The Cereal Murders Read online

  At some point in the evening the tortuous road between Elk Park and Aspen Meadow had been plowed. Still, we skirted the banked curves with great care. My mind wandered back to that upturned sled in the snow.

  To the look of horror on Keith Andrews’ young face.

  I shook my head and focused on the driving. Gripping the steering wheel hard, I accelerated up a slight incline. I hoped Arch was okay. The rock thrown through one of our windows was worrisome. Halloween was coming up, and pranksters had to be expected. I should have told Schulz about the rock, though. I’d forgotten.

  Schulz was going to call us. He would tell us what had happened to Keith, wouldn’t he? I had plodded through the headmaster’s snowy yard, found the lifeless form, touched the icy extension cord. It was like a personal affront. I had to know what had happened. Like it or not, I was involved.

  Resolutely, I veered off this thought pattern and reflected on Schulz. Somehow, his behavior this evening indicated a sea change in our relationship, from a growing intimacy back to the distance of business. I turned the steering wheel slowly while negotiating a switchback. For one breathtaking moment on this curve, all that was visible out the window was air.

  Tom Schulz. We had been dating off and on, mostly off, for the past year. Recently, however, we had been more frequently and more seriously on. This summer had brought a rapprochement, a French word for getting back together that Arch now dropped into conversation the way he sprinkled sugar on his Rice Krispies.

  Schulz and I had not really become a couple. But he and I, along with Julian and Arch, had become a unit: the four of us hiked, we fished, we cooked out, we took turns choosing movies. Schulz’s light caseload lately had consisted mostly of investigating mail thefts and forgeries, giving him time to spend with us.

  Insulated by the presence of the two boys, my post-divorce ambivalence toward relationships had begun to melt. I had found myself thinking of reasons to call Tom Schulz, inventing occasions to get together, looking forward to talking and laughing about all the daily details of life.

  And then there had been the issue of the name change. What had started out as a small problem had developed into a symbolic issue between Schulz and me. Over the summer I’d learned of the existence of a catering outfit in Denver with the unfortunate name Three Bears Catering. They had threatened me with a suit over trademark infringement. In one of our jovial moments, Tom had suddenly asked if I would like to change my last name to Schulz. With all that that implied, I had immediately demurred. But you know what they say about parties: It was awfully nice to be asked.

  Only now we had a catastrophe out at Elk Park Prep. Involving me, involving Julian, involving homicide. Something told me the future of my relationship with Tom Schulz was once again a question mark.

  The brake lights of the Range Rover sparked like rectangular rubies as Julian and I continued the steep descent into town. We rounded the flat black surface of Aspen Meadow Lake, where one patch of shining ripples reflected elusive moonlight. Part of me wanted Schulz to say, Come back to my place. But another, saner, inner voice said this desire came from knowing it was impossible. A homicide investigation was when Schulz was the busiest. Mortality and the need for relationship loomed large since I had looked into the dead face of young Keith Andrews.

  My tires crunched down Aspen Meadow’s Main Street. The only cars were those parked at wide angles along the curb by the Grizzly Saloon, where music and flashing lights announced it was still Saturday night. Witnessing partygoing after what I’d just seen at Elk Park Prep brought light-headedness. I rolled down the window; my eyes watered from the gush of freezing air.

  Moments later, Julian and I pulled up across the street from my house. White shutters gleamed against the brown shingles. The front porch with its single-story white pillars and porch swing seemed to smile. The old place had become very dear to me in the five years since my divorce from Dr. John Richard Korman. Arriving home at night, I was always happy that the Jerk, as his other ex-wife and I called him, was gone for good, and that my brand-new security system could make sure he stayed that way.

  I hopped out of the van and landed in three inches of new snow. It was less than we’d received in Elk Park, which stood another five hundred feet above Aspen Meadow’s eight thousand above sea level. A sudden slash of wind made me draw my coat close. A curse rose in my throat. I had unwittingly gone off wearing the stupid raccoon thing. I put my hand in the pocket and felt tissues and something flat and hard. The thought of a trip back to the school to return the coat brought a shudder.

  I pressed the security buttons and came in out of the cold with Julian close behind. Arch, who of course had not gone to bed after Julian’s call, clomped down the stairs in untied hightop sneakers. He was wearing a gray sweatsuit and carrying a large flashlight—defense against power outages. His knotted, wood-colored hair stuck out at various angles. I was so happy to see him, I clasped him in a hug that was mostly raccoon coat. He pulled back and straightened the glasses on his small, freckled nose. Magnified brown eyes regarded Julian and me with intense interest.

  “Are you guys late! What are you doing wearing that weird thing? What’s going on? All you said was that there was a problem at the headmaster’s house. Does that mean we don’t have school on Monday?” This prospect seemed to please him.

  “No, no,” I said. Weariness washed over me. We were home, finally, and all I wanted was for everyone to go to bed. I said, “Someone was hurt after the dinner.”

  “Who?” Arch pulled his thin shoulders up to his ears and made a face. “Was there an accident?”

  “Not quite. Keith Andrews, a senior, died.” I did not say that it looked as if he’d been murdered. This was a mistake.

  “Keith Andrews? The president of the French Club?” Arch looked at Julian, full of fear. “The guy you had that fight with? Man! You’re kidding!”

  Julian closed his eyes and shrugged. A fight had not come up in the questioning. I raised my eyebrows at Julian; his facial expression stayed flat.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Arch. Tom Schulz and the police are over at the school now—”

  “Tom Schulz!” cried Arch. “So they—”

  “Arch, buddy,” said Julian. “Chill. Nobody knows what happened. Really.”

  Arch’s eyes traveled from Julian back to me. He said, “A lot of people at school didn’t like Keith. I liked him, though. He didn’t drive around in a Porsche or BMW, like he was so cool. You know, the way some of the older kids do. He was nice.”

  Arch’s words hung in the air of my front hall. How easily he had put the boy’s life in past tense. Finally I said, “Well, hon, I’d rather not talk about it now, if that’s okay. So … you had a problem with a broken window?”

  He reached into the front pocket of his sweatshirt and pulled the rock out. So much for fingerprints. But the rock was tennis-ball-size and jagged. It probably wouldn’t have held a print anyway.

  “I’ll bet it was some kids from my old school. Trick or treat.” Arch sighed.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Oh, late. Right before Julian called.”

  I took the rock from him. Did I have any clients who were angry? None that I could think of. In any event, I was too tired to think about it. “Church tomorrow.” I said to Arch as I pocketed the stone and started toward the kitchen.

  “But it’s been snowing!”

  “Arch, I can’t take any more in one night.”

  “Hey, guy,” said Julian, “if you come up with me now, I’ll let you show me that model you made from the Narnia book.”

  “You mean the wardrobe with the fake back?”

  “Whatever.”

  And before I could say anything, the two boys were racing up the wooden steps. Arch let out a howl trying to beat Julian to the room they now shared. I looked around the hall and thought about the boxes of dishes waiting in my van to be washed. It was past midnight. They would keep.

  I shrugged off the coat and looked at t
he thing in the pocket. It was a Neiman Marcus credit card. The name on it was K. Andrews.

  I swept up the glass shards underneath Arch’s broken window, taped a piece of cardboard over the hole, slumped into my room, and fell into bed. Fitful sleep came interspersed with nightmares. I awoke with a dull headache and the realization that the previous evening had not been a bad dream.

  There was no way Schulz could have left Elk Park Prep before midnight. Rather than wake him at home, I put in a call about the credit card to his voice mail at the Sheriff’s Department. Neiman Marcus for an eighteen-year-old? But Arch had said Keith did not show off, at least materialistically. What had he said? Like he was so cool.

  On my braided rug, Scout the cat turned his chin in the air and dramatically flopped over on his back. I obediently scratched the long white fur of his stomach, light brown hair of his back, dark brown hair of his face. While Julian had inherited his Range Rover from the rich folks the two of us had worked for, my inheritance had been the feline. I felt content with my part of the unexpected beneficence. Scout was always full of affection when it was eating time. Perfect cat for a caterer.

  Speaking of which, I had work to do. For me, cats were safer than credit cards. I had never even been inside Denver’s new Neiman Marcus store, I reflected as I began to stretch through twenty minutes of yoga. In general, Dr. John Richard Korman’s child-support payments were late, incorrect, or nonexistent. My calendar shrieked with assignments for this busiest season for caterers, the stretch between Halloween and Christmas. During November and December people were social, hungry, and flush. This was my most profitable time of year. No matter what was going on out at Elk Park Prep, I had to earn enough money for our household to scrape through the first six months of the new year. Upscale department stores were definitely no longer a part of my lifestyle.

  In the kitchen, Scout twined through my legs and I fed him before consulting the calendar. Unfortunately, my first job of the day was not even income-producing, although it was a tax write-off. In a moment of weakness I had agreed to prepare the refreshments to follow that morning’s ten o’clock service at the Episcopal church. This would be followed by a more profitable half-time meal of choucroute garnie for twelve Bronco fans at the Dawsons’ house. Trick of caterers: Always use the French name for food. People will not pay large sums for a menu of sausage and sauerkraut.

  No rest for the weary, especially the catering weary, I thought as I hauled in yesterday’s crates of pans and plates and loaded them into my heavy-duty dishwasher. When I was done, I washed my hands and began to plan. I had to call Audrey Coopersmith and remind her that for the half-time meal she needed to wear a Bronco-orange T-shirt.

  Despite the fact that she had worked late with me the night before, I knew Audrey would be up early this Sunday morning. With the depression brought on by her divorce trauma, Audrey rarely slept past dawn. I knew, because I was one of the people she started phoning around six. In fact, in the past few months I had become something of a reluctant expert on the life of Audrey Coopersmith.

  For the mother of a high school senior, Audrey was young: thirty-eight. Her house was full of books. Despite marrying and dropping out of college at twenty, she was self-educated and extraordinarily well read. Rather than take direct care of herself, she took in strays: extra kittens other people couldn’t give away, guinea pigs, hamsters, and rabbits left over at the end of the school year, stray dogs abandoned by families moving away. She also exercised fanatically at both the athletic club and the local recreation center.

  But the shelves of books, the cadre of pets, the soft body that refused to become fit, had been no help, she had sadly announced at a meeting of Amour Anonymous, our support group for women who felt they were addicted to relationships. After two years of denial, Audrey Coopersmith had finally begun divorce proceedings against her husband of eighteen years. With a deviousness that had fooled no one but Audrey, Carl Coopersmith had been supporting another woman in Denver for the past fifteen years. This other woman had children by a previous marriage, but Carl had been hanging around for so long that the other woman’s kids called him Dad and the other woman’s neighbors all thought “Dad” was the other woman’s husband. Which, when it came to financial support, made for a very confusing situation for everyone but the lawyers. With delays, requests for documents, filing motions and countermotions, the legal beagles were having a field day.

  Bottom line was, Carl “Dad” Coopersmith had cancelled Audrey’s cash card, credit cards, and provided a copious supply of lies about his salary and other accounts. The court order on permanent support for Audrey and their daughter, Heather, was supposed to come down any moment. But as was typical, it had been delayed three times. Two months ago Audrey had asked me for part-time work. She couldn’t earn too much, she told me, for that would undermine what she was asking from Carl. But she was having trouble making ends meet. She balanced the work she had from me with a part-time job at the Tattered Cover, Denver’s largest bookstore, a place she claimed to love. But as you might expect, Audrey was always exhausted, always broke, always unhappy.

  The one bright spot in her life was super-achieving Heather, an eighteen-year-old science whiz who ranked third in the senior class at Elk Park Prep. To my utter dismay, there were only two things Audrey wanted in life: for Heather to get into MIT, and for Carl to come to his senses, leave the other woman, her kids, and her neighbors, and return to their home in Aspen Meadow Country Club.

  Now, this was a woman who was addicted to a relationship. Not to mention that she didn’t have too firm a grasp on reality. Audrey desperately wanted to return to the status quo. In Amour Anonymous, we had all tried to enlighten her, to no avail. Sometimes people just have to go through things.

  The phone had not even rung one full time when she answered. Once she realized I wasn’t Carl, her voice went from lively to remote. Yes, she remembered that she was supposed to help me with the football party. But then she remembered that she was supposed to make a stir-fry for a small staff meeting after she filled in at the bookstore that afternoon.

  I said, “Filled in?”

  She gave a short laugh. “Best department.”

  “Really?” I said. “Cookbooks?”

  “Self-improvement.”

  So I asked if she could help with the church refreshments instead, and I’d see if I could get someone else for the Dawsons’ party in the afternoon. She agreed and added that she had to get off the phone because for some reason the police were at her door.

  For some reason. I hung up. So Headmaster Perkins had already given the police Audrey’s name. But that surely would not be the end of it. I looked out my kitchen window at lodgepole pine branches heavy with snow. A number of Elk Park Prep parents were Episcopalians. By the time of the service, the investigative team already would have visited some of them. The official interrogations, not to mention Keith’s bizarre death, would be guaranteed topics of conversation during the church coffee hour.

  Cook, I ordered myself, you’ll feel better. I folded shiny slivers of orange zest into a pillowy spongecake batter to make Bronco-fan cupcakes for the Dawsons’ brunch. When the cupcakes were in the oven, I drained and chopped fat purple plums for a Happy Endings Plum Cake, a prototype for Caroline Dawson, who had promised to taste it at church. If she and Hank liked the cake, they’d said I could sell them at their restaurant, the Aspen Meadow Café.

  For the rest of the church refreshments, I sliced two dozen crisp Granny Smith apples into bird-shaped centerpieces that would be surrounded by concentric circles of Gouda and cheddar wedges. I didn’t even want to think about the price of the cheeses in this little spread. I reminded myself that this was an advertising opportunity, even if it was church. To complete the cheese tray, I cut several loaves of fragrant homemade oatmeal bread into triangles and threw in a wheel of Jarlsberg for good measure. Advertising could get expensive.

  Arch dressed with minimal complaining, since he didn’t want to wake up Julian
, who was snoring deeply. The wind bit through our clothing as we climbed into the van. The sky was luminescent, like the inside of a pearl. Streets slick with newly plowed snow made the going slow. By the time we arrived at the big stone church with its great diamond-shaped windows, the parking lot was already half filled with Cadillacs, Rivieras, and Chrysler New Yorkers, with the occasional Mercedes, Lexus, and Infiniti.

  I scanned the parking lot for my ex-husband’s Jeep with its GYN license plate, but he was not making one of his rare church appearances. The personalized tags indicated who had already arrived. The Dawsons’ matching vans advertised the presence of parents and offspring. Greer Dawson was known to her volleyball teammates as G.D., the Hammer, hence the tag GD HMR. Her parents’ more sedate tag read AMCAFE, for the Aspen Meadow Café. There was MR E, from a local mystery writer, and UR4GVN, from who else? The priest. I pulled in next to the gold Jaguar belonging to Marla Korman, my best friend, who also happened to be Dr. John Richard Korman’s other ex-wife. Her license tag said simply, AVLBL.

  When Arch and I pushed through the heavy doors with our platters, Marla shrieked a greeting and rushed across the foyer toward us. Large in body and spirit, Marla always dressed according to the season. This morning, an early appearance of winter demanded a silver suede suit sprinkled with an abundance of pewter buttons across a jacket and skirt. Sparkly silver barrettes, my gift for her fortieth birthday, held back her eternally frizzed brown hair. She folded me in a hug that was all bangle bracelets and soft leather.

  “What in the hell happened out at that school last night?” she hissed in my ear.

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “What, are you kidding? My phone started ringing at six-thirty this morning!”