The Grilling Season Page 6

  “Dad’s! I mean, I thought he might have spent the night at Suz’s place and not be home yet! I … was just trying to see where he was so I could spare you some pain,” I gabbled helplessly. “I didn’t know what I was going to stumble on to.”

  “Well, you didn’t spare me any pain,” my son said harshly, and turned away from me to stare out the window again.

  As I drove the van back into Aspen Meadow, I did my best to act loving and patient. It didn’t work. Arch had retreated into silence.

  Why did John Richard Korman continue to mess up our lives? That was the question to which there was no answer. My knuckles whitened as I gripped the steering wheel.

  At home Arch slammed out of the van ahead of me. Macguire had let Jake into our fenced backyard. The hound howled with delight at our arrival. Anticipating my worry about the neighbors’ complaints, Arch became intent on getting Jake back into the house. I sat in the van contemplating Arch’s short legs and flapping T-shirt and the crisis that confronted us.

  My son would talk to me about how he was feeling, I felt sure. Only he would do it in his own time. We always worked things out, I told myself. But I felt a twinge of uncertainty. I slid out of the van and trod carefully across the wooden deck I’d added to the back of the house some years before. Suddenly I stopped and stared at the diagonal slats. The deck, the doggone deck. Dizzily, I sank down on a cushioned redwood chair.

  The deck had been my idea. My present to John Richard on our fifth anniversary. Oh, Lord, why was I thinking about this now? Because everything was erupting: my life, my family, my mind. The world felt like a pinball machine flashing TILT with no way to turn it off.

  I gazed down at the deck. I had saved the money out of what John Richard called my “grocery allowance,” what I later referred to, once I learned how much money he was really earning, as my “pittance.” Naively, I had thought the deck would be a wonderful place for us to gather as a family. I’d even believed that John Richard and I would enjoy watching the progress of its construction. Ha.

  I ran my fingers over the smooth redwood railing that always smelled so wonderful after a rainstorm. When the builders started, John Richard had second-guessed and criticized every aspect of the construction. Why redwood? It’s too expensive. Why do you have to have it so big? The next day: Why is it so small? Why don’t you add a barbecue? and despite the fact that he wasn’t contributing, he’d yell This is costing a mint! Do you think I’m made of money? In the end, he’d declared he was never going to sit out on our lovely redwood deck. So the deck stood empty. To his friends, he’d laughed about my project. He’d called it Goldy’s Golden Goof.

  After the divorce papers were signed and I had deposited my settlement check, my very first act had been to drive to Howard Lorton Galleries, the most exclusive furniture store in Denver. There I’d impulsively ordered a thousand dollars’ worth of deck furniture.

  Why rehash old history now? Once again my brain supplied a warning. Because he’s barged into your life again, and it’s not just to declare bankruptcy.

  Watch your back, Goldy.

  Chapter 7

  Inside the house, Arch was on the phone. He looked at me solemnly, then shook his head.

  “ReeAnn,” he said impatiently into the receiver. Had John Richard’s secretary called us? Or had Arch just phoned her? “I don’t know what you’re supposed to tell the patients. Better see who’s on call for Dad … I don’t know! Look, would you please ask him to give me a ring if he phones in?” His voice cracked. “No! How should I know what they’re doing to him?” He banged the phone down and regarded me dolefully. After a moment he said, “You look terrible, Mom.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Why don’t you cook or something?”

  I glanced around the kitchen. Cook or something. The rows of cupcakes sat waiting to be iced. The remains of my coffee fixings lay in a heap by the sink. Nothing beckoned.

  “Mom, please.” Arch gave me a quick hug, then pulled back, embarrassed. “It’s going to be okay. It’s just all a big mistake.”

  “Oh, honey …” But words failed.

  “Let me go see if Macguire went back to bed after he let Jake out,” Arch announced abruptly. “It’s time for him to be up, no matter what, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, sure.” I shook my head as Arch left to rouse our boarder. To keep from brooding, I made another espresso.

  “I’m up, I’m up,” Macguire Perkins hollered through the closed door of his room. His muffled voice echoed mournfully down the stairs.

  I slugged down the coffee, hauled myself over to our walk-in refrigerator, and stared at the contents. Fixing breakfast for Macguire Perkins—maybe that was a cook or something challenge I could handle. Arch was right: I seemed to think more logically when preparing food, anyway. And with Macguire as a buffer, perhaps Arch and I would be able to discuss his father’s status as a murder suspect without further fireworks. I heard more banging upstairs.

  “I’m up, didn’t you hear me?” called Macguire. “Why is everyone tormenting me?”

  Good old Macguire, I thought as I got out eggs and butter. With no plans one year after graduating from the same prep school that Arch attended, Macguire had begun the summer working part-time for me. Macguire’s father, the headmaster of Elk Park Prep, had agreed to let Macguire live alone in their house on the school grounds for three months. Meanwhile, Perkins senior was off to direct a summer seminar in Burlington, Vermont. When he started as my assistant, Macguire confessed that he was reluctantly trying to decide what to do with his life. What he wanted to do with his life wasn’t catering, I discovered after he’d been working in the business a few weeks. Then Macguire made the announcement that he’d decided to become a police detective. Unfortunately, he’d run amok.

  Against all advice, Macguire had tried to solve a case on his own. The result was that a criminal had savagely beaten him and—in a raging storm, by the side of the road—left him for dead. Macguire had ended up in the hospital with multiple bruises and lacerations. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning of his medical troubles. After being discharged from the hospital, he’d gone home to Elk Park, where he immediately developed strep throat that quickly evolved into full-blown infectious mononucleosis.

  Headmaster Perkins had flown home and asked for my help. Macguire was unable to swallow anything more than liquids and began to shed weight at an alarming rate. During the first three weeks of July, he lost twenty pounds. His doctor said when Macguire finished his antibiotics, he needed rest, support, nutritious food, and very moderate exercise. But Headmaster Perkins couldn’t picture trying to help his son get better while the two of them lived out of suitcases in a Vermont bed-and-breakfast, no matter how quaint the setting. That was when Perkins senior begged me to allow Macguire to live with us for the remainder of the summer.

  “Just give the kid three squares a day. Or even three cubes. You know, steaks,” he’d told me. A square meal or a cube steak? The headmaster thought he was hilarious. For the most part, Perkins senior was merely ridiculous. “Under your care, Goldy dear,” he’d announced airily, “I have no doubt my son should recover nicely in a week or two.”

  I’d said yes, and as a result Macguire Perkins had been living with us since mid-July. But recover nicely was exactly what the teenager hadn’t done. Of course, our observation of Macguire was inevitably colored by our experience with the now-absent Julian Teller, whose high energy, intellectual sharpness, and enthusiastic affection for our family had been hallmarks of his time with us. Julian had done everything from loving Arch as if the two were the closest of brothers to cooking wildly inventive vegetarian dishes for our family meals. To Julian’s surprise but not to ours, he’d been offered a great summer job working in the kitchen of a chic hotel in upstate New York. We felt his absence deeply.

  When Tom and Arch and I had agreed to take Macguire in, I’d secretly hoped that Arch would somehow be the beneficiary, because he would have a new friend Julian’s a
ge.

  Arch, sensing my motive, had mumbled, “It’s like when your dog dies, you can’t just go out and buy a new dog.”

  “Arch, give him a chance,” I’d protested.

  “Trust me, Mom, it’s not the same.”

  But despite Arch’s initial reluctance, he’d grudgingly accepted having Macguire as a boarder. Macguire was slow-moving, honest, and sweet. Furthermore, he presented a much more challenging rehabilitation situation than we’d ever faced with Jake, Arch’s beloved bloodhound, who’d been fired from law enforcement for being suspected of being unreliable. Which the dear dog wasn’t, as it turned out.

  The problem with Macguire, however, was that he would not eat. He said he couldn’t—he wasn’t hungry. Wouldn’t or couldn’t, the result was the same. The boy would not take nourishment.

  In the breakfast department Macguire shunned bacon and sausage; scrambled, poached, boiled, or fried eggs; toast or English muffins; ready-to-eat cereal, oatmeal, or granola; yogurt shakes; fresh fruit of any kind. I had yet to convince him to swallow anything more than orange juice. He claimed his stomach hurt whenever he ate even the smallest morsels. His doctor had proclaimed, “When he gets hungry, he’ll eat.” In the three weeks he’d been with us, however, that hadn’t happened. But I was ever hopeful. Now I set aside the eggs and butter and went back to our refrigerator. There I retrieved a bowl of homemade chocolate pudding left over from a catering job. I ladled spoonfuls of it into a crystal parfait glass.

  Arch clomped back into the kitchen after completing his summoning duty, flopped into a chair, and turned doleful eyes to me.

  “When do you suppose I’ll be able to talk to Dad? He hasn’t called his office and ReeAnn is having a fit.”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

  “But … is Dad in jail? When will he get out?” Arch insisted.

  “Um, I’m not sure. He’s probably being processed.”

  “Oh, great. Like liverwurst.”

  I let this pass, set the chocolate pudding on the table, and started to mix up a batch of hockey-puck biscuits. If Macguire wouldn’t go for traditional bacon-and-egg-type breakfast-taste sensations, perhaps he’d flip for chocolate and biscuits.

  While Arch contemplated the table, wrestling with his confusion, I sifted the flour with the other dry ingredients while my food processor cut through the shortening. I mixed in the buttermilk, patted out the dough, cut it into circles on a sheet, and set the sheet in the oven. Then I cleaned the doser and refilled my espresso machine with water. This would be my fourth quadruple-shot of the morning, but I desperately craved the clearheadedness that caffeine usually offered. Unfortunately, such clarity had eluded me ever since my gruesome discovery on Jacobean Drive.

  Nevertheless, the coffee-making process gave me time to think about how to deal with Arch. I wished that I hadn’t told Marla it was okay to leave. She’d have been able to help me with this minefield of a dialogue, cowardly as that sounded. Arch’s questions were difficult to answer, not only because they were delivered in an alternately pleading and hostile manner, but also because the answers themselves were sure not to please him. When would John Richard be freed? How was I going to tell my son that bail was not supposed to be granted in capital cases? Of course, occasionally something was wrong with the arrest or the evidence, or the judge had a surpassing reason for granting bail. Sometimes the suspect’s standing in the community was so impeccable that the judge let him or her out once a huge bail had been set. But John Richard’s reputation was far from impeccable.

  I took a deep breath and poured Macguire some juice. “Your father’s lawyer will go before a judge first thing Monday morning and at least try to get him out on bail. I have to tell you, Arch, it would be unusual for the request to be granted. And if bail is set very high, I don’t know if your father has that kind of cash or equity in his house.”

  Arch’s face darkened and he turned away from me. On some level he seemed to be aware of his father’s financial problems. “What about Tom? Are they going to assign Tom to this case?”

  “I doubt that very much,” I said carefully. “It would probably be viewed as a conflict of interest.”

  Arch flashed back around. His forehead was so furrowed with alarm that I felt my heart slam against my chest. You bet it’s a conflict of interest, I could imagine him saying. But to my surprise his distress went the other way. “They’re not going to assign Tom? But I thought you said he was the best the department has! If they don’t assign Tom, how will we ever prove Dad’s innocent?” I was speechless.

  So Arch’s question hung unanswered as Macguire Perkins galumphed slowly into the kitchen. His yellowed eyes were difficult to look at, as were his hollow cheeks and emaciated frame. When I first met him, he’d been strong, a basketball player and bodybuilder. Now, thin and lethargic, Macguire seemed to teeter on his long legs like a precariously staked scarecrow.

  “Well,” he murmured without enthusiasm, “how’s everybody?”

  “Not so hot,” Arch mumbled.

  Macguire sat down at the table, ran his fingers through his long, unevenly shorn red hair—going to the barber gave him a headache—and stared forlornly at the pudding and juice. Then he sighed and pushed both away. Undaunted, I poured him a glass of milk. He took one sip. When I pulled the hot, puffed biscuits out of the oven, he said, “I hope you didn’t make those for me. Because I can’t even look at them. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I lied encouragingly, and set the pan on a rack to cool. So much for today’s hearty breakfast.

  “My dad’s been arrested,” Arch announced in a tone that said, Can you believe the injustices of this world?

  “Bummer,” replied Macguire. He took another tiny sip of milk, then said, “My dad was arrested once, but he doesn’t want anybody to know.”

  “For what?” asked Arch, who of course wanted to know.

  “Drunk and disorderly,” Macguire replied matter-of-factly. “It was after my mom left and Daddy-o couldn’t handle it.”

  Arch closed his eyes and shook his head. I turned away and ran hot water and soap into the biscuit-batter bowl.

  “I have to cater tonight,” I announced. “Stanley Gup celebration party. Marla is calling Todd to see if you can go over there, Arch. Do you feel up to helping me, Macguire?”

  “Can I see how I feel later?” His smile was wan. “I want to help. You know folks think that if there’s a thin caterer, they won’t gain any weight eating the food you serve.”

  Before I could voice my opinion about this theory, Arch sighed. “I don’t want to go to Todd’s,” he said morosely.

  “Man,” said Macguire, “you are in one tight mood, big A. Why don’t you go for a walk with me? We’ll go visit Kids’ Vids if you want, see if they have any cool new games.”

  Arch sighed again. “It’s going to rain. Besides, Dad might call.”

  Macguire strained his neck to look outside, where the sun shone between a few drifts of cloud. “What, you predict the weather? That’s pretty cool.” By the door, Jake let loose with another of his howls. “Come on, buddy, we’ll go by your dad’s office and see if there’s any news. We’ll even take the dog. If it rains, we’ll all get wet.”

  “Oh, you just want to go see ReeAnn,” Arch accused.

  When Macguire’s jaundiced-appearing face blushed the color of a sweet potato, I knew Arch had found a target. I said, “ReeAnn probably won’t be in any mood for company.”

  “Sure she will,” Arch countered. “ReeAnn likes to see Macguire. They took driver ed together, and now she has a Porsche. He’s had a crush on her forever. And not even because of the Porsche,” he glumly added.

  “Gee, Arch,” Macguire said, “thank you for pointing all this out. You and the hound dog want to walk or not?”

  Arch regarded me warily from behind his thick glasses. “So can Dad call me from the jail or what?”

  “You can call him and then he’ll call you back. But I’d say you might be better off
waiting. Besides, as you know, he’ll have to call his office at some point.”

  “All right,” said Arch, defeated. He took Jake’s leash from its hook on the wall and departed.

  “So what’s Dr. Korman been arrested for?” Macguire asked as soon as the door closed on Arch.

  I said, “Murder.” Outside, Jake howled with happiness.

  Macguire sipped the milk and didn’t miss a beat. “Oh yeah? Who’d he kill?”

  “Macguire, if you want to go into police work, you need to learn to say, ‘Whom did they say he killed?’ “

  “Okay, who’d they say he bumped off?”

  “His girlfriend. Suz Craig.”

  Macguire’s rusty eyebrows shot up. “Uh-oh. How’d he do it? Wait. How’re they saying she bought it?”

  “Beaten to death, looked like. The technical term would be multiple blunt-force injuries, I think.” I had another flash of Suz’s bruised and broken body in the ditch.

  “Huh,” said Macguire. “Too bad.” On the deck, Arch was having a noisy heart-to-heart with Jake about the attachment of the leash. “So this dead broad was your ex-husband’s chick? Or … one of them, anyway?”

  I took a steadying sip of coffee. The only activity Macguire energetically pursued during his convalescence was reading Raymond Chandler. Unfortunately, it sometimes took me a moment to translate the private-dick lingo. “Why do you ask that?”

  Macguire frowned. “Uh, ask what?”

  I said patiently, “Why did you ask if Suz Craig was one of his … girlfriends?”

  “Well, wasn’t she? I thought he had a lot of girlfriends.”

  “Yes,” I said cautiously. “But I thought Suz was his only girlfriend. His only current girlfriend.”

  “Oh.” He scowled at the milk he’d scarcely touched. “Well.”

  “Macguire, I’ve tried to put as much distance as possible between my ex-husband’s love life and myself. I don’t ask for any details.”

  “So, what’re you saying? You’re feeling bad because his girlfriend croaked, huh?”