Sticks & Scones Page 3

  I fell silent. Wyatt and Vaughan studied me. The coffee was no longer hot; my teeth were chattering. Wyatt got up and called to the team who’d arrived and begun working in our living room. A policewoman brought in a quilt. I thanked her and wrapped myself up in the thick handmade comforter, sewn by county volunteers for crime victims.

  “Any neighbors who might pose problems?” Wyatt’s partner asked patiently. “Those guys outside look a tad trigger-happy.” Was that a hint of a grin on Wyatt’s face? I gushed that our neighbors were all terrific. The last time a neighbor had shot at anything, it had been a woodpecker. But he’d really hated that bird; his skirmishes with it were the stuff of neighborhood legend. And anyway, after he’d fired, the woodpecker had flown away, unscathed.

  “Are there any other folks,” Vaughan pressed, “any other clients, you might have had trouble with?”

  “Ordinarily,” I replied, “my clients only get upset if I don’t show up.” My throat closed. What was I supposed to do about the lunch? The bullet-smashed window made it too cold to do the crucial last part of the necessary food-prep here at home, unless I could quickly find a repairman to put plywood over the window. I had to honor my luncheon commitment at Hyde Chapel. If I wasn’t able to get the window fixed, could I do my cooking in the castle kitchen? Would the Hydes want me to arrive at the castle before sunup? Gooseflesh pimpled my arms, and I sighed.

  Wyatt closed his notebook. The phone rang. I bolted for it, hoping it was Tom.

  “Goldy, it’s Boyd,” said the gravelly voice of Sergeant Boyd, one of Tom’s closest friends in the department.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “Did you hear about the—”

  “It’s why I’m calling,” he interrupted. Boyd had a no-nonsense attitude that was complemented by his barrel-shaped body and unfashionable crew cut, all of which I had come to cherish. Tom trusted his life to Boyd, as did I. “Listen,” he said now. “I want you out of there.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I protested. “I’m also thinking our window just needs some plywood—”

  “Forget it. Your security system needs to be rewired and the house may not be safe. I’ve already talked to Armstrong.” Sergeant Armstrong, who worked with Boyd, was another friend and ace investigator. “We want you to get out and stay out until Tom gets back. It is not safe there. You and Arch can hole up in my spare bedroom if you want. Armstrong’s family is willing to have you, too.”

  I thought of the minuscule kitchen in Boyd’s bachelor apartment, and of the chaos Armstrong’s six children wrought wherever they went. “Thanks. I don’t—”

  “We’ll get your window fixed, don’t worry. And your security system, too. But we need to find out who did this to you.”

  “Okay,” I agreed reluctantly, knowing Tom would want me to do whatever Boyd recommended. “I’ll … make some arrangement.”

  “Good. Talk to you later.”

  I thanked him, hung up, and told the deputies what Boyd had said. Both seemed relieved. After all, the house would be too cold and too dangerous to stay in, at least for that day. So what other impromptu arrangement was I supposed to come up with? What friend can you call at four-thirty in the morning, to ask for refuge and a large kitchen?

  During the current remodeling of her guest bedroom, my best friend Marla Korman—who always claimed that the Jerk had married her for her inherited fortune, which she’d refused to share with him during their brief marriage—had staked out a suite at Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel. I knew Marla would have welcomed me, even at that ungodly morning hour. But the sixty-five-minute trip back from downtown Denver to Aspen Meadow, to cater at Hyde Chapel between ferrying Arch to and from school, was simply not feasible. Plus, the Brown probably wouldn’t look kindly on yours truly invading their restaurant kitchen.

  Reluctantly, I realized that whatever I decided, I would soon have to call the Hydes—Eliot and Sukie—proprietors of Hyde Castle. The Elk Park Prep fencing coach, Michaela Kirovsky, doubled as a caretaker at the castle. She had mentioned to Arch that the couple who owned the castle would not mind if both of us stayed there while Tom was gone. Staying there, Michaela had kindly suggested, might even make my upcoming castle catering jobs easier for all concerned. But it was far too early to call the Hydes. And I didn’t know how impromptu Michaela Kirovsky’s invitation had been. Maybe the Hydes didn’t want their caterer underfoot. Their caterer and her son, I reminded myself.

  What would Tom want us to do? I had no idea. I had stayed in the home of clients before, when my ex-husband had been making threats, and before our house had a security system. But those clients had been relatives of Marla’s. Working for Eliot and Sukie Hyde was purely a business arrangement.

  Without enthusiasm, I made a decision: I’d just have to pack up my son, myself, and all the food, drive to the castle gates, and give the Hydes a ring from my cellular. If they said they wouldn’t have us, then I’d have to come up with another plan.

  As Deputy Wyatt sent out a newly arrived pair of deputies to canvass my neighbors, the video team arrived. I went upstairs to pack a few things and asked Arch todo the same. My son announced that the first thing we had to do was find someone to take care of Jake and Scout. I called Bill’s wife, Trudy—their lights were all on, so I knew she was up—and made arrangements for our pets. It would only be until I could come up with a repair plan, I assured Trudy, trying to sound confident and also apologetic, for calling at this hour. But she was wideawake and glad to help. In fact, it seemed as if all the folks on our street were up. They were either entertaining neighbors in their kitchens, clomping up and down the icy sidewalk, or sipping coffee on the curbs while exchanging theories on the shooting. The incident at our home had turned into a predawn block party. Welcome to the mountains.

  I tossed my pj’s, toothbrush, and a work outfit into a suitcase, then reentered the kitchen just as Wyatt finished interviewing the canvassing team. The deputy’s face pinched in dismay when I asked if any of my neighbors had seen anything. One woman—the wife of one of the gun-toters—had reported hearing something moving on the ice-slickened street. After the gunshot, she’d glanced out her window and made out someone bundled into a bulky coat hustling away from our house. Judging from the person’s muscular build and swaggering stride, she thought the figure was that of a man. The person she’d glimpsed, she insisted, had had a rifle tucked expertly under his arm.

  “We’ll keep working on it,” Wyatt reassured me, in a kindly voice. “By the way, I called Captain Lambert. Since the department employs your husband, and this may be connected to an official inquiry, we’ll handle finding a janitorial service to clean up the glass and an electrician to redo your security system. The department will have the window replaced, too,” he added.

  I thanked him and, trying to smile, asked if bulletproof glass was available.

  Wyatt’s reply was humorless. “We’ll look into that. And Mrs. Schulz? We’ll need to know where you’re heading.”

  “I’m going to show up a little early at a client’s house….I have a booking today at Hyde Chapel, by the estate,” I replied. Wyatt copied the Hydes’ number from my client directory. “If that doesn’t work out, I’ll give you a call—”

  “The Hydes?” Wyatt asked suspiciously. “They live in that big castle up on the hill? Poltergeist Palace?”

  “I’ve heard it called that,” I said. “But I don’t truck in ghosts.”

  He frowned. “The chapel you’re working at is that one down by Cottonwood Creek where people used to have weddings? Looks like a little cathedral?”

  “The Hydes gave the chapel to Saint Luke’s,” I told him, “but they’re still involved in running the place. I’m …just starting to work for them,” I added, wondering at Wyatt’s sudden interest. My paranoia engine must have been in overdrive, though, because Wyatt merely grunted.

  Just after five-thirty, Jake was ensconced, but not happily, at Bill and Trudy Quincy’s house. Trudy had promised to take in
the mail, monitor the cleanup and window repairs, and care for Scout the cat, who’d refused to leave his post under Julian’s bed. Arch and I tucked two suitcases into the back of the van Tom had bought me for Christmas. My chest felt like stone. I hated leaving our house.

  I filled a carton with my mixer, blender, favorite wooden spoons, and assorted culinary equipment. In our walk-in refrigerator, I’d already assembled the ingredients for the steak pies and chicken croquettes, plus their accompanying sauces. After transporting those boxes to my van, I packed up frozen containers of homemade chicken stock and frozen loaves of manchet bread—the sort eaten by Tudor royalty, Eliot Hyde had informed me—and fresh beans and field greens, along with almost-ripe dark Damson plums. Last, I packed two fragrant, freshly stewed chickens.

  A chicken in every pot, Herbert Hoover had promised, when speaking of the delights of the prosperous household. What would Hoover have said about being forced from one’s home, clutching the cooked birds in a box?

  CHAPTER 3

  My new van chugged the short distance to Main Street. There, darkened shop windows and ice-crusted pavement mirrored the gloomy glow from our town’s rustic street lamps. Exhaust-blackened heaps of snow clogged the gutters. A rusty van and what looked like an old BMW were parked across from the bank. Both had a forlorn look about them. I prayed that no homeless people were sleeping in those vehicles on this frigid morning. Not only did our small mountain town have no motels, it also possessed no shelters. The occasional homeless person who attempted to brave the winter at eight thousand feet above sea level usually gave up and hitchhiked to California.

  My tires crunched up to the icy curb. On the north side of the street, the Bank of Aspen Meadow’s digital numerals blinked that it was three below zero at thirty-eight minutes after five. Beside me, Arch scrunched down in his jacket. Heat poured from the humming engine while I stared up at the sky and tried to plan what to do next.

  Furry, impenetrable clouds obscured the stars. The light of the rising sun would not begin creeping over the mountains for nearly an hour. I tugged my hat down over my ears and struggled to work out the logistics of a predawn appearance at Hyde Castle.

  I’d first visited the Hydes during a freezing, mid-January fog. At the time, I’d been grateful for Sukie Hyde’s call. Ever since the unfortunate New Year’s party at the Lauder-dales’, I’d been low. When the police had refused to bring an assault case against me—Buddy had claimed I hit him when I tried to wrench little Patty away from him—the Lauderdales’ lawyer had begun calling me, threatening civil suits. Self-proclaimed friends of the Lauderdales had either snubbed me or scolded me for dragging the name of a longtime Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church and Elk Park Prep supporter through the mud. Forget low. Until Sukie called, my mood had been subterranean.

  I’d known Sukie casually for the past two years, through Saint Luke’s. A widowed Swiss émigrée, she had married the reclusive Eliot Hyde a little over a year ago. Her call to me in January had been to announce that she and Eliot intended to turn his family castle into a retreat center for high-end corporate customers. They’d been remodeling the castle for months, and now Eliot was eager to move ahead with his plans for historic Elizabethan meals—meals that would eventually be served to conference clients. Was I interested?

  I practically choked saying, You bet, yes, please, absolutely, I adore history and the food that goes with it!

  I was desperate for the booking; I was also curious to see the lavish work on the castle redo. Rumor had it that Eliot and Sukie had already spent several million dollars. Everyone in town knew that Sukie was a cleaning and organizing whiz. And good old Eliot Hyde must have thanked his lucky stars, rabbit’s feet, and four-leafed clovers when Sukie’s reputation had proved true.

  When Sukie first arrived in Aspen Meadow, the story went, she was bored. Her husband, Carl Rourke, had owned a successful roofing company that many local high-school students, including Julian, had worked for. Sadly, Carl had died on the job, in a freak electrical accident. After a year of widowhood, Sukie’s loneliness had made her restless. Figuring her obsessive tidiness ought to be worth something, she’d advertised to work as a personal organizer.

  Her first and last client was Eliot Hyde. Never married, virtually penniless, Eliot was a former academic who had retreated to the castle he’d inherited after being denied tenure at an East Coast college. The castle itself, built in Sussex, had been bought by Eliot’s grandfather, silver baron Theodore Hyde, on a trip to England in the twenties. Belonging to a line of earls, the castle had been uninhabited since the time of Cromwell. Like the parvenus making social splashes with their enormous palaces in Newport, Rhode Island, silver-baron Theodore had apparently hoped his castle would give him the social cachet of an actual baron. He had the castle disassembled in England, then he hired a team to reassemble the royal residence in Aspen Meadow. He dammed up Fox Creek that flowed down the hill to the castle, to make a moat. He hired a fleet of servants to keep the place sparkling. Among his employees were a Russian fencing-master to teach him historic martial arts, and a butler to bring him tea and scones each day at four o’clock.

  Unfortunately, Theodore and his wife Millicent had disliked tea and found fencing exhausting. The butler quit; the fencing-master, Michaela Kirovsky’s grandfather, became the castle caretaker. The Hydes, meanwhile, decided that what they really liked was collecting old European buildings. Once the castle was in place, they purchased a thirteenth-century French chapel that was a mini-version of Chartres. That Gothic jewel had been painstakingly reconstructed not far from the castle, on the Hydes’ sloping forty acres below Fox Creek and above Cottonwood Creek, the wide body of water that runs through Aspen Meadow. Then, before their dreams of purchasing a ruined abbey could be realized, Theodore and Millicent had both been killed in a railroad accident.

  Their only son, Edwin—facing a Depression economy, played-out silver mines, and no financial assets aside from his parents’ estate—had tried to turn the castle into a hotel. This failed, as did mounting Aspen Meadow’s first and last circus on the castle grounds. After hiring ranchers to cart away mountains of elephant manure, Edwin and his wife had been reduced to charging for tours of the castle.

  Their son, Eliot, had returned to the castle almost nine years ago, after his parents’ death and his own failure in academia. At thirty-nine, he hadn’t accumulated much in the way of savings, and those had drained swiftly away as he, too, struggled to make a living from giving tours and renting out the French chapel by Cottonwood Creek, now christened Hyde Chapel. By the time Eliot hired Sukie to organize the place, he’d stopped the tours and sunk into a depression. Income from renting the chapel was down, and stories in town had him living like a hermit in one room of his castle.

  The family of the fencing-master, meanwhile, had been offered one whole wing of the castle rent-free, as long as they remained the caretakers. It was in their palatial fencing loft that young Michaela Kirovsky’s grandfather and father had taught her to fence, a skill that subsequently provided income for her, when she became the fencing coach at Elk Park Prep.

  Beside me, Arch was fast asleep.

  There was more to the tale of Eliot Hyde and Sukie Rourke. In fact, the months-old series of events were now routinely chronicled by townsfolk over coffee and doughnuts. Oddly, You can’t be too clean seemed to be the moral of the story.

  When then forty-seven-year-old Eliot hired thirty-five-year-old Sukie, she had crisply informed him that she would not work in the castle as long as the stench remained from the castle’s medieval toilets. Unfortunately, these thirty-three so-called “garderobes”—actually ancient narrow bathrooms corbeled out over the castle walls—had not been cleaned before leaving England. Also central to the Sukie story was an acknowledgment of one of the flaws of medieval military architecture: Each garderobe had its own shaft into the moat. Those shafts had proved a convenient, if messy, mode of entry to attackers of Richard the Lionheart’s Château Gaillard on the Seine, bu
t Sukie hadn’t cared about old tales of invaders. Back in medieval days, each castle garderobe shaft emptied into a cesspit or the moat itself, both of which had been periodically cleaned out. But the medieval folks had not cleaned the garderobe shafts. Ever. After all these years, they still stank.

  Yes, the story went, medieval courtiers had tossed down herbs, straw, and old letters to absorb some of the filth, but the latrine stench invariably sent foul smells throughout the castle. The British construction folks who’d taken the castle apart eighty years earlier to be shipped here to America had pulled down the shafts in sections. And the shafts had also been reassembled that way, much to Sukie’s disgust.

  So: For Sukie’s first order of organizing business, she’d had each and every garderobe and shaft disassembled to be cleaned and disinfected.

  And then.

  Think of flushing things down the toilet, I’d said to Arch, when Sukie’s subsequent discovery made national headlines. You might flush down things that made you angry, like a dunning bill for canceled phone service, or a Dear John letter from someone who’d sworn to love you forever. Or … say you received a letter from the government denying you guardianship of your beloved, orphaned nephew. That denial made you so enraged, you threw that bureaucrat’s epistle down the toilet shaft, where it … stuck….

  In 1533, that was just what the Earl of Uckfield had done. His petition to raise his wealthy nine-year-old nephew, the orphan of his ultrarich brother-in-law, a duke, had been turned down by the monarch. In a fury, the earl had flung that letter down one of his garderobe shafts. And that was where the missive had stayed for over four centuries. It had taken a compulsively clean Swiss woman, ordering that the shaft be scrubbed, before the discovery was made.