“It’s her calling,” said Quartz. “I saw that the first time I laid eyes on her. I mean, I’m into food and everything, but Pammie connects with what we eat on a higher plane.”
Much as Sally hated to admit it, she had a notion of what he was talking about. Lots of people cooked. Only a few treated making dinner as if it were making love. To somebody you really cared about.
“Pammie’s training now, but she’s hoping to open her own place in a couple of years,” Quartz explained.
Training. Okay. Now Sally knew where she’d seen Pammie before. In the past few months, the dinner salads at the Yippie I O Café had gone from being nicely prepared and presented to being works of epicurean art. If you took away the long blonde ponytail and plunked on a calico chef’s hat, you’d have chef John-Boy Walton’s salad girl, an employee he bragged about and exploited with equal enthusiasm.
“So, did you two soul mates meet at the Yippie I O?” Sally asked.
He sighed sweetly. “Yeah. I’d gone to town with Nina and Kali to get groceries, and they decided to stop off for lunch. Nina ordered the black bean soup, but Kali wouldn’t touch it because it was cooked.”
Sally blinked and shook her head. “I thought the whole point of going to a restaurant is that you get to eat food somebody else cooked.”
“Not if you’re Kali,” said Quartz, sprinkling fresh lemon zest into his bowl and gently turning the mixture with his hands. “She only eats raw foods—fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. She mixes in a little soy here and there, but it’s a pretty narrow diet, and she’s totally adamant about it, even though she’s too shy to actually confront a waiter or anybody.”
“So let me guess,” Sally said, filching a perfectly seasoned apple slice. “They sent you to talk to the cooks.”
Quartz was grinning in earnest. “Yeah. Lucky, lucky me. Pam was whirling around at this long open counter, pulling stuff out of undercounter fridges, chopping and assembling and arranging. She piled up this and that, and the next thing I knew, Kali was digging into some concoction of enoki mushrooms and arugula and raspberries and blueberries that looked like the garden at the Tuileries.”
Sally stifled a laugh. Those Unitarian boys had almost all been sent overseas by their parents to learn about other cultures. Some went to Ghana or Guyana. Others, like Quartz, opted for the chance to get to Paris on somebody else’s money. “So who got to play Marie Antoinette?”
Quartz walked to the refrigerator, pulled out a wax-paper-wrapped parcel of pie dough, and began rolling out his crust. “Well, Nina was our queen, of course. But Kali is kind of like one of those ladies-in-waiting. You know, with the heart-shaped patch in the corner of her mouth and big schemes for the empire.”
“Nice feel for the ancien régime, Quartz.” How could such a person have only a short while earlier been running naked through a Wyoming blizzard?
“I was a history major at Reed. Really dug the French Revolution.”
That explained a lot. But there was something serious at work under Quartz’s metaphor. This Kali was assuredly an important presence in the Wild West Foundation. “So where is Madame du Barry today?”
“She left for Salt Lake City yesterday,” Pammie called from across the kitchen. She had her back to them, stood maybe eight feet away, was in the middle of explaining to her other assistant, the boy with the blond dreads, how to use a potato peeler to shave Parmesan cheese. Pammie possessed the master chef’s uncanny and uncontested talent for knowing what everybody in the kitchen was saying, who they were saying it about, and why, and then joining in the conversation as if she had every right to be included. “Kali goes to Utah every couple of weeks to check in with her biotech firm. Wild West doesn’t pay a lot, as I’m sure you can imagine, so most of us do some moonlighting. She’s pretty much kept her day job.”
“I thought you were working at the Yippie I O,” Sally said as she ferried a cutting board full of chopped zucchini and tomatoes across to Pammie. “Doesn’t that keep you pretty busy?”
Pammie shot Sally a sidelong glance as she laid out a bouquet of parsley on a board, anchored the tip of her big triangle-bladed knife, and hefted the handle to begin chopping. “I’ve been working out here on a day-to-day basis ever since Quartz showed up.” She had the grace to smile at her, er, soul mate. “A couple of weeks ago, Nina asked me to be her personal chef.”
“I’m surprised,” said Sally. “That seems pretty Hollywood for Nina. From our conversations, I’d had the impression she wasn’t too concerned about food. She told me once that one of the best meals she ever had was a bowl of Raisin Bran, eaten standing over the sink, watching the sun set over the hills.”
“Just because you don’t mind a view doesn’t mean that you don’t care about food,” said Pammie, sniffing haughtily. “Nina cared. She liked lovely, healthy food. But with the exception of coming in to make a smoothie every morning, she had absolutely no idea what people did in a kitchen.”
“She was really particular about that smoothie,” Quartz said.
“Yeah,” Pammie agreed. “I kept telling her I could easily blitz one up if she’d just tell me her secret recipe, but she always made it herself.”
“Not that the recipe was really a secret,” said Quartz, pinching the top crust of his apple pie to the bottom, fluting the edges, slashing leaf patterns in the dough for vents. “A couple handfuls of fresh or frozen fruit, couple big spoonfuls of soy yogurt, a drizzle of honey, a big splash of soy milk, and a huge heaping spoon of protein powder. What’s not to love?”
Pammie continued pulverizing her parsley, but she couldn’t resist a comment. “Soy yogurt, soy milk, even soy protein powder—yick. Why not just add a little chalk dust? All the over-forty chicks think if they eat soy shit, they won’t need the face-lift they’ve been putting off for like ten years. As if they don’t all look like they tried to swallow a bag of marbles that only got down as far as their necks. Pathetic.”
“That’s a little harsh, sweetheart,” said Quartz. “That protein supplement’s supposed to help arthritis. Nina had a lot of pain.”
Sally sympathized. Her own knee creaked like a horror-movie coffin lid. And, of course, she herself was trying to eat more soy, though that generally meant eating a bowl of hotand-sour soup every time she went to California, and otherwise snacking on edamame laced with enough salt to cure an Iowa hog. Nina had had beautiful skin, taut and remarkably unlined. Maybe there was something to the soy miracle diet. “Do you know what kind of supplement she used?”
“Sure,” said Quartz, reaching down into a cupboard and taking a large can off a shelf holding maybe a dozen such cans. “But I don’t think you can get it in a store. She had some health food outfit blend it up specially for her.”
Pammie looked over. “Go ahead and take a can if you want, Sally,” she said. “Take the whole case. Otherwise, I expect it’ll just get thrown away.”
Why not? If she couldn’t bring herself to relish soy yogurt or tofu surprise, maybe soy powder could smooth out a wrinkle or two. It might be worth a try. “Thanks,” she said, taking the can, walking to her shoulder bag, and putting it in. “If I suddenly start looking twenty years younger, maybe I can come back and get the rest.”
“You don’t need to look twenty minutes younger,” said Quartz, instantly winning Sally’s heart for all time. “There’s nothing that says a woman can’t be beautiful lots of ways over a long life.”
“Right,” said Pammie. “At least that’s what Kali kept telling Nina all the time.”
“So they were close, Kali and Nina?” Sally asked.
“Oh yeah,” said Quartz. “They were like sisters.” Pammie looked over her shoulder, still chopping, and smiled sweetly at Quartz. “Uh-huh. You should see my sister and me, honey. Last time I saw her she borrowed fifty bucks from me so she could get her books for school, she said. Two days later, I found out she’d never even registered for school, had spent the whole wad on crystal meth for her and her disgusting boyfriend, and had e
nded up running our mom’s car into the back wall of the Torch Tavern after she’d been in there trying to score more.”
Quartz sighed. “I’m a sentimentalist.”
“Me, too,” said Pammie. “About you. But not about Nina and Kali. They were always real sweet to each other, but I got the impression that Nina felt like Kali was crowding her. Sometimes it seemed like Nina couldn’t go two steps without her little shadow tagging along.”
“And what about Whitebird?” Sally asked.
Pammie stirred the parsley into her soup, frowning. “Kali’s main competition,” she said at last.
“For Nina?” Sally said.
But she never got her answer. The yoga class broke up, and people began to move around, making noise, streaming into the kitchen. Dickie Langham and Nels Willen came in the back door, both tight-lipped, followed by Scotty Atkins, unreadable as usual.
“I’ll keep it brief,” Dickie announced. “For any of you who’ve been entertaining ideas about getting out of here and going to town tonight, forget about it. We’ve got lots more questions to ask, for one thing. For another, the highway patrol has closed the road to Laramie. In other words, we’re all snowed in together. So it’s a good thing that something smells good in here. It’s gonna be a long night.”
Chapter 6
Hellfire or Whiskey
Under the best of circumstances, Sally Alder was a lousy sleeper. Circumstances being what they were that night in Shady Grove, her chances of a peaceful rest were exactly zero. Not long after dinner, Randy Whitebird had retired to Nina’s bedroom as if it were his right. Nels Willen said nothing, watched Whitebird go, and then allowed as how if nobody minded, he’d take the other bedroom. After directing the cleanup and talking to the police, Pammie and Quartz went out to the bus. By and by, all of the Dub-Dubs had been questioned. A couple decided they’d try sleeping in their cars, despite the cold, but most opted to bed down in the living room, clustering together, Sally supposed, out of California herd instinct (she’d noted the same behavior in L.A. freeway drivers) and fear of guns, stormy weather, and wild Wyomingites. Dickie’s two deputies stayed with them. There was some grumbling about “fucking pig surveil-lance.”
She wandered out to the studio, where Dickie Langham and Scotty Atkins were finishing up their notes on the interviews. Nina wouldn’t have been happy. There were dirty bowls and coffee cups scattered around, the place reeked of cigarette smoke, and a hand-thrown ceramic plate over-flowed with butts. Scotty, in the throes of an investigation, wouldn’t have noticed if a garbage truck had dropped its load in the middle of the room. Dickie was a considerate guy, but housekeeping wasn’t his strong point, and when it came to his filthy nicotine habit, he was a Wyoming libertarian through and through.
Then it occurred to her that quite apart from addiction, Dickie would have used smoking as a tactic in his interviews with the sprout eaters, a form of chemical warfare. He might look like a big galoot, but he knew how to play for advantage. She walked in and left the door open, hoping to clear the air a bit.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
Scotty was writing something down on a yellow pad, and didn’t bother to look up. Dickie said, “We can’t decide between Cabo San Lucas and Acapulco. Scotty likes Cabo because he says the beaches are better, but I kind of dig Acapulco because there’s more to do. Then again, maybe we should just do the patriotic thing and see America first. I hear there’re great Internet deals on Kauai.”
She stared at him. “Very nice. What did you find out from these bozos?”
Scotty did look up now. His eyes looked exhausted. “I believe we’ve already conducted an interview with you, Professor Alder. What could possibly delude you into imagining we’re interested in divulging the particulars of a police investigation to a civilian, no matter how meddle-some?”
She was just as tired, edgy, and hostile as he was, but having seen it all in him before, she wasn’t deterred. “Look, I was here. Maybe if you tell me what you can, it’ll jog something loose I haven’t thought of. Was she murdered? With Willen’s gun? Did he do it?”
Scotty shook his head, jotted down one more thing, and then got up and went into the studio bathroom.
She turned to Dickie. “Come on. I’m every frigging bit as beat as you are, and I want to know what’s going on.”
“We’re not holding out on you, Mustang,” said Dickie. “Although we surely would if we had something. We’re still putting the picture together. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and like you said, it’s been a long damn day. Right now, all I want is to curl up on that couch over there and get a few hours of sleep. You should do the same.”
“The whole house is full of freaks. I’m not real thrilled about the prospect of going back in there.”
“Then crash out here,” Dickie said. “You can put a sleeping bag over there on the carpet, between the desk and the filing cabinet. Scotty can bed down over here on the floor. I don’t snore much. Do you?”
Mary Langham often said her husband snored like a steam shovel, and Sally was ambivalent about the prospect of learning Scotty Atkins’s sleeping habits. But the odds were that there’d be more noise among fifteen sleeping people than three. “I’ll get my bedding,” she said.
When she returned with bag and blanket, she found them glaring at each other. “Scotty has questioned my judgment in offering you the hospitality of our little bungalow here,” Dickie explained.
“I’ll go in the house,” Sally said instantly, turning to go.
“No,” Scotty said. “Don’t bother. There’s room enough for three out here. Forget I said anything. Seriously,” he said, clearly his version of an apology.
And Sally realized, all at once, that she was too beat to go one step farther. The air in the studio had cleared some, but she didn’t even care about the smoke. Without a word, she walked over to the desk and spread out her bed on the floor next to it. With her last ounce of energy, she pulled toothbrush and toothpaste out of her shoulder bag and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She barely registered coming out and crawling into her sleeping bag.
Sometime in the night, Dickie’s snoring woke her. She opened her eyes. The sky had cleared. Moonlight reflected off the snow, bathing the room in silver ghost light. Scotty Atkins sat in an overstuffed chair by the window, staring out. She didn’t think she’d moved, but in the stillness, she must have made some small sound. Otherwise, why would his head turn and his eyes gaze into hers for a too-long moment?
He looked back out the window. She shut her eyes again, turned over, and lay with her back to him, her mind jumbling all she’d been through, until at last sleep found her again.
As dawn broke, she woke for good, stiff from the night on the floor and royally pissed off at everyone and everything, but especially (and to be fair, unaccountably) at Scotty Atkins. Why was she so angry? He hadn’t done anything more than be a little ruder than he needed to be. In her experience, Scotty never settled for merely average rudeness while doing his job. And he was doing his job. Just because she was feeling raw and needy, it certainly wasn’t up to Detective Atkins to comfort her. Dickie Langham, she knew, would have done so if she’d acted as if she wanted it. He was the King of Hugs, even if he was a sheriff. But she hadn’t exactly been Ms. Warmth either.
She was alone in the studio. Dickie and Scotty were already up and gone.
Sally got up, folded the blanket, got back down on her knees and began rolling up the sleeping bag. But as she was cinching a cord around the bedroll, she knocked over her shoulder bag and sent a lipstick tumbling under Nina’s desk. She lay on the floor, stuck a hand between a wastebasket and the desk, and felt around under it in search of the lipstick. Her hand closed over a wadded-up piece of paper.
Sally sat up, leaned back on folded legs, and smoothed out the paper. It was a letter, typed, undated.
Dearest to My Heart,
I know you didn’t mean to hurt me when you said good-bye this morning. I shouldn’t have been
so angry. I need to remember all the ways we’ve cared for each other, not the hard words. You know me. I dwell too often in the dark.
But trust me, love. I’m not one of your enemies. Turn to me. I know I can keep you safe and make you happy, no matter what kinds of things we said today.
The letter wasn’t signed.
What the hell was this about?
Whatever it was, the cops ought to have it. But first, Sally thought, she’d make a quick copy. She pulled out her DayMinder, opened at the back page, and hastily scribbled down the words.
Just as she finished, the studio door opened. Lark, the blonde who’d taught the yoga class, entered. “The detective sent me to get you,” she said. “They want everybody in the living room.”
“Sure. I’ll be right there,” Sally said. The woman looked at her, registering the crumpled paper in her hand. As nonchalantly as she could, Sally folded the letter and stuck it inside the cover of her appointment calendar, then put both in her shoulder bag. Saying nothing, Lark turned and left. Sally picked up her bedding and her bag and followed.
Sally walked out to the parking area, wading through knee-deep snow, to put her things in the Mustang. By the time she got to the house, the nearly two dozen people had assembled, filling the room to bursting. They crowded the couches, sat three to a chair, sprawled on rugs and sleeping bags. Randy Whitebird sat on the coffee table, one leg tucked up with his arms around the calf, spine softly curved. Nels Willen leaned a shoulder against the wall, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle, face unreadable. If nothing else, these guys knew how to play it casual.
Sheriff Dickie Langham glanced around, beaming a friendly smile. He looked entirely too perky after the long night, and Sally realized that he was holding a large mug of what must be Nels Willen’s politically correct coffee. She edged toward the kitchen, hoping for a transfusion.
Bye, Bye, Love Page 6
