The Grilling Season Read online

  During the eight years of our marriage, and even in the six years since the divorce, the Jerk’s behavior was unknown to many, dismissed or disbelieved by others. And yes, he’d dished out disdain and disloyalty to his second ex-wife, Marla Korman, who’d since become my best friend. I grinned, thinking of good old Marla. She’d kill the Jerk if she had the chance, but she’d had a heart attack last year and was trying to be careful.

  I should have told Patricia I had tried to have the Jerk penalized in some way, any way. But I’d been determined not to go crazy. Patricia, though, was on the edge. A very dangerous edge. I set down my coffee and stirred another bowl of cake batter. The scent of chocolate cake perfumed the kitchen. Her malpractice suit would put him out of business, Patricia insisted. She apologized that this could mean a loss of child support for Arch. I told her not to worry about us. I’d manage, I always had. Patricia claimed that no matter what, she was going to make John Richard pay, and she was going to bring down ACHMO at the same time. Good for you, I thought now, with an involuntary shiver.

  I began to scoop silky dollops of cake batter into the next pan. I put down the spatula, sipped more coffee, and smiled. There was another reason why I’d given up the need for revenge. Just over a year ago, happiness had come into my life like an unexpected houseguest determined to stay. I’d married a homicide investigator who worked for the sheriff’s department. Tom Schulz’s bearlike, handsome presence, his kindness and intelligence, his affection for Arch and me, still felt like a miracle. I glanced up at one of his recent presents to me: a blond doll dressed the way you might imagine a Tyrolean caterer would be, with a snowy lace apron over a royal blue vest and skirt. Actually, the doll’s official name was Icelandic Babsie, and Tom had bought it for me to celebrate an upcoming booking to cater a doll show. He’d told me I could sell the doll in a year and retire on the profits. In addition to his other virtues, the man has a sense of humor.

  Tom was like a slice of capital-G Grace, a concept I sometimes discussed with my Sunday school class. Plus, being married to a cop finally made me feel safe. And through all this—divorce, building a business, raising a child, remarrying—I’d held my own. I’d kept my friendships, made new ones, even stayed the course in our local church, where we now had a new priest and I still took my turn teaching Sunday school and making muffins for the after-service coffee. Which brought us to the present moment.

  Rejoicing in the suffering of others is a sin. Well, then. Call me a big-time sinner.

  The timer beeped and I remembered the hockey fans. I checked the cupcakes—not quite done—reset the timer, and again studied the menu for the party. I took a deep breath and ordered myself to let go of all the negative thoughts that Patricia’s vengeful tale had provoked.

  “He’s going to run out of money,” Patricia’s voice echoed.

  I still did not know how, in addition to the legal mess, the Jerk had gotten himself into a deep financial pickle. I’d promised Patricia I’d listen to the details of that news when I catered her party.

  I grimaced at the list of dishes to be prepared and tried to picture the setup at the McCrackens’ Aspen Meadow Country Club home. The McCrackens were adding playing hockey to celebrating hockey. So I would start with beer and a vegetable-and-chip tray with layered Mexican dip served at the end of the driveway during the in-line skating, provide more drinks and Mexican eggrolls upstairs in the living room, do the grilling and barbecue buffet on the large deck, then finish in the living room with cupcakes and coffee. Actually, the McCrackens did not live too far from the Jerk’s year-old million-dollar house. The million-dollar house he might have to sell. Oh, too bad.

  Think about hockey, I scolded myself. Fix the frosting for the Stanley Cupcakes. I’d told Patricia the NHL wouldn’t approve of her husband’s name for the dessert. She’d retorted that she didn’t care. I fitted the electric mixer with a flat beater and recalled how breathless Patricia had been with her news yesterday about John Richard’s impending financial demise.

  “We were right there when they auctioned off his Keystone condo,” she’d squealed. “It went for sixty thousand below market. This must be the juiciest revenge you’ve ever envisioned,” she’d added with glee.

  Not quite. John Richard still had the Aspen Meadow house, a condo in Hawaii, white and silver Jeeps with personalized license plates—the white one said OB and the silver said GYN, just in case anyone wondered what kind of doctor he was—and a wealthy, beautiful, smart, new girlfriend whom I grudgingly admired.

  The beater began its slow circuit through the pale, unsalted butter. John Richard’s girlfriend, Suz Craig, was the executive vice-president of the AstuteCare Health Maintenance Organization. I didn’t know if Suz’s feelings for John Richard were being affected by Patricia’s suit against ACHMO. I did know that as of four weeks ago, John Richard and Suz were nuts about each other. To celebrate going together for six whole months, he had given her a full-length mink coat, bought on sale at the beginning of the summer, Arch had informed me. Suz had even modeled the coat when I’d catered a corporate lunch at her home in July. And why shouldn’t I have catered for her? Suz had unabashedly informed me that she was a great businesswoman. Well, so was I.

  Suz was young, thin, blond, a whiz at her job—by her own accounting—and eager, I thought, to show me that she wasn’t going to make the same relationship mistakes that I had. What that meant, I didn’t know, and didn’t want to ask. Suz had confided that she’d given John Richard a solid gold ID bracelet as a way of showing her six-month-old affection. I’d tried not to roll my eyes. The only stage of relationship John Richard did well was infatuation. But if John Richard and his girlfriend wanted to act like high school sweethearts, I wasn’t going to stop them. His relationships never lasted very long.

  No, Patricia McCracken hadn’t been quite on the money when she’d said John Richard’s financial crash was the juiciest revenge I’d ever envisioned. John Richard had not yet lost the malpractice suit. His girlfriend hadn’t renounced him. He wasn’t in jail; he hadn’t even been publicly humiliated. A declaration of personal bankruptcy, which was what I was assuming was about to happen, was not the kind of revenge I’d always hoped for.

  But it was close.

  Chapter 2

  When I opened the oven to take out the cupcakes, the scent of chocolate drenched the kitchen. I drank it in and immediately felt better. Thinking dark thoughts was unappealing; thinking dark chocolate thoughts was vastly better. That was the conclusion I’d come to yesterday as I whipped up a batch of fudge. Stirring the sinfully rich pot of candy, I’d decided I really didn’t want to get a blow-by-blow description from Patricia of John Richard’s condo being auctioned off, after all. Listening to sizzling gossip while grilling tuna during the party tonight could lead to frayed nerves, scorched fish, or worse.

  Nor could I quite picture hearing about the woes of John Richard Korman while catering to a large group of hockey aficionados. The fans would be hollering with blood-mania at slow-motion videos of battered hockey players slamming other bruised and injured players into the glass—while I celebrated a vengeance I’d tried to put behind me years ago? Something about that didn’t quite work.

  I straightened and rotated my shoulders. My right shoulder was scarred from the time John Richard had shoved me into a dishwasher and I’d landed on a knife. I’d fallen on my left shoulder when he pushed me down the stairs in a drunken rage. Both shoulders seized up with pain from time to time. Yesterday, when I was making the fudge, the ache in my upper back had been unbearable. Of course I’d suspected it was because my body didn’t want to be reminded of John Richard. Let go of it, I’d admonished myself. I’d called Patricia in Keystone and said I didn’t want to hear any more about the Jerk.

  “You don’t want to hear before our hockey game about your ex-husband’s ruin? Don’t you want to hear what he said to my lawyer about the money the suit is costing him?” Patricia had shrieked. When I’d said no, she seemed stunned by my lack of
interest. “You’re crazy. This whole thing is a huge comedown for him.” Then she said—I swear she said this—“You must be out of your pucking mind.”

  Maybe so. But my shoulders felt better today. I swirled thick whipping cream into a mountain of snowy confectioner’s sugar for the cupcake frosting. Yes, I could wait to hear the news. Now I could wait, that is. Tom Schulz, even if he was my husband, had always felt that justice would eventually triumph. I guess that’s why he’s in the business he is.

  It is going to happen, Tom had frequently assured me. John Richard Korman will go too far, get caught, and be nailed. In fact, I had been vaguely aware that John Richard was having financial problems. After all, I hadn’t received a child support payment in three months. He was usually late, but not this late. Despite Patricia’s dire news about the Keystone condo, I’d actually been hoping that John Richard could talk to me this morning about his money situation, without lawyers, without lying, and without loudness. Fat chance.

  But, as they say, I was going to be in that neck of the woods, so I might as well try to chat with him. With Arch as a buffer, and before John Richard had had a drink or two, we could occasionally communicate. Besides, if I thought we could get something settled, it would make the chauffeuring job this morning less irksome. The house where Arch was staying was only two miles from John Richard’s neo-Tudor monstrosity, while it was close to ten miles from our place.

  I was doing the pickup because Arch had been desperate to attend the party. The poor kid had not made many friends at the private school he’d started attending two years ago. Now that he was going into ninth grade, he relished the idea of someone inviting him over, even if it was because he was one of the few kids not currently away on an exotic summer vacation. An invite is an invite, Arch had reminded me seriously as he nudged his tortoiseshell glasses up his nose and donned a too-large pair of denim shorts to go with a raggedy nut-brown shirt that matched his hair. And I’m going.

  I slid the bowl of frosting into the walk-in, set the cupcakes on racks to cool, and scribbled a note to Tom to have one for breakfast if he craved an early-morning chocolate fix. I would be back soon, I wrote. Tom had been out past midnight working on a case. In the hours before dawn he had crept in and tried not to wake me. But whenever he pulled the Velcro straps off his bulletproof vest, I woke in a sudden sweat. For over a year, he’d been telling me I’d get used to it. I never had.

  I tiptoed upstairs to check on our boarder. Recovering from mononucleosis, nineteen-year-old Macguire Perkins was spending the summer with us until his father came home from teaching a course in Vermont. A tousle of red hair, a patch of pale skin, and loud snores indicated that Macguire was sleeping, as usual. Arch’s bloodhound, Jake, dozed at Macguire’s side, while our cat, an adopted stray named Scout, kept a watchful emerald eye from his perch on the dresser.

  I finished getting ready and quietly crept out our front door. Another fresh morning breeze whispered through the aspens. After a nastily wet spring, we were enjoying what the locals call a one-in-ten year for wildflowers. This was probably going to be a one-in-ten year for the elk population, too, but I didn’t mind. I revved up Tom’s dark blue Chrysler sedan that he’d left in the driveway behind my van. Backing out, I tried to avoid blue flax, blush-pink wild roses, and brilliant white daisies, all nodding in the warm wind.

  Actually, one of the reasons I’d come to admire John Richard’s current girlfriend, Suz Craig, was that she had learned the names of nearly a hundred different kinds of flowers that were being put in as part of an elaborate landscaping project at her country-club home. While I was setting up for the business lunch in July, Suz had taken the time to point out the varieties of campanula and columbines that her landscapers were planting between the quartz boulders and striped chunks of riprap rock. Even businesswomen who were vice-presidents needed a hobby, I supposed. The lunch had been a going-away gig for some AstuteCare people visiting from out of town. As ACHMO’s regional veep, it was Suz’s job to provide their “day in the mountains,” a de rigueur excursion for visiting out-of-staters. The buffet as well as the day had been Colorado picture-postcard perfect: sapphire-blue sky, sweet mountain air redolent of pine, platters of chilled steamed Rocky Mountain trout, and luscious chocolate truffles.

  The only mishap of the catered lunch had occurred when Chris Corey, the overweight head of ACHMO’s Provider Relations, had taken a spill down an incomplete set of stone steps. Chris had sprained his ankle and Suz had vowed to fire the landscapers. One of the guests had taken a bite of trout, winked at me, and commented that firing people was what Suz did best. I’d made a mental note. Maybe she’d dump the Jerk before too long. I wondered how he would react.

  The sedan’s engine purred as I passed Aspen Meadow Lake, where the early-morning sun and whiff of breeze had whipped the placid water into jagged sparkles. At the Lakeview Shopping Center across the road from the lake, a tattered banner, ruffling slightly, announced that Aspen Meadow Health Foods was under new management. Beneath the banner a beautifully painted sign advertised the upcoming doll show at the LakeCenter. BABSIE BASH! the curlicued script screamed. GO BERSERK!

  I pressed the accelerator and hummed along with the engine. When I thought about Babsie dolls these days, I didn’t think berserk, I thought bread and butter. Starting Tuesday, I’d be catering to the doll folks for two days. The bash organizers had warned me that they didn’t want any food to get on the display tables, the Babsie costume boxes, the eensy-weensy furniture, the tiny high heels, the fanciful costumes, or, God forbid, the dolls. I’d assured them I could do all their meals, including a final barbecue, outside—complete with finger bowls, if they wanted. They’d said I should find a Chef Babsie outfit to wear. I’d been afraid to ask them if they were kidding.

  Once I’d rounded the lake, the sedan started uphill toward the country-club area. Actually, Suz Craig had always reminded me of Babsie. Beyond her looks, though, I had to admit that Suz had a phenomenal mind and a charismatic personality to go with her statuesque, size-six body. I never had been able to understand how the Jerk could attract women like her.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror at my slightly chubby face, brown eyes, and Shirley Temple-blond-brown curls. “He got you, didn’t he?” I said to my puzzled reflection, then laughed.

  The stone entryway into the country-club area had been graffiti-sprayed by vandals. The vandals’ defacement of property was one of this summer’s ongoing problems in our little town. Still, I knew my way to Arch’s friend’s house without having to decipher the spray-painted street signs. The developer for the old part of the club had been an indiscriminate Anglophile. He’d given the streets names like Beowulf, Chaucer, Elizabethan, Cromwell, Tudor, and Brinsley. As long as you knew a bit about English history, you were in good shape. I approached the turn to Jacobean Drive, where Suz Craig lived, and hesitated. I pulled over and the sedan tires crunched on the gravel. Despite my best intentions, I was suffering a typical Jerk-inspired dilemma. Would he be home yet?

  Tom’s cellular was close at hand. I could call John Richard first to make sure he was awake and ready for Arch’s arrival. On the other hand, I didn’t want to wake him up and risk one of his infamous tantrums. If I drove past Suz’s and saw one of his cars in the driveway, I would know to stall on picking up Arch. But stall how? I tapped the dashboard in frustration.

  Okay—I remembered that the woebegone landscapers had been planning three patios, along with a series of steps, on Suz’s sloping property. The vandalism had been so bad in the country club that Suz had confessed to being afraid to have the flagstones delivered and left outside, where they ran the risk of being spray-painted with cuss words. So Suz’s garage was full of flagstones, and if John Richard had spent the night with his girlfriend, one of his Jeeps would be sitting in her driveway. This, in spite of the fact that his house was close by. But John Richard never walked for exercise; he played tennis.

  I revved the engine, turned up Jacobean, and immediately knew
something was wrong. I rolled down the window and tried to figure out what didn’t fit. The rhythmic, slushy beat of automated sprinklers buzzed across manicured green lawns. On both sides of the road bunches of trim aspens, conical blue spruces, and buttercup-flowered potentilla bushes were all picture-perfect. Picture-perfect except for one thing. In the ditch running beside Suz’s driveway, one of the landscape people had inconsiderately dumped one of the quartz boulders.

  One of the quartz boulders? No.

  I slowed the sedan, carefully set the parking brake, and got out of the car. Then, feeling faintly dizzy, I walked toward the ditch. Suz’s cheerily painted mailbox had been knocked or driven over and lay in the middle of the street. The block letters of the name Craig gleamed in white paint on the shiny black metal. I looked back at the ditch.

  It was not a quartz boulder that lay in the dirt.

  It was Suz.

  Oh God, I prayed, no.

  I moved haltingly toward the ditch. Loosely clad in a terry-cloth bathrobe, the exposed parts of Suz’s slender body were blue and white. Her shapely legs were improbably skewed, as if she were running a race. Her blond hair, normally tied back in a pert ponytail, was soaked with mud. It clung to her face like seaweed. Her bruised arms hugged her torso, while her blue lips were set in a silent scream. She did not appear to be breathing.

  What to do? Call somebody? Tom? No, no, no, there might be hope, if an ambulance could get here quickly. Plus, some logical voice whispered, I needed to call for help as if I didn’t have any idea as to what had happened. Which I didn’t. Which I did.

  Get into the car. Dial 911. A whirring noise in my ears made thinking difficult as I ran to the sedan. Too late, too late. Emergency Medical Services wouldn’t be able to do anything. I knew it even as my shaking fingers punched 911 and Send on the cell phone. The connection was not immediate, as frequently happens in the mountains. One second, two endless, endless seconds. There was no movement from the ditch. Very faintly, from a distant part of my brain, I could hear Tom’s voice.