The Grilling Season Read online

  Gail Rodine motioned me forward as she announced crisply to the guard: “And this is our caterer. She’ll be here to set up the box lunches tomorrow, and our breakfast on Wednesday just before nine o’clock.” She cocked an eyebrow at me, as if daring me to contradict her agenda. Actually, I needed to get in closer to eight on Wednesday. But before I could utter a word, Gail noticed Macguire. Her face stiffened with anger.

  I tried to sound reassuring. “Gail, we’re just here today to check that the ovens are working and to see where you want the buffet to be. Plus, day after tomorrow, I need to get in closer to eight or eight-fifteen. Would that be okay?”

  She lifted her chin, and I had a glimpse of a hooked nose and an auburn-lipsticked mouth with a cruel slant. “Eight will be fine. You said ‘we.’ Is this … person … your assistant? If so, you may come in now, he may not,” she proclaimed imperiously. “That boy has already made our lives quite difficult here. And we’re preparing to take our morning tea break. The break will be held in the same place as the brunch.”

  “Okay,” I managed to choke.

  “Well, then.” She bristled impatiently. “Come and see what I’m talking about.”

  Gail marched ahead of me down the path. Ordinarily, I adore my clients. They’re happy to book me. They enjoy planning the menu. They rave about the food I lovingly prepare. Ordinarily, things end happily, with future bookings in sight. But sometimes you can sense when things are going to go badly. Gail had been cruel to the kids at Arch’s slumber party; she’d been mean to Macguire when he’d merely tried to help. I’d just seen her give the security guy hell and I could feel that I was next in line, right before the tea break. I tried to wipe from my mind a sudden vision of Gail Rodine bobbing in a lake of Orange Pekoe, with her Babsie dolls tied around her neck. I suppressed a groan. Behind me, Macguire turned and shuffled back to the van.

  I followed Gail past the bored-looking, slightly ripe-smelling guard—after all, what kind of drinking stories could he get from protecting dolls?—and into the kitchen. The large and serviceable space was as I remembered it: two ovens set against one wall, a sink overlooking the parking lot. Two lengthy counters separated the kitchen from the ballroom. These counters doubled as a snack bar in the winter months, during skating season, but would serve for me as a prep area. I checked that the ovens worked and looked briefly into the ballroom, where dealers were cracking open long tables and setting up tiers of empty shelves for their displays.

  “In the morning,” Gail explained grandly over the bustle of dealers, “I want all the food out back. Nothing can touch the doll displays, remember. You can wheel the food trays out through here.”

  She swished toward the wall beside the kitchen, then expertly opened a door in what looked like a solid block of logs. The door—actually a rectangle of sawed logs that snugged into the wall—gave out on the flagstone patio on the side of the structure. Gail moved outside. She briskly pointed out the grill for Wednesday’s final meal, the picnic tables on the deck overlooking the lake where dining would take place, and the tall doors between the ballroom and the deck.

  “No dolls beyond this point, unless they have been purchased,” she said firmly. I smiled, nodded, and wondered how Macguire was doing. After promising Gail that I’d be back the next day with the box lunches, I zipped back to my van.

  Macguire, chin in the air, mouth open, had fallen asleep with his head cocked against the neck rest. There was no way he could have been comfortable.

  When the van jolted out of the dirt lot, he was startled awake. He blinked, then muttered, “Uh, I’m ready to go home.”

  “Just one more quick stop. I promised this nurse I’d be in to see her today. Plus I want to warn her about my ex-husband being released from custody. He mentioned her on the phone from jail. I should let her know he might show up.”

  “Then I’d better go in with you,” Macguire said wearily. “If your ex has already gotten up here, you’ll need backup.”

  We bumped back over the potholes, pulled into the Lakeview lot, and parked in front of the health-food store next to a Harley-Davidson. An Indian cowbell attached to the door gonged as we entered. Inside, ruffled green gingham curtains framed the windows. The pinewood-paneled walls were hung with pictures of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and other dignitaries of the vegetarian world. The distinctive smell of exotic herbs and incense that permeates most health-food stores enveloped us.

  Even though the store had only been open ten minutes, two people had preceded us. One was Patricia McCracken, whose pear-shaped body was stuffed into a white tennis dress that contrasted with the more exotic surroundings. She sat at a table with Amy Bartholomew. Amy sported a green-flowered Indian dress embedded with spangles. The other person in the store, a black-leather-clad burly man with shoulder-length, curly black hair, studied two shelves stacked with brown bottles. An array of silver rings spilling down his left ear flashed in the sunlight whenever he leaned forward to study a label.

  “Even in disguise,” Macguire whispered, “I don’t think Korman could look like that.”

  “You’re right,” I whispered back.

  At their table Patricia and Amy were in intimate communication. Patricia’s voice cracked with pain; Amy’s voice exuded its liquid warmth. After nodding briefly to acknowledge our arrival, Amy directed Patricia to hold a bottle to her heart with her left hand. With her right hand Patricia was told to press her forefinger and thumb together in an okay sign. Then Amy asked a question and gently pried apart the fingers of Patricia’s right hand. “Six a day?” Amy murmured, and pulled. The okay sign opened. “Eight a day?” It opened again. At twelve a day Patricia’s fingers wouldn’t budge. Amy wrote on a yellow pad while Patricia wrote a check. A novel approach to prescription, this.

  Patricia gave me an apologetic glance as she exited. “Do you still hurt from Saturday?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her, not quite truthfully. “But listen. John Richard’s out on bail. I don’t think he’d come after you, but when he loses his temper with women … Well. Be careful.”

  Patricia’s face tightened and she swore under her breath. Then she shook her head and moved away from me without asking another question.

  Amy was already eyeing Macguire by the time the cowbell rang behind Patricia. After an appraising squint, she moved to Macguire’s side. The thin teenager towered over her.

  “You’re not well,” she murmured.

  “Yeah, lady. Really.”

  “I’ll be with you in a sec.”

  Macguire nodded without interest. He stopped in front of a rack of magazines. Amy slipped over to the shelves, where she seemed to know exactly what the Earring King wanted. I watched her hand him a large cellophane bag filled with lots of small cellophane bags, each of which was crammed with multicolored capsules. I could imagine Frances Markasian’s loud headline: COP’S WIFE ARRESTED IN HEALTH STORE DRUG BUST.

  The Earring King glared at me. “What’re you staring at, woman?” he demanded.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. My mouth had gone dry.

  “Edgar, you need to transform that anger,” Amy gently reprimanded the man. “It’s blocking you.”

  Emanating hostility that showed no sign of being transformed, Edgar slapped down some dollar bills for his cellophane bags, mumbled that he didn’t want the change, and clanged through the door. A moment later a motorcycle engine split the silence. Amy shook her head of red hair.

  “Cancer,” she said sadly. I didn’t know if she meant the disease or the astrological sign, and wasn’t about to ask. She looked at me and said, “How’s that shoulder?”

  “Fair.”

  “Let me treat your friend and then you. How’s that?”

  “Well …” How was I supposed to say this? My ex-husband called from jail. He suspects you of killing his girlfriend. Or he wants to pin the murder on you. Now he’s on the loose and may come looking for you, Amy. Better pack up your alfalfa sprouts and hit the trail. “I need to talk to you without
interruption,” I said somewhat lamely.

  “No problem,” Amy replied brightly, and blithely turned the door’s paper clock to CLOSED.

  Amy beckoned to Macguire. He shuffled behind us as she led the way to the back of the shop, where small tables were sandwiched between two refrigerated cases that held plastic bottles of chlorophyll and other substances I wouldn’t want to ingest. Next to the bottles were plastic bags of adzuki, black, and pinto beans, a few tired-looking carrots, and a small selection of packaged grains. Macguire flopped into a chair and I sat next to him. Amy clasped one of Macguire’s hands in hers; he immediately withdrew it. I had the same discomfiting sense I’d had in the McCrackens’ bathroom—that Amy was way ahead of me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to catch up.

  “Perhaps you should just treat me,” I told her. “I don’t really have any authority to—”

  But Amy was absorbed with Macguire’s eyes. He turned his face away from her and rubbed his temples. She said, “What do the M.D.s say?”

  “The … Oh,” I faltered, “well, Macguire has mononucleosis, and he … what worries me is that he doesn’t have any appetite. The doctor has said he should be getting better, but … Anyway, he’s staying with me until his father gets home later in the month, and I’m not sure his father would approve of—” I was yakking away. Why did this woman always make me yak?

  “Macguire?” Amy asked in her kind, melted-milk-chocolate voice. “Do you want to be healed?”

  Macguire tilted his head skeptically, glanced swiftly at Amy, then stared at the floor. “I guess.”

  “Okay. Just relax.” She had him remove his watch. Then he touched his head with first one hand, then the other.

  “What are you doing?” I blurted out.

  She replied without looking at me. “I’m reading his aura.”

  Oh, that! I reflected. Of course. Marla and I would have to offer it in Med Wives 101.

  Amy took a small flashlight from her pocket, then opened and smoothed out what looked like a paper diagram or chart of some kind. “Look at me.” This Macguire did, and for the next five minutes Amy shone the flashlight in his eyes and consulted her chart. When she’d made a few notes, she rose and briskly began to gather supplies. A bottle of chlorophyll. Five brown bottles of pills. Cellophane bags similar to the ones the Earring King had purchased. Then she commenced the same drill she had with Patricia: Macguire held the medicines to his heart, and Amy asked questions and tested the response by pulling apart his fingers pressed in the okay sign. I kept an eye on the door, in the remote case the Jerk showed up.

  Finally Amy seemed happy with a combination of three bottles of pills, two cellophane bags, and the chlorophyll. She asked Macguire if he wanted her to run through putting together his twice-a-day regimen. As usual, he replied dully in the affirmative.

  “You’d better watch this, too,” she told me, and then showed us the sheet. He was to take ten capsules twice a day, plus a teaspoon of chlorophyll dissolved in a cup of cold water. Yum-my!

  I pointed at the capsules. “What’s in these?”

  “Shark cartilage,” she replied, “pau d’arco bark, essiac tea, rosehips—”

  A vision of Macbeth’s witches rose before me. “Okey-doke,” I interrupted her, before we could get to eye of newt.

  “Are you ready for me to take a look at you?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said enthusiastically. What did I have to lose?

  While Macguire dutifully swallowed his capsules with a glass of springwater spiked with chlorophyll, I got the same flashlight-in-the-eye treatment he’d received. Again Amy consulted her chart.

  “Hmm,” she said. Then the beautiful brown eyes and faded-freckled face regarded me sadly. She bit the inside of her lip and then made her pronouncement: “You’re depressed.”

  Great, I thought, got herbs for it? Prozac bark? Instead I said, “Since it’s truth-telling time, Amy, there’s something I really need to talk to you about.”

  “Your ex-husband. Dr. Korman.” “How did you know?”

  She smiled. “I may run a health-food store, but I don’t live in the next galaxy. Suz Craig and I didn’t get along, as you said you knew, when I helped you out at the McCrackens’ house. What, you think Dr. Korman is going to come gunning for me? I was a victim of Suz’s nastiness, so now I’m a suspect in her murder? Is Dr. Korman trying to say I killed her?”

  Without warning, I felt infinitely dejected. Maybe it was Amy’s suggestion that I was depressed; maybe it was my acknowledgment of the truth. A woman was dead. If my ex-husband had killed her, he would pay. But so would my teenage son, who would pay a long-lasting price in emotional pain. If John Richard had not killed Suz, then finding out who did would be left to the D.A.’s investigator, Donny Saunders. Saunders, who, last time we’d met, had informed me radicchio was the name of a mobster. No wonder my spirits were low.

  “Let’s get you some herbs for that depression,” Amy said decisively. She moved to the same area of the same shelf where she’d pulled down the bottle for Patricia McCracken. Hmm.

  And then I, too, went through the drill of holding the herbs to my heart and having my fingers pried open. Within five minutes I, too, was swallowing mammoth capsules whose ingredient list included only three things I recognized: bamboo sap, ginger rhizome, and licorice root. It didn’t sound like a mixture I’d use in a cookie.

  “So is Patricia McCracken depressed, too?” I asked Amy. “About losing her baby?”

  Amy lifted her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Depressed enough to get really angry with Suz Craig?”

  “Who knows? Suz distressed a lot of people.”

  “Including you.” When she gave a single nod, I swallowed, then said, “Why’d she fire you?”

  Amy smiled placidly. “Is that what Suz said, that she fired me? No. That’s what she always said when people couldn’t get along with her … that she fired them, as if they were the incompetent ones.” She shook her head gently. “I quit ACHMO. My payout from the pension plan helped buy this shop.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “Why’d you divorce Dr. Korman?”

  “Because he abused me.”

  “Aha! Same here. Only Suz Craig didn’t abuse people physically. She beat them up mentally.” Amy said it as if it were a disease. “When I left, I thought, now why did that take me so long?”

  “Meaning … ?”

  She frowned and pondered my question. For a long minute she was silent. Then she answered, “AstuteCare has been in Colorado for eight years. I was with them from the beginning, moved up to Medical Management. There was a group of department heads, including Brandon Yuille and Chris Corey, who also lived in Aspen Meadow. We worked as a team. Suz joined ACHMO two years ago. It was the beginning of hell.”

  Hell. Interesting. “Why? What did she do to change things?”

  “We used to have a weekly meeting to discuss problems we were having. What we needed in the new Provider Relations Manual, that kind of thing. Suz would scream and yell. ‘What’s the matter with you people?’ was her favorite. And then she’d viciously attack every person in the room for being stupid, lazy, incompetent. Or, in the case of Chris, fat. ‘How’s a tub of lard supposed to set a model for health?’ Suz used to yell at him. You get the idea. Brandon Yuille’s father, who’d just lost his wife, was remodeling and reopening the pastry shop. Suz was on Brandon’s case constantly about being there on the weekends instead of working overtime for her. She claimed Brandon came in too tired to be of any use, because he was up all night baby-sitting his father, on and on. It was none of her business that Brandon’s father was a widower and alone and desperately needed his company. But she made it her business. She made his life miserable.”

  Aha, more hell. “Wasn’t there anybody you could complain to?”

  She shrugged. “It was coming to that. A group of them was trying to go over her head.”

  “And did they? And to whom?”

  “They talked a
bout it. But I’d had enough. Her cruelty was unbearable. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The last—no, let’s see, the next-to-last—straw for me came about five months ago when I was negotiating to buy this store. I saw the store as a long-term project for my retirement. Originally I was planning just to have it open on the weekends, until I could build up the clientele over about a ten-or fifteen-year period, when I retired from ACHMO. But Suz never wanted you to be in charge of your own destiny. She wanted to be in charge of your destiny.”

  “She knew you wanted to open this store?”

  Amy smiled sadly. “Suz made it her business to know personal details about the people who worked for her.” She shook her head. “Anyway. One of the ACHMO doctors had a gambling problem. Suz asked me—privately, mind you—to follow the guy to the casinos in Central City, see what he was up to, and try to talk to him. See if he’d go into some kind of self-help group, therapy, whatever. If I did, she said, she promised to co-sign one of my loan applications. I didn’t feel good about it”—she shrugged—“but if one of our providers had an addiction that would negatively affect the care he gave, I believed I should help find that out. So, I agreed to follow him.”

  “So you don’t gamble?”

  She laughed softly. “No. I followed this provider of ours to Central City and found him playing slots. I watched him for two hours, then confronted him. He convinced me to dance with the one-armed bandit for a while so I could see how much fun it was. I dropped eighteen dollars in quarters into two slot machines and never made more than a dollar. Then I convinced this guy—a pediatrician, if you can believe it—to have some coffee, to talk to me. Over coffee he said he wasn’t going to quit gambling. I was wasting my time. Suz got rid of that doctor and now he’s in Utah, leading rock-climbing expeditions. Different kind of gamble, I guess. Then Suz spread it around that I had the gambling problem. At that time people were bidding for this store space and I was working feverishly on loan applications. Because I hadn’t succeeded in rehabilitating the pediatrician, Suz refused to co-sign for me, and I didn’t get my loan. When I confronted her about trying to destroy all my plans for the future—to destroy me—she claimed I was paranoid.”