Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series) Read online

  “Sorry about your business,” was the mournful greeting from Murray, the master baker.

  I said, “I love living in a small town.”

  Murray looked puzzled. “Listen,” he said defensively, “it’s gonna hurt me, too. Somebody kills that doctor, I’ll lose half my customers.”

  I nodded. The shop was on the first floor of a long two-story wood-paneled building. Upstairs, Fritz and John Richard practiced obstetrics and gynecology. It would be a couple of hours before John Richard came in. But within fifteen minutes of his opening, the pastry shop would begin to fill with pregnant women. I knew the pattern: they would eat nothing before weighing in for their appointment. After seeing the doctor they’d waddle down the wooden staircase outside the building and burst into the pastry shop, starved. I often wondered if that was why Murray had located his bakery-haven in this particular spot.

  “Don’t worry,” I said before ordering, “he’s going to be just fine, and so is your business.”

  Soon I was dipping one finger of that western oversized baked good, the Bear Claw, into coffee and reading in last week’s Mountain Journal of Laura Smiley’s death. The new issue would not be out until later in the week, and it would undoubtedly cover the postfuneral fiasco. That was something I could wait for. Now I read of Laura Smiley, the much beloved teacher at Furman Elementary, who had been born in Denver and raised in Aspen Meadow until she went to the University of Illinois. After that she had become an elementary teacher in Carolton, also in Illinois. There was something familiar about that name, that place. After Laura’s parents were killed in a drunk driving accident on Highway 285 near Conifer, she had moved back to the family home, and had been a teacher at Furman Elementary ever since.

  I stared at the picture. Between the black dots of newsprint, Laura was caught in a sunny grin. Suddenly, the dots clouded.

  You’re depressed, I told myself. Drink some coffee. I looked up at Murray, who gave me his best version of a sympathetic wink. I held the paper in front of my face. Ms. Smiley, the Journal went on to say, was found by fellow teacher Janet Heath, autopsy ordered, new deputy coroner performing. Funeral Saturday, in lieu of flowers, donations to Pacifists United or the National Organization for Women. But some people had sent flowers anyway. And not only to her.

  The rest of the article was what I already knew. But the words “came as a great surprise to her students and those who had known her” were difficult to handle. I thought once again of the cheerful punning magnets and paintings of serene landscapes in Laura’s small home.

  Out the pastry shop’s picture window old wooden storefronts broke the cloudy view of distant snow-capped peaks. Most people moved to the mountains for this vista and for the slower pace. Now Homestead Drive and Main Street were silent. The only noises were the gentle gushing of Cottonwood Creek and the occasional ding-ding of cars announcing their presence at a nearby gas station.

  Maybe Laura had been looking for serenity when she stayed in Aspen Meadow after her parents’ death. She had taught third grade at Furman Elementary. Arch had been in the class; it was the first time I felt a teacher had appreciated him. The beginning of their friendship, she had related at the first parent conference, had come from a technological advance.

  He had come to her shyly one snowy November morning before school. A neighbor with a new car had driven Arch along with his own kids to avoid a late bus. At school Arch had asked Laura how a door could be a jar. A voice in the neighbor’s car had said, “Your door is ajar!” Then she’d told him once she’d eaten a strawberry moose. Kindred spirits. They’d written little jokes and poetry verses to each other, and later letters, and they were partners in laughter even after he went on to fourth grade. The next year, in one of those moves peculiar to elementary school administrations, Laura was transferred to teaching fifth grade. Arch had ended up with her again.

  Sometimes I had thought they spent too much time together. He had come home with some peculiar stories. Ms. Smiley had made fun of the President. Well, who didn’t. But with a fifth grader? Then when her street wasn’t plowed, she told Arch she was going to hire dump trucks to leave a ton of snow in front of the county commissioners’ office. When I asked her about these stories, she just laughed them off. It never occurred to me that Laura Smiley was truly off-balance. With the suicide, of course, I had begun to wonder.

  And poor Arch. This year he had slammed into the hostile environment of a large sixth grade. He had reacted by becoming more secretive and serious, more committed to the complex fantasy games, more rebellious in the slide to adolescence. He had no teacher who could talk about dumping fantasy snow on newly cruel peers.

  I looked down at the newspaper on the table, then back out the window. The sun had burnt off the fog and shone now in a liquid expanse of blue. It was hard to imagine someone looking at the Colorado sky before making that last trip into the bathroom.

  Marla broke the silence by plopping into the chair across from me.

  She hummed as she spread out her fare, two buttermilk-glazed doughnuts and a cream-filled Long John—the western version of an éclair—and a cup of coffee, which she immediately began to douse with sugar and cream. She stopped humming to give me a baleful look.

  “You shouldn’t eat alone,” she warned. She shook pillowy jowls that resembled the Pillsbury doughboy’s. She had on a sequined sweat suit. Half of her brown frizzy hair was held by a ponytail. The rest spilled out every which way. Her face, however, was perfectly made up. She bit carefully into one of the doughnuts so as not to smear the scarlet lipstick,’ then went on with her mouth full. “It’s like drinking alone. A bad sign, very bad.” She dabbed around her mouth with a napkin. “Especially in the morning.”

  “Then why are you here?” I asked. I took a sip of coffee before biting off another Bear Claw finger.

  She narrowed her eyes and munched thoughtfully, then tongued a small glob of cream that had oozed out of the center of the Long John.

  “I’m used to eating alone,” she replied. “You’re not.” She looked at the paper spread out in front of me and shook her head again. “Good God. Eating alone and reading about suicide.”

  “Give me a break, Marla.”

  “Hey! I’m trying to cheer you up.”

  I smiled and looked down at her doughnuts. “What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked. “I thought your larder was full.”

  “Well,” she said hesitantly, “you’re not going to believe this, but I can’t eat at home. Mice.”

  “Mice?” I said, staring at her.

  She gulped her cream-colored coffee again and touched her free hand to the frizzy mass of hair. “Yeah, so what? It’s getting cold outside. The mice come in. They’re hungry. They scare me. I call an exterminator. Is there something wrong with that? You sure seem to be on edge this morning.” She gestured at the paper. “Stop reading about Laura. That’ll only make you feel worse.”

  I frowned at her. She was my friend.

  I said, “Whoever tried to do in Fritz Korman used rodent poison.”

  Marla closed her eyes, then opened them. “I didn’t do it, Goldy.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  She leaned across the table. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t even care about Fritz. And neither should you. The more involved in this you become, the more depressed you’re going to get. It’s like hanging around John Richard. It just makes things worse. Let the police do their job.”

  “I have to help them,” I said. “My business and livelihood arc on the line.” This would not have occurred to Marla, of course, since she’d made her money the easy way: she inherited it.

  She shrugged and tapped a fat finger twinkling with sapphires on the newspaper picture of Laura. “Here’s a mystery you should be working on,” she said. “Why’d she do it? I have a theory.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Unrequited love.”

  I looked at her blankly. “What?”

  Marla returned the blank look and start
ed to mumble vaguely about not being completely sure when the shop door flew open, banged against our table, and sent the coffee into a tidal wave across the Formica.

  “I figured you were here,” Arch announced triumphantly as he marched in with Patty Sue in tow. “You always come here when you don’t have any work.”

  I gave Marla a rueful glance and dropped a pile of napkins on the table’s lake of coffee, then got up to refill our cups and pay for whatever Arch wanted. He ordered a sugar twist and juice. Patty Sue, after noticing she hadn’t brought any money, ordered a Long John, a cheese Danish, and two cartons of milk.

  “How do you stay so thin?” demanded Marla. “I mean didn’t they feed you out in eastern Colorado, before you had to come out here to see Fritz, or what?”

  “They fed me. And I’m trying to learn to cook,” said Patty Sue in what I viewed as extraordinary understatement. “One time Dad was sick for a long time and then I had to do the cooking because Mom got sick, too. I fixed frozen stuff like Banquet chicken and Sara Lee.”

  Marla said, “What did she have, scurvy?”

  There was no answer. Patty Sue and Arch were staring at Laura’s picture in the paper. Patty Sue put down her Danish and looked out the window. I reached for the paper.

  “Guess what,” I said to distract Arch. “Marla has mice.”

  “Oh, cool,” he said with genuine admiration. “Do you have gerbils, too?”

  Marla turned her look of distaste on me.

  “Arch,” Marla explained as she gestured with her remaining doughnut, “there are good mice and bad mice. Good mice live in cages and children’s stories. Bad mice bite and spread disease after they get into your best cookies and crackers and make a mess. Not to mention that after all your cookies are gone, you have to go to local pastry shops and listen to your best friend ask if you’re using rodent poison on humans.” She paused to swallow some coffee. “And no to the gerbils, too.”

  Arch nodded. “Did you call the Division of Wildlife to get rid of them?”

  Marla and I both found this amusing. The furrows of confusion in Patty Sue’s forehead deepened. I was not sure, but it looked as if she was about to cry.

  “Arch honey,” I said in a voice I hoped was not patronizing, “you call the Division of Wildlife if you have a problem with a bear or a raccoon or a mountain lion. Not for mice and common animals like that.”

  Arch said, “I don’t think you’re right, Mom.”

  Marla glanced at her watch. “Oh,” she said, her mouth full of doughnut, “the irony of it all. Time for exercise class.”

  I nodded. I still needed to find out if Hal was interested in my cleaning offer, so I hustled Patty Sue and Arch along. As they were getting up to leave, I turned to Marla.

  “So what’s this about Laura?” I asked in a low voice.

  “I’ve seen and heard this and that,” Marla whispered.

  “Well, tell me.”

  “Not now,” said Marla. She thought. “Let me ask around at the club. That’s where I saw something that made me wonder.”

  “Made you wonder about what?”

  “Let me call around, will you, Goldy? I hate to gossip.”

  Untrue, I thought, as I hastened after her. Marla adored gossip.

  We took off for the Aspen Meadow Athletic Club, which occupied the bottom two floors of a streamlined brick building full of glass and sharply angled walls. The other four floors of this incongruously contemporary edifice housed First Bank of Colorado, realtors’ offices, even our own branch of Merrill Lynch. The building and its residents were a sign of the urban future coming to our little town, a sign that was none too welcome to the small population that had moved here to get away from all that.

  Inside, the athletic facility was about as close to yuppie heaven as one could find in Aspen Meadow. Plexiglas walls enclosed clean white racquetball courts; an advanced sound system boomed in the exercise room; Nautilus equipment and weights were judiciously spaced in another room, which had the look of a museum exhibit of modem sculpture. For postworkout relaxation there was a steamroom, sauna, and hot tub in a locker room that would have given pause to the architects of the Roman baths.

  A cook feels more comfortable putting fat into things than taking it out or off, so belonging to a fancy gym had always felt strange. As I pushed through the glass door and shuffled across the beige-and-burgundy striped carpet, it was Marla’s comment that reminded me of the other reason for feeling out of place here. The club was the one spot in Aspen Meadow where, as if by agreement, all the single people who did not want to resort to either bars or church groups could meet.

  I only felt duty bound to exercise, and that not too much. My business had kept me going until a few days ago. Besides splashing in the pool, Arch enjoyed puttering around on the racquetball court, so I also rationalized paying the dues for his sake. But unless some work materialized soon, we would have to quit. I hated to feel poor. It made me resent John Richard even more than usual.

  Needless to say, I hadn’t taken advantage of the social life available at the club. There was a small voice of uncertainty in my gut, not unlike the interest in Pomeroy. Over the years some of the muscle-bound fellows had asked me out. I had replied in the negative, claiming to myself that I wasn’t ready.

  But I belonged to the club, and like the woman on a diet who stares at the frozen desserts, I had my wild thoughts.

  This feeling did not diminish when Patty Sue, Marla, Arch, and I retrieved our locker keys from Hal, a shaggy-haired jock who had metamorphosed from surf bum to club owner without losing his beachboy gestalt. He was on the phone and whispered he would talk to me later. The place was crowded since it was a holiday. Glancing into the Nautilus room the first person I saw, of course, was Pomeroy Locraft. Not teaching today because the high school was closed, no doubt. He gave us a hearty wave which, since I had never received it before, was probably meant for Patty Sue. She waved back while Arch sauntered over to chat, probably about beekeeping.

  In the locker room Marla said, “I don’t know if I’m ready for this after two doughnuts and a Long John. What an unfortunately phallic name for an éclair, anyway.” She was struggling into peach-colored tights that made her look even more round and fuzzy than she already was.

  “Okay, girls,” shouted Trixie after we had stretched calves and assorted ligaments, “let’s go get ’em!”

  This, coupled with the sudden booming of the theme from Top Gun, meant the war on cellulite had been declared. I had not had a class from Trixie in quite a while. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

  Within the first minute of activity it was abundantly clear that too long a time had elapsed since my last trip to class, no matter who the teacher was. The ruthless bank of mirrors in front of us pointed out every fatty pouch. My thighs, next to Patty Sue’s long slender ones, looked as if they were plastered with rice pudding. My stomach was a bombe glacée.

  “Come on, girls!” exhorted Trixie. “Get that energy up!” She balled her hands into fists and punched at the air below the ceiling. “Go! Go!”

  Beside me Patty Sue was lunging and jumping. Pomeroy and Arch were out of sight. I surveyed the rows of women. I did not want to do this, did not want to do this.

  The women were like pasta groupings, I decided. The back row of overweight newcomers wiggled laboriously, manicotti in hot water Next came lasagne, wide-looking one way and thin when they turned. The linguini in front of them possessed the same thin/wide dimensions, only in not so dramatic proportions. Then onward to spaghetti and finally to vermicelli, thin tall tubes like Patty Sue and Trixie. How Patty Sue could eat so much and stay so thin was beyond me. I was an incidental misfit on this row, short and round. An elbow macaroni, maybe.

  After class I stretched out on a towel in the steamroom, where I was soon joined by Patty Sue, Marla, and Trixie.

  “Glad you’re back,” said Marla to Trixie.

  “Oh,” Trixie said loftily, “I’ve been back for a couple of weeks.”

&
nbsp; “In fighting shape,” I said as we all settled in the dark room with its swirls of steam.

  Trixie said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Not a damn thing,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Not a damn thing,” she said. After a moment she sniffed.

  I said, “Did I say something wrong?”

  Trixie nipped over. She said, “Just shut up, Goldy.”

  I said, “What are you so angry about?”

  Trixie said, “Since when are you a shrink?”

  “Be cool, girls, be cool,” said Marla.

  I let a silence go by. Then I said, “Would somebody please tell me what is going on?”

  “Not now,” said Trixie.

  There was another uncomfortable silence, in which Patty Sue cleared her throat several times.

  “I’ve been thinking, Trixie,” Marla said finally. “Maybe you’d like to come to our group. Tell her about it, Goldy.”

  I did, but I didn’t know why I was doing it. I explained that we ate dessert and talked. If she was having some problems, I said delicately, it sometimes helped to talk them out.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Trixie. “When do you meet?”

  “We’re meeting on Thursday the twenty-second,” I said. “Then we’ll meet again on Friday night the thirtieth.”

  “Um,” said Patty Sue, “can I come too?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Trix?”

  “I teach Thursday nights and Saturday mornings,” she said, “so maybe the one near Halloween. Martin’s going out of town at the end of the month—it’s a possibility.” She was quiet for a minute. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Such enthusiasm,” said Marla. To me she said, “I’m glad the last one’s near Halloween. I’ll need a heavy sugar fix right before all the little neighborhood goblins arrive and I actually have to give candy away.”

  After dressing I hunted for and found Hal. We stood in back of the desk to talk while he continued to dispense keys. I told him we were desperate for money to pay our dues, and that I had spent some time doing cleaning in addition to cooking, so I was qualified to do both. And he couldn’t beat my prices.