the dirt between the pool construction site and the school parking lot.

  I stepped out of the van and slammed the door behind me, scanned the parking lot with angry eyes, and ended up looking at my son. He was regarding me with some puzzlement. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose.

  He said, “What are you doing here?”

  What was I doing here, anyway? I stared back at Arch, as if his face could prompt my memory. Oh yes, decals.

  “I’m not here to get you,” I told him.

  He announced in his grown-up, greater-knowledge voice, “I’m waiting for Julian. He’s going to take me back when he finishes in the lab.”

  At that moment I noticed two girls about Arch’s age lolling on top of a hill of dirt behind the pool site. They were watching us.

  “Arch, who are those girls?” I asked. I pointed.

  He said, “Never mind, Mom. Let me just take you into the office.”

  “Great.”

  We started to walk toward the stucco building. Behind us female voices called, “Hey! You’re cute!”

  I whirled around. “Arch! Are they yelling at you?”

  His cheeks were crimson. He was staring at the sidewalk. He said, “Just keep walking, Mom.”

  • • •

  The switchboard operator chirped, “Elk Park Prep! Please hold!” into five lines in quick succession while I waited to ask for my dreaded decals. Arch disappeared. I sat on an imitation-leather bench and allowed blankness to fill my mind. I was just getting started on my mantra when Joan Rasmussen caught sight of me and, like a human Amtrak, chugged purposefully in my direction. I groaned. Loudly, I’m afraid.

  “Excuse me, Goldy the caterer, right?” she said with her best imperious tone. “Surely that wasn’t a groan I just heard from you? I am working very hard on this pool project, a lot harder than most parents, I might add, and to think that you—”

  “It wasn’t a groan,” I said as I rose to my feet. My face only reached her matronly bosom, which I tried to avoid looking at. “I was doing an om . . . it’s a guttural sound issuing from the soul.”

  “I realize that you are in the service industry, Ms. Bear, but we really must ask that you go door to door—”

  “Doctors and lawyers are in the service industry,” I replied evenly. “Do they go around pitching the pool and handing out decals?”

  “Of course not,” she huffed. “But that is because they can afford to give—”

  “Oh, I get it!” I cried. “If you can give a certain amount, you get out of grunt-work! Tell me, Joan, how do I apply for an exemption?”

  At that moment, the headmaster appeared from behind the switchboard operator. I had never seen him up close. He was a baby-faced fellow whose round-rimmed glasses gave him the look of a young owl. Despite the fact that we were halfway through June, he was wearing tweeds. Mister Rogers goes to Yale. He peered at us and frowned. Trouble in the neighborhood.

  “Here are your decals,” said Joan Rasmussen as she handed me a packet. “Thank you for volunteering your time so generously.”

  A noise arose from deep in my throat. “Ommmmmmmm.”

  There was a simultaneous sharp intake of breath from Joan and the headmaster as the two of them fixed their eyes at a point beyond my shoulder. Glancing backward, I saw a senior member of the Coors family coming through the doors of the school lobby. Too late I realized that the only thing between the headmaster and all those brewery millions was me.

  “Gah!” I yelled as the headmaster mowed me down. I teetered backward and then fell over the imitation-leather bench. The fund-raising packet flew up out of my hand. My back hit the wall and I landed ungracefully on the floor. Decals floated down like confetti.

  Joan Rasmussen marched off to use one of the phones. The switchboard operator continued to sing her greeting to callers. As I gathered up the decals from the floor, I watched the headmaster do a slithery Uriah Heep routine with the politely attentive Mr. Coors.

  “What happened here?” said Sissy Stone from far above me.

  I looked up and tried to give her a big smile. When we had last parted, she had not been in a terrific mood.

  “I’m cleaning up my decals, what else?”

  She craned her neck around to see if anyone more important was in the vicinity. “My, my, look who’s here,” she said under her breath.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in gathering some of these up?”

  She sighed with great drama. “Sorry. I’m waiting for Julian, and I can’t get my pants dirty on the floor.”

  I grunted, and stuffed the last of the decals into the envelope. When I had heaved myself back up on the bench I thought again about what Elizabeth had told me about Philip’s problematic clients. I gave Sissy a long look. Perfect makeup, perfect hair, perfect rounded and polished nails, perfect pink-on-blue printed blouse coordinated with blue-on-pink printed pants. Miss Perfect had worked for Philip Miller. I wondered if he had been interested in her psychological makeup as well.

  I said, “Let’s go have a Coke. I’ve lost Arch. I’m parched, and I want to talk to you about something. Does this school have a lounge?”

  Her pretty face clouded. “We used to have vending machines in the basement. But the parents protested against chips and cookies and soft drinks. Now you can get juice and granola bars and stuff they sell at Elizabeth Miller’s store. They still call it the snack corner. Should be the birdseed corner, if you ask me.”

  I forced a smile. “Let’s go anyway. Get healthy.”

  I gave a sidelong glance back at the headmaster and his wealthy prisoner before Sissy and I headed down to the snack corner. Maybe having money wasn’t such a good thing after all. We successfully avoided another encounter with Joan Rasmussen and within a few minutes were happily munching on peanut butter-coconut bars and drinking strawberry-guava juice. It’s hard to think of how to frame questions with several tablespoons of peanut butter cemented to the roof of your mouth, but I tried.

  “I miss Philip Miller,” I said finally, after taking a long pull on the grotesquely sweet juice.

  “Yeah, he was a good guy.”

  “I understand you shadowed him during the school year.” I tried to sound wistful.

  She pulled down the corners of her mouth. “Nothing sensitive, you know. Nothing confidential.”

  “Right,” I said, shaking my head, “absolutely not. I know how he was about ethics and all that.” To avoid grinding my teeth, I took a tiny bite of granola bar. “So what were you doing for him, then?”

  “Oh, he used to talk to me about his schedule, the kind of problems he saw, what kind of training you had to have. Sometimes he would give me research projects. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. Then the last week he was”—she hesitated and cleared her throat—“you know, alive, he asked me to work on something. He was kind of in a panic about it, it seemed to me. He knew about the case, but needed specifics. He didn’t have time to get all the details from the research.” She finished her juice and set it down on the linoleum floor, then gazed at the wall. “Tarasoff versus California,” she said in a far-off voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  She puckered her lips in thought. “It was a court case. I was running it through InfoTrac at the library, trying to find articles to help him see how it applied to him.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Tarasoff was the last name of a woman in California. She was dating this guy, and he was in therapy. There at the psychiatric clinic at one of the University of California schools. I forget which. Anyway. The Tarasoff woman dumped the guy. The guy went in to see his therapist. He was a mess. Said he wanted to kill this woman who just dumped him. The shri
nk recognized that the guy was unbalanced. You know?”

  For once, Í did.

  She went on, “So the shrink tried to get the guy institutionalized. He realized the guy was losing it. But the guy terminated his therapy instead. The shrink called the campus police. He was worried about protecting the confidentiality of his client, but he was also worried for the woman named Tarasoff. Without telling the cops why, he asked them to beef up their security around the house where the Tarasoff woman lived.” She paused.

  “And did they?”

  “Yeah, they did. But it wasn’t enough.” Sissy’s voice caught. “The guy killed her.”

  “Sheesh.” I thought for a minute. “But who brought suit?”

  Sissy pushed her pink-and-blue striped Pappagallos out in front of her and crossed her legs. “Her relatives did. They sued the University Regents, since the guy, the killer, had been going to a shrink connected with the school. The court maintained that the shrink had a greater obligation to keep the Tarasoff woman alive than to protect the confidentiality of his client.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sissy gave me a long look. “The idea was that the mental-health counselor had a duty to warn the person whose life was in danger.”

  “Who won?”

  “The Tarasoffs. That’s what I told Philip the day before he died. If he knew that somebody wanted to kill somebody, he had to warn the would-be victim. That was his legal duty.”

  “Holy cow. Do you know if he did?”

  She shook her head. “I think he was going to do something, tell whoever it was that there was danger. Have the person call the cops or something, but I can’t be sure.”

  I stared at her, transfixed. The call Schulz had received just before the accident. From the Aspen Meadow Country Club.

  You gotta come help me, my life’s in danger.

  20.

  At that moment, Julian came shuffling down the stairs to the so-called snack bar. How long had he been listening? I did not know.

  “Hey, what’s happening,” he said. I said nothing. He scanned Sissy’s face and then mine. He was looking for a mood.

  “Are you done with your lab work yet?” Sissy demanded.

  “Yeah, I’m done, are you upset?”

  She assumed a light tone. “I’d hate to think what would happen if you actually had to be responsible, Julian. Now you have to drive back to the club, and I’m going to be late for the library. If you were me, would you be upset?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “Now, now.” Almost immediately, I regretted opening my mouth. Both teenagers turned mind-your-own-beeswax looks in my direction. I said, “I’ll take Arch home if it will speed things up. There’s really no need for a conflict here.”

  Sissy said, “Since when are you the expert at patching things up?”

  I itched to say something bitchy, but remembered my words to Arch regarding taunting on the playground. I’d say, Don’t get down on their level, sweetheart, just walk away. For once, I took my own advice.

  “Hey, wait up!” Julian hollered after me when I had reached the landing.

  “I’ll be looking for Arch,” I called over my shoulder.

  Outside the weather obliged by rolling a cool breeze off the mountains. More dark clouds threatened. Where had Arch gotten to, anyway?

  “Look, hey, I’m sorry about that,” said Julian when he reached me. He cast his eyes down, embarrassed. I leaned against a dusty Acura Legend. It was an expensive car; probably belonged to a seventeen-year-old.

  I said, “You’re not responsible for the way she acts, you know. Even if you were married to her, you wouldn’t be responsible for her. And by the way, I would strongly advise against further interest in this girl.”

  He pulled his mouth over in a half-smile.

  “The caterer with the advice.”

  “Oh,” I said, “spare me.” I called Arch’s name.

  Droplets of rain splatted into the dust as I began to traipse toward the pool site. Julian was close on my heels. I found myself worrying about the water dripping through the pinpoints of Julian’s bleached hair. His scalp would become drenched. He would come down with bronchitis. Not responsible, I reminded myself, not responsible! In fact, I would serve Hostess Twinkies in hell before I would tell him to cover his head.

  “Look!” Julian raised his voice over the hissing of the rain. “Sissy’s just—”

  “You don’t need to make excuses.”

  We came up on the pool site. Fat lot of good a six-foot fence would do if someone left the gate open. In the pool, Arch, splashing around as if he were blind, yelled, “Marco!”

  I called again. The two friends who had been answering “Polo!” leaped out of the pool and disappeared. I thought, Aren’t there any regulations around here? I howled for Arch and glared at Julian.

  He went on talking as if it were not raining and I was not trying to get Arch out of the pool. He said, “Sissy’s sort of, like, possessive.”

  “Ah. Explains everything.” I crossed my arms and tried to ignore the rain. Once Arch realized his friends were gone, he opened his eyes, saw me, and propelled himself up the side of the pool. He yelled that he would be there in a minute.

  “Really,” Julian said. He craned his neck back and shook his head the way a wet dog would. “She worries about me.”

  “I think you had it right the first time.”

  “Thing is, I’m not sure she . . . wants me.” He shifted his weight and looked around. I wanted to say something about perhaps trying another hairdo when without warning he leaned close to me.

  “What is it?” I blustered, and thought immediately of Brian Harrington. Why were males suddenly attracted to me? Maybe I was losing weight.

  “What’s the secret?” he said in a low tone.

  “What secret?”

  “About aphrodisiacs.”

  I said, “You’re a child, for God’s sake!”

  A throat cleared behind us. I turned around.

  It was Tom Schulz. His head was cocked, his eyebrows lifted. Arch, wearing flip-flops, clopped up to join us. He shivered underneath his towel.

  “What were you doing?” I demanded of him.

  Arch tsked, as if I were terribly overbearing.

  Tom Schulz murmured, “Might want to ask the same thing of you, Miss G.”

  At that moment Sissy strode up; she and Julian wordlessly withdrew.

  “Hey!” Arch called after them. “I thought you guys were taking me!”

  “Things have changed,” I announced. “I’m taking you. After I get an explanation.”

  His lips were blue, but he managed to say, “It’s not official, but they’ve filled the pool with water. We were just having some fun. But then it started raining.”

  I said, “No kidding.” I brushed raindrops from my face and arms. “Would you please get into the van?” I handed him the keys. He knew how to start it and warm it up. He also knew better than to launch a verbal defense at that moment.

  Schulz said, “Want to get into my car for a minute? I can tell when you’re not in one of your better moods, Miss Goldy.”

  “Should I be in a good mood?” The raindrops turned to heavy mist. The road to Aspen Meadow was shrouded in fog and rain, just as it had been after the brunch. The pool water reflected the dark sky. “I’m worried about Arch,” I said. “I want to stay where I can see him.”

  Schulz said, “By the way, I do think Julian Teller is a little young for you.”

  I gasped sharply.

  His large, moist face beamed when he laughed.

  “Didn’t you see what he—” I began.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Behind us my van started up. I hoped Arch turned the heat to high. “Listen, the general said you’d be out here doing fund-raising for someone other than yourself.”

  “Excuse me? How’d he know that? I was the only one who talked to the fund-raising lady.”

  “Look, Goldy, you live with a former member of the intelligence community, y
ou gotta figure he’s going to do what he does best.”

  “Great.” If he was going to listen in, why didn’t he just answer the phone himself?

  “Anyway,” Schulz was saying, “something’s come up with the Philip Miller case.” He paused and looked around. “Something you said about the way he was driving made me call back the coroner’s office. They just checked Miller’s eyes briefly because he was a cornea donor. You know, that procedure has to be done within a few hours or it’s no good. So I called the cornea bank. You’re not going to believe this.” He took a deep breath, his green eyes suddenly solemn. “Miller’s corneas were rejected.”

  “What?”

  “The coroner’s office doesn’t remove contact lenses, which Miller had on. Remember, he had gone to the eye doctor that morning?” I nodded and he continued, “Miller’s contacts, according to the ophthalmologist at the cornea bank, were embedded with peroxide. The tainted contacts burned off the epithelium, or top layer of the cornea. He couldn’t see.”

  I was incredulous. “Couldn’t see? He could see me at the brunch. He drove fine on the road for a while. How could this happen?”

  “Goldy. I do not know. I called the eye doctor. He said Philip Miller was fine when he left his office. And obviously he could see well enough to get to the brunch. Another thing. The doctor said peroxide on your ienses would cause intense pain. And right away. It’s not possible anyone could stand the pain for more than a few seconds.”

  I ran my fingers through my damp hair and shook my head.

  “I gotta go,” said Schulz. “Lot of work to do. Mind if I peek in at Arch?” He eyed the van.

  “Sure.”

  He opened the door and said a few words to Arch that I could not hear. They both laughed, then Schulz slammed the door and swaggered over to give me a hug. Into my ear, he said, “There’s just one thing I want.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whatever it was Julian Teller wanted.”