Sticks & Scones gbcm-10

by Diane Mott Davidson

  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, to do 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 wide-awake 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?

  -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 Lauderdales’, 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 grand
father, 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, but 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.

  The letter denying the earl custody of his nephew had been signed by Henry VIII. It bore the king’s initials, H. R., and his royal seal.

  The letter sold for twelve million pounds at Spink’s, a leading London auction gallery. Eliot had immediately married Sukie, christening her his twenty-million-dollar woman. After their honeymoon, he announced to the media, Sukie would be embarking on a cleaning expedition of the other thirty-two garderobe shafts in the castle.

  She hadn’t found anything else. Eliot hadn’t minded.

  The day after Sukie’s call, I’d gone to Hyde Castle. Once seated in the imposing living room, I drank tea and ate stale, mail-ordered scones, made tolerable only by heaping tablespoons of homemade strawberry jam, Eliot’s one and only specialty. With great fanfare, tall, handsome Eliot Hyde brewed our tea. Eliot dressed like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character; for tea, he wore herringbone knickerbockers and a silk scarf. When he brewed the tea, there was no dumping of hot water over a teabag. No: Eliot tossed his silk scarf over his shoulder, removed the lid from a bone china teapot in the shape of a prissy-faced English butler, cleared his throat, and meticulously, s-l-o-w-I-y poured boiling water over Golden Tips leaves. Then he covered the pot with a cozy. Finally, he asked Sukie honeykins, as he called her, to time the steeping.

  Good tea, bad food, I’d reflected, as I sipped the dark brew moments later. I’m going to love this place.

  I’d told them yes, February was almost completely open for me. My son was in school every day. And I could hire Julian

  Teller, our former boarder, to help with the catering, as he was taking only a half-load this semester at the University of Colorado. Plus, I added, Julian had toured the castle during his time at Elk Park Prep, and knew his way around.

  I’d listened to their food proposals, nodded, and written up a contract. Eliot’s ideas sounded awfully work-intensive, but focusing on paying work, instead of on the Lauderdales, their bloodthirsty lawyer, and their Jaguar-driving cronies, was a welcome relief. In the end, Eliot and Sukie had booked Goldilocks’ Catering for two events. First would be an Anglophile lunch in appreciation of the big donors who’d paid for the new marble labyrinth set into the floor of Hyde Chapel. The second was an Elizabethan feast that would double as the end-of-season banquet for the Elk Park Prep fencing team. Eliot had been quick to clarify that the Tudor upper crust had only seen a feast as a grand meal. A banquet, on the other hand, had

  been an elaborate dessert course served later, often in a charming banquet-house not unlike our modern gazebo. These days, the terms feast and banquet had become synonymous, alas. In any event, Michaela Kirovsky wanted to hold her team’s banquet at the castle.

  For the opportunity to test feast-giving in their Great Hall, Eliot an
d Sukie were picking up half the tab.

  Eliot, meanwhile, would continue working, planning, and publicizing, to ready the castle for opening as a conference center.

  “That’s my dream,” he’d informed me, although his dark brown eyes looked unexpectedly sad. Above the creamy silk shirt and scarf, he had a beautifully featured, smooth-shaven face, framed by long, wavy, light brown hair. If my catered events went well, he added, we’d work out further bookings featuring historic English food.

  I’d set aside any hesitation. My only other February commitment was making cookies and punch for the Elk Park Prep Valentine’s Day Dance. The chapel lunch had been scheduled for today, Monday; the Elizabethan feast, for this Friday. I’d asked Michaela Kirovsky if the fencing team wanted swordfish. Her white hair had jounced around her pale face as she laughed at my suggestion. No swordfish, Eliot had protested. The recipes he wanted me to test on the students and their parents were more of the English court variety. So I’d ordered veal roasts, to be served with a potato dish, a shrimp dish for those Catholics who’d rejected Vatican II, a rice dish, a plum tart… and Eliot and I would come up with the rest of the details this week.

  Okay. Back to the present, to five minutes to six, to be exact. The sun would be rising soon on a day which found Arch and me temporarily homeless. Time to get moving.

  To get to the castle, the van would have to pass through antique gates that were over half a mile from the castle itself. Those gates, bearing the Hyde coat of arms and several other painted shields Sukie had unearthed in a Denver antique shop, had been open when I’d visited three weeks ago. Were they electronically armed before sunup? I had no idea.