“Oh my God!” Marla cried after she’d pulled the key out of the lock and opened the doors.
My heart plummeted as I reeled back.
The smell of spoiled food was horrific. I thought, I’m doomed.
2
It’s a body,” Marla whispered. “The killer hit you so you couldn’t witness anything.”
“It’s spoiled food,” I corrected her. I limped inside, still aiming the gun at the floor. The putrid stench turned my stomach. Not meaning to, I took a deep breath. The smell filled my nostrils and I coughed. I panted—anything to avoid using the olfactory gland.
Delicately holding her nose, Marla followed me into the Roundhouse dining room. The place had never served as an actual train roundhouse, but was merely a fifty-year-old hexagonal building constructed of dark-stained pine logs. With a massive stone fire-place at its center, the dining room resembled a giant wooden teepee. The irony was that I’d been looking forward to the Roundhouse’s early morning aroma, where smoke from thousands of barbecued steaks still lingered in the log walls.
“What do you want to do?” Marla asked, her voice nasal.
“Check everything in the kitchen,” I replied. “Trash—every container. Refrigerators.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “With a simple assault and vandalism, there’s no way the cops will do prints and all that. Let’s go around to the side. Whoever attacked me came out that way, and probably broke in there, too.”
“Just make sure you’ve got hold of that gun,” Marla ordered.
“That’s the last thing we’re going to need.” My mind seized on the funeral lunch. “What we’re going to need is more food. And quick.”
Our footsteps echoed on the wooden deck as we made our slow way around to the side of the old restaurant. My back still ached and my knees hurt. The sight of the wooden ramp that my attacker had raced down gave me gooseflesh.
A hundred yards away, the sun had risen higher, and Aspen Meadow Lake was a field of sparkles. When I’d signed the lease on the Roundhouse at the end of April, the large deck and magnificent view of the water had been selling points. In Colorado, people want to hold events both inside and outside, and any catering center that doesn’t offer both is sunk. I shook my head, remembering my early enthusiasm for the Roundhouse. While reconfiguring the place for catered affairs, I’d come to wish the lake was full of cold cash instead of chilly snowmelt. But it was still a nice view. Calming. And calm was what I needed at the moment.
When we arrived at the back door, the reek was even more intense. I peered at the spot where the lock had been forced. Splinters littered the deck and the kitchen floor. Yellow wood showed where the hinge had been torn off from the paneling around it. Carefully, Marla and I tiptoed inside. She flipped on the lights—no power outage, anyway—and the spacious, newly painted kitchen popped into view. To my surprise, the place was completely clean.
“Stop. Take the safety off,” Marla whispered. “I hear something.”
Oh, man, I knew we should have waited in the car. Marla pointed to a paper grocery bag on the far side of the floor. With its flap rolled tight, the contents lay shrouded in darkness. But was it…moving?
“Stay put,” I ordered, then advanced, thirty-eight raised, across the kitchen.
Without warning, the bag shuddered open and a dozen mice raced out. Startled, I accidentally shot off the damn gun.
Marla shrieked and ran outside. The rodents scattered. I cursed, eased the safety back on the thirty-eight, and placed it on the counter. Now the place really stank, with gunsmoke in addition to the stench of garbage. And probably a neighbor would call the cops. Maybe that would get them up here quicker, I thought as I pulled over some folding chairs to prop open the wrecked door. If my attacker had planted more mice, we needed to provide an easy exit for the furry little creatures. Plus, I was desperate to air out the place.
“Stop that!” Marla snapped from the deck. “You need to get the cops to get clues from the door.”
“They won’t have time for that, trust me.”
The ibuprofen was kicking in and I could move a bit more easily as I limped back over to the bag, now empty. I didn’t want to ponder how much a fumigator was going to cost. Oh, hell, I thought as I looked ruefully at the bullet hole in my new kitchen floor. Add on to that the price of oak-floor repair.
I took what they call in yoga a cleansing breath. If you’re smelling something putrid, does the breath still cleanse? I didn’t think so. Focus, I told myself. Marla, whom I always depended on to be brave and helpful, was blubbering on the deck.
First I had to find the spoiled food. I began to check the trash containers. Every one of them was empty.
“Why didn’t you shoot them?” Marla wailed. “You had the gun, for God’s sake, why didn’t you keep firing? Oh my God, mice! Maybe they were rats,” and so on.
I stared at the two commercial refrigerators I’d installed in the kitchen. They were walk-ins I’d bought at a restaurant auction. The previous evening, I’d placed eleven hundred dollars’ worth of grilled and chilled herb-crusted salmon, potatoes Anna, radiatore pasta salad, and spinach soufflé mixture into them. The food cart had contained the now-wrecked desserts. When Julian Teller, my longtime assistant, drove over from Boulder, he was bringing a vat of his luscious cream of asparagus soup. Liz Fury, a forty-two-year-old single mom who was my other helper, was visiting an early-bird farmers’ market to pick up fresh arugula and watercress for the salad. These she would toss with delicately marinated hearts of palm and her own champagne vinaigrette.
Slowly, I opened first one, then the other refrigerator door.
I lurched away from the blast of hot, putrid air. A second later I was taking shallow breaths through my mouth and peering inside.
The refrigerator interiors were warm and dark. They stank of rotten food. I knew the math of spoilage; every caterer did. For every hour foods with mayonnaise and other perishable substances are at a temperature above sixty-five degrees, the toxins multiply exponentially. My attacker couldn’t just have shown up this morning and wrecked this food. So what was going on?
I moved outside as quickly as my battered body would allow. Marla was still sniveling on the deck. I checked the compressors. Someone had thrown the safety switches on both of them. I howled and pushed them into place, then hobbled back inside.
The refrigerators had hummed to life. I pulled open the doors, then stared inside. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.
The bowls, vats, and trays of salmon, potatoes, pasta, and spinach reeked of putrescence. So the guy, or whoever it was, had thrown the compressors last night, to guarantee that the food would be wrecked? And then he’d broken in this morning to plant some mice? Had he done anything else?
I saw the answer in a line of small, dead trout strung across the shelves of one refrigerator. On the base of the other walk-in, another paper bag seemed to be wriggling…oh God.
About six mice—fewer than in the other bag, anyway—scampered out. I jumped from one foot to the other, which made my body scream with pain.
“More mice coming!” I hollered at Marla.
“Will you shoot that damn gun?” she shrieked from the far side of the deck.
“Not again,” I called back. I limped back to my van and stowed the thirty-eight in my glove compartment.
This was not, as it turned out, one of my better ideas.
Within ten minutes, I’d rustled up both Liz and Julian on their cells. I said I needed a ton of d-Con, at least a dozen mousetraps, and a carload of air fresheners.
“Okay, boss,” Julian agreed. The kid was calmer than any twenty-one-year-old I’d ever known. “But what’re you going to do for food?”
“Assiettes de charcuterie,” I said decisively. “Plates of chilled imported salami, Westphalian ham, and Port Salut cheese. And some lovely fresh rolls. Can you find an open delicatessen in Boulder? And a bakery?”
“No prob.”
“Plus, I’ll need a l
oad of unsalted butter and…jars of gherkins, if you can manage it. With your soup, Liz’s salad, and the garden-club cakes, we ought to be in good shape.”
“The garden-club cakes?”
“Flourless chocolate. Marla ordered them to sell for her splinter group’s bake sale. But they’re not going to get them.”
“Goldy, what’re you going to do if Roger Mannis shows up?”
“Oh, God help us.”
Roger Mannis was the new district health inspector, assigned to make life difficult for yours truly and other caterers in our part of the county. The guy was a nightmare, Uriah Heep meets Jack the Ripper, with a Ph.D. in biology, to boot. He’d shown up—unannounced, as was his prerogative—at our very first event in the Roundhouse. I’d been serving tea, sandwiches, petits fours, and sliced fruit out on the deck. Unfortunately, the garden-club ladies had been acting anything but ladylike in their fight over a town tree-planting campaign. Roger Mannis—thirtyish, tall, and dark-haired, with deep-set eyes and a chin that could have sliced a pork loin—had started writing up every infraction he could find. He shook his head at the landscaping over my new plumbing lines. He stuck his little thermometer into the fruit salad and found it insufficiently chilled. He claimed to have detected insect remains on the floor of the deck. Julian and I knew to beg pardon and act obsequious, especially since we needed to calm the enemy armies of the garden club, who’d been on the verge of a fruit fight.
My dear Liz Fury, however, had been a bit more flippant. Tossing her silver-white hair and thrusting a long finger in Roger Mannis’s face, she’d told him that the staff of Goldilocks’ Catering abided by all hygiene rules. She announced, moreover, that Roger was being an ass. Distracted, the garden-club ladies had begun to titter. Liz hollered that Roger could get that ass, his ass, away from the Roundhouse immediately. Otherwise, she’d call his supervisor, her uncle Ozzie, who also happened to be the Furman County Health Inspector, and have him canned. “So to speak!” cried one of the women, and the entire garden club had snickered.
Roger Mannis had responded by narrowing his pupils, bottomless dark caverns that made most caterers’ innards quake. His sharp chin had quivered as he’d stepped toward me and hovered ominously, clutching his clipboard. He’d been so close I could smell his aftershave. I’d actually cowered. Then Roger Mannis had turned on his heel and left.
Unfortunately, someone had been sitting right next to where I was standing during the whole interchange with Mannis. The wrong someone, as it turned out: Cecelia Brisbane, that most ruthless of gossip columnists, had been peering through her thick, cloudy glasses as she tried to cover the garden-club meeting. I heard later that she’d been hoping for hot items on the tree-planting conflict. Instead, Cecelia had mercilessly skewered me, the event, and the district health inspector. During what recent get-together was a county official with a chainsaw chin, muskrat eyes, and clothes resembling a nuclear-bomb inspector told off by our town’s caterer?
There was no point calling the Mountain Journal office and complaining. I’d tried that once and it hadn’t worked. I just didn’t want to think about it.
So…now, in answer to Julian’s question: What was I going to do if Roger Mannis made an unexpected visit to this catered event…and saw all this spoiled food? I didn’t want to contemplate that, either.
“Goldy, are you all right?” Julian asked, startling me.
“Sure. Thanks for reminding me about the dear inspector,” I replied into the phone. “Let me see if Marla can waylay him.”
While Marla and I dumped the vats of slimy pasta, stinking salmon, and putrid spinach into plastic bags, I tried to think of a way to bring up the Mannis predicament. The apparent disappearance of the mice had soothed Marla’s nerves somewhat. Plus, she’d been eager to speculate about who could have done all this damage—although her considerable moneybags were still placed on the Jerk.
“He threatened you from prison,” she asserted as she lugged a trash bag to the Dumpster. “To your face and behind your back. To Arch, to his lawyer, to anyone who would listen. He read the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News every day, and when some guy got off for beating or killing his wife, he mailed the article to you, Goldy. For God’s sake!” She paused at the far end of the parking lot. “I suppose he’s making an appearance at the lunch?”
“Holly Kerr invited him,” I replied. “You remember Holly, don’t you? Albert’s wife, now widow? She wanted to include all the old gang from Southwest Hospital.” I grunted as I heaved my bag over the lip of the Dumpster.
Marla groaned and clumsily tipped in her sack. I frowned. Her beautiful pink-and-gold silk dress was stained with sweat and spotted with spoiled food. Dear Marla. And here I was going to ask something else of her.
“Uh, girlfriend?”
Marla lifted her chin and shot me a wary look. Her brown curls had come askew from the sparkling barrettes, and perspiration streaked her face.
“Now what?”
“I’m sorry, but when the cops arrive, I need you to do one more thing.”
“It can’t be worse than this.”
“Would you be willing to go home,” I asked quickly, “take a nice shower, put on something really sexy, and find a county employee named Roger Mannis? I’ll give you his work number and address. Then distract him, seduce him, or do something to keep him occupied over the next few hours.”
“You mean Roger Mannis, the health inspector who hassled you at the garden-club lunch? The subject of Cecelia’s column, he of the muskrat eyes? One and the same?”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?” I asked as a sheriff’s-department vehicle finally, finally drove into the lot.
“You know what, Goldy?” Marla wiped her brow, glanced at the cop car, then put her hands on her hips. “If you weren’t my friend, I would have no excitement in my life.”
3
She drove off, as they say in this part of the world, in a cloud of dust. The cop, a brawny blond fellow named Sawyer, had me repeat what had happened and show him the scene of the crime. He frowned at the place where I’d fallen, probed the splintered door frame with his finger, and narrowed his eyes at the bullet hole in the floor. He also told me I should see a doctor. I promised I would when the dust settled.
“Still, Mrs. Schulz, I’m going to stay here with you until your help arrives.”
“Feel like carrying some trash?”
His grin was expansive. “Sure.”
With Sawyer at my side, I hobbled back to the kitchen. The two of us grabbed the last of the trash bags—Sawyer insisted on taking three, so I had only one—traversed the lot, and heaved them into the Dumpster.
“I need you to show me the gun you used in the kitchen,” Officer Sawyer said mildly as we made our way back to the Roundhouse.
I veered toward the van, unlocked it, and flipped open the glove compartment. Then I unloaded the gun and handed it to him. He looked at it briefly before giving it back. His expression was inscrutable.
I put the thirty-eight into the glove compartment and slammed it shut. “My permit’s in the kitchen, in my purse.”
“That’s all right.” He waited for me to close the van door, then walked beside me back to the Roundhouse.
The breeze that had been ruffling the lake’s surface died down. Half a mile away, the lake house was deserted. Paddleboat and skiff rental did not begin until ten, and even the walkers and runners had hightailed away to their daily pursuits. The small commuter rush had abated, and Upper Cottonwood Creek Road was quiet.
I walked slowly. My shoulders ached. My back throbbed. Our footsteps on the gravel were the only sounds. Things seemed, as they also say in this part of the world, too quiet.
“Officer Sawyer?” I said suddenly. “Have you had this kind of attack around here lately? Somebody in a ski mask, vandalizing commercial establishments?”
Sawyer shook his head. “There’s always a first time. I wish you’d go see a doctor.”
I thought, Sure, right after I fi
nd some electric fans, get the bleach, clean out the walk-ins, and start setting up….
“I know that we are all thankful for the life of Albert Kerr,” Dr. Ted Vikarios announced, his voice as authoritative as that of Moses descending from Sinai. Dr. V., as we’d always called him, towered over the microphone, his six and a half feet not even slightly reduced by having reached his early sixties. His long, large-featured face was as imposing as ever, although I was pretty sure he was now dyeing his jet-black hair. He still wore it swooped up in front, like a wave cresting toward shore. “We rejoice in spite of our pain!” his voice boomed, and the mourners jumped in their seats.
Tell me about pain, I thought. My back, neck, and knees were still in a world of hurt. I shifted from foot to foot and glanced out at the people gathered for the memorial lunch. Most of the sixty guests had served in Southwest’s ob-gyn department sixteen years ago, during the time that Drs. Kerr and Vikarios had been co–department heads of ob-gyn. And maybe they wished they hadn’t, because Dr. V. had already been preaching to them for twenty-five minutes.
John Richard Korman, looking breezy, nonchalant, and as devastatingly handsome as ever, sat by the French doors. He wore a pink oxford-cloth shirt, patterned gold-and-green silk tie, and khaki pants. Did he look freshly showered? I mean, you would have to fix yourself up if you’d taken time out that morning to attack your ex-wife. At the very least, your naturally blond hair would get messed up underneath that ski mask. Stop it, I ordered myself. You’re not at all sure that John Richard was the culprit.
I returned my attention to the lunch. The only way I was going to get through this event was not to care that he was present. Make that not to care insofar as possible, since I had already noticed how he was charming the women at his table with sly grins, winks, and an occasional backward flip of his careful-to-look-
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