“No, that’s okay,” I told the driver. “I was mistaken. It’s been a long day.”
“And it’s not even over,” the driver muttered.
He piloted the limo off Main Street and up our road. My eyes searched hungrily for our brown-shingled house. I finally picked out our newly painted white shutters and trim shimmering in the bright June light.
“Mrs. Schulz?” asked the limo driver. “Is this home?”
My mind again blanked as I looked out at the reporters and photographers crowding our small lawn. Was this a vision, too, only a bad one?
“Mrs. Schulz? Do you want me to help you to your front door?”
When he braked, the tires squealed. A sea of hungry journalists surged toward the curb.
“Keep going!” I cried. A wave of eager faces called to me. “Hit the gas!” I hollered.
As we screeched up the street, I tried to think. My reflection in the rearview mirror did not look good. Holly’s dirt driveway and my unwanted tears had left my cheeks a dusty gray. The last thing my business needed—besides my being convicted of murder, of course—was a photograph of my smudged and soiled self sprinting toward our door.
“Turn left and see if you can circle the block,” I said. “There’s an alley that cuts behind our house.” I couldn’t go to Marla’s or anywhere else, because hiding out was not on the agenda. With any luck, the journalists wouldn’t have thought I could sneak in the back without them seeing me. But I had to get into my kitchen. In the Life Goes On department, I was a caterer until further notice.
“Okay, just a quick left,” I told the driver once we’d reached the alley. Even with the drought, profusely blooming branches of Alpine roses arched over the alleyway and almost concealed our brown-shingled garage. Thorny branches scratched the windshield and sides of the formerly pristine limo. “Once we get there, could you run me to the back door?”
The driver nodded assent, then eased in behind our garage. I readied my keys and grabbed my bag. Once we were out of the car, the driver took my elbow and we quickstepped toward the house’s rear door. We were halfway through Tom’s back garden when the shout went up.
“She’s coming in around back!”
Dammit.
“Mrs. Korman, did you kill your husband?”
“What are those papers sticking out of your bag, Mrs. Korman? Do they have something to do with the case?”
Ignoring the shouted questions, I repeated the mantra, “Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee,” the last few steps to the back door, until I had it unlocked and the security code entered.
“Thanks,” I told the limo driver, and meant it. I suddenly realized I had no money for a tip. I imagined the headline: “Caterer Refuses Fellow Service Person Gratuity.”
He read my mind. “Don’t worry, a twenty percent tip’s included.”
From behind him, a third reporter shouted, “Did you kill your ex-husband, Mrs. Schulz?”
I ignored him and turned to go in the house. The limo driver gently caught my arm.
His low voice murmured, “If coffee is the password to your security system, you better not be saying it so loudly. People could break into your house.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered, and patted his arm. “Thanks for everything. You’ve been great.”
I slammed through the door. Once inside, I raced through each ground-floor room, pulling down shades, curtains, and blinds. Then I took a few deep breaths, fixed myself a double shot of espresso, and used it to down four ibuprofen.
Wherever Tom and Arch were, playing golf or touring Main Street, they were still out. I sloshed a medicinal amount of whipping cream into a second doppio and booted up my computer. Within moments I had opened a document and was assiduously typing the names of all the funeral-lunch guests from Holly Kerr’s photocopied guest list. I didn’t want to call the document “Jerk Death,” in the remote event that Arch went trolling through my database. I finally just gave it the initials “JRK.” Because I had learned a thing or two from Tom, I also typed in every conversation I’d had with anybody—right from the beginning of the previous morning. The memory is a slippery thing, Tom often said. We tend to reshape dialogue after the fact, and details slide away. I was under suspicion for my ex-husband’s murder and I was estranged from my son. I couldn’t afford to let anything slip.
I sat back, reread what I’d written, and tried to come up with some ideas, or at least a strategy, as I’d promised Brewster I’d do. How could I get the cops to investigate Bobby Calhoun? And more pressingly, what intersection of my life and John Richard’s had precipitated the attack at the Roundhouse, and perhaps also John Richard’s death? I returned to the computer and typed in those questions. I noticed one thing: In the department of the Jerk’s mistresses, my memory had not only slipped, it had deleted all those names except the most recent. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.
The fact that I had food to prepare weighed heavily on my mind. I also felt like absolute hell—from my aching body to my throbbing head. But I reminded myself that Furman County investigators were out there gathering evidence, trying to decide whether to arrest me. Maybe they were merely waiting for the firearms report and GSR results. Oh, joy.
I checked my answering machine—the only message was from Trudy, next door. A flower arrangement had arrived. She thought the presence of reporters had driven more well-wishers away. We were welcome to eat at their house, if we wanted. Otherwise, she’d bring some goodies over when the coast was clear.
More troubling, though, was the fact that there was no message from Brewster Motley. What was the point of Marla’s paying him so much money if his investigators couldn’t come up with information to exonerate me? Just how good a criminal defense attorney was he?
I opened another computer document. I had the names and conversations; now I had to type up everything that had happened so far. I figured if the cops wanted an exact chronology, I should have one, too. I began in late April, when John Richard had reentered our lives as a free man.
On April the twenty-second, the day John Richard had walked out of jail, I’d been catering another lunch, a bittersweet remembrance requisitioned by Cecelia Brisbane. She’d invited the entire Mountain Journal staff to her house for what would have been the sixtieth birthday of Walter Brisbane, her dead husband. Three years before, while Cecelia was at a Women in the Media convention in Las Vegas, Walter Brisbane, the ultracharming publisher of the Journal, had killed himself with one of his own firearms.
According to the Journal, the police had confirmed an accidental suicide. Only one bullet had been missing from Walter’s twenty-two, the one that had entered his skull. There had been gunshot residue on Walter’s hands, the twenty-two had been at an odd angle, not entirely consistent with intentional suicide. A neighbor had heard the single shot and called the police. There had been no sign of forced entry. Walter had apparently been alone, and he had not left a note. According to Cecelia, he had been happy, their family had been happy; everyone at the Mountain Journal had been happy, happy, happy!
Yeah, right, I had told Tom while he helped me put salmon on the grill for this year’s posthumous Brisbane birthday. Still, no other story had surfaced. Tom had shared the tantalizing fact that Walter had had a phone call from a Denver pay phone not twenty minutes before he died. But without more, Tom said, we’d never know what had really happened.
The Brisbanes’ daughter, Alex, short for Alexandra, was serving on a nuclear submarine deployed in the Mediterranean. A navy chaplain had called Cecelia and relayed the message that Alex could not be notified of her father’s death for at least a month, and thus would miss the funeral. At this April’s birthday lunch, I’d seen a photograph of a solemn-looking Alex on Cecelia’s coffe table. The brown-haired young woman, wearing a navy pea coat and sailor cap, standing at some distance from the camera, had been pointing at a Greek temple. Recently, when the Aspen Meadow library had opened a photo exhibit featuring “Local Men and Women in the Armed Services,”
Cecelia had had the photo blown up for the display. It was now pinned next to a picture of the Vikarioses’ son, George, who was serving in the army in Germany. I’d never met George Vikarios, and I supposed the army kept him busy. But I did wonder about the navy being so demanding of Alex that they would never allow her home for the yearly posthumous birthday parties Cecelia insisted on having for her dead husband. Then again, there were many reasons for family members not appearing at anniversary functions. Moreover, family absences at parties was such a sore subject, most caterers wouldn’t touch it with a pole the length of the Alaska pipeline.
In any event, the whole Walter Brisbane thing was weird, Tom had said. In addition to the mysterious phone call, Walter Brisbane had been very careful with his guns; he’d been a seasoned hunter. And there had been no witnesses to the shooting. That’s why we’ll never know what happened, Tom had told me, as he magnanimously flipped the salmon.
I’d hated doing that lunch, as much as I’d hated doing that birthday celebration every year since I’d been in business. I’d hated parking beside Cecelia Brisbane’s dumpy old wood-sided station wagon that she refused to get rid of. I’d hated seeing Cecelia Brisbane’s bespectacled, shovel-shaped face crumple in grief, as it did every year when we sang “Happy Birthday.” Most of all, I’d hated Marla bursting into Cecelia’s pine-paneled kitchen, ashen-faced, her voice cracking.
“Goldy. The Jerk’s out. Forever. The governor commuted his sentence.”
Yes. I’d hated that most of all.
Marla had peppered me with questions for which I’d had no answers. No, I didn’t know if he’d be settling down alone. No, I didn’t know where he was going to live. And no, I didn’t know what he was going to do for money. But we should have guessed.
He’d found a woman, of course. Courtney MacEwan had become his girlfriend almost immediately. Where did he find such willing females? Unlike Val, a vampy former girlfriend who’d been charged with murder herself, Courtney belonged to the country club and had a tennis figure to die for. I hadn’t seen any pictures of Courtney in Holly Kerr’s album, but back in our married days, John Richard and I had known Courtney and her hospital-CEO husband well enough to make small talk. Last year, the sudden death of Courtney’s husband had netted her those big bucks, and John Richard had begun to salivate.
I reached for a couple of cookies to go with the last of my coffee. The buttery crunch of nut cookies helped jog my memory of the events of May.
On Saturday, May the seventh, Arch had called me from John Richard’s house and asked me to come get him, since his father was “busy with a move.” When Marla had accompanied me to take Arch over for a golf lesson the next week, Sandee with two e s had answered the door. Would Marla know the exact timing and rationale for the swap of one girlfriend for another? I made myself a note to ask. In any event, after the girlfriend switch, things had been fairly calm with John Richard, at least by Jerk standards, except for this obsession with teaching Arch to play golf, Tuesdays and Thursdays, one o’clock on the dot or risk being yelled at. Except for yesterday, when he’d wanted me to bring Arch at four because of the lunch screwing up the timing.
And then there had been the funeral lunch the previous day, where all hell had broken loose. Actually, Hades had erupted before the lunch had even begun. Someone had thrown the switches on my compressors Monday night, the sixth of June. Why? By Tuesday morning, my food had spoiled. Why go to such trouble? Did someone really hate Albert Kerr and want his memorial lunch wrecked? Or did someone want me embarrassed, not to mention shoved out of the way and chopped on the neck?
My mind kept circling around the same question: What could be the reason for that attack? John Richard hadn’t had any current conflicts with me that would have led him to bust me up, had he? Then again, when had I ever been able to figure out the Jerk? Maybe he’d been ticked off over something I didn’t even know about. This would have been typical. Still, he’d usually let me know exactly what transgression brought on a beating. I shuddered, remembering, and touched the thumb he’d broken in three places with a hammer. The only thing I could figure was that these days he knew I’d report him, and that he’d face jail time again. That might have made him keep his assault “anonymous.”
I chewed on an ice cube and recalled the theory put forward by the detectives, that John Richard had beaten me up Tuesday morning, and I’d gone over to his house and shot him for revenge. That was ridiculous, of course…but say someone was carefully setting up this crime, and framing me. You beat up Goldy, steal her gun… Had the person who burgled my van been looking for the kitchen shears or the gun? If that person wanted the gun, he or she would have to know I kept it in the glove compartment. I had to face the fact that my best friend was the most notorious gossip in town. Could Marla have “let it slip” that I kept a thirty-eight in the van glove compartment?
I closed my eyes and rubbed them. Yes, of course she could.
And then there was Brewster’s question: Who would have been mad at both of you? Under this theory, whoever had sabotaged my food and hit me had then gone on to shoot the Jerk. I wracked my poor little brain until it hurt. The only person I knew of who held a grudge against both the Jerk and me was Courtney MacEwan. According to Marla, Courtney claimed that I had ruined her chances with the Jerk. But that was ancient history, wasn’t it? And would gorgeous Courtney know about freezer compressors and the math of spoilage? Would she be brave enough to handle bags of mice? I thought not. Talk about grasping at straws.
I stared at my blinking computer screen. Back to the chronology. At the memorial lunch itself, I typed, Courtney MacEwan had been upset, Ginger Vikarios had seemed tense and unhappy, and Ted Vikarios had been talkative, then angry with John Richard. What had that been about? Unfortunately, after that conflict, the Jerk and I had had a very public argument about a new tee time for Arch—with the funeral guests looking on. I’d gone home, driven to Lakewood to pick up Arch, and taken him over to John Richard’s rented house in the country-club area.
Wait. First I had stopped by the clubhouse to leave brownies for the PosteriTREE bake sale. And Cecelia Brisbane had sought me out. All right, then, while I was in the straw-grasping business, what was it Cecelia had been referring to regarding files on John Richard? I was willing to believe that she was paying someone to listen in on cell phones or calls to the sheriff’s department, so that she’d heard about the Roundhouse break-in, and surmised that the Jerk was the culprit. But what had she meant when she’d said she had different files from the police?
I put in a call to the Mountain Journal. Cecelia Brisbane was not at her desk. I left a message for her to call me, but didn’t hold out much hope for that happening. Belatedly, I thought to dangle the idea of a hot piece of gossip for her column, but the receptionist had already hung up.
I needed to cook, and I still hadn’t finished writing up the events of the previous day. My fingers paused over the incident with the skeleton-faced man waiting in the cul-de-sac. Mrs. Korman, do you have my money? I’d written down that guy’s license-plate number. Surely someone at the sheriff’s department had tracked down the plate by now. Even better, maybe that someone would know what funds the guy had been after.
Who at the sheriff’s department could help me with the license plate? I called Sergeant Boyd, but he was not available. I cursed voice mail silently and left a purposefully vague message for Boyd to please, please, call me back ASAP.
I took a break and tiptoed onto our back deck to feed Scout the cat and Jake, our bloodhound. The chatty reporters had reconvened on our front porch. Both animals seemed to know something was up, and I murmured to them to be quiet. Scout ignored his food and rolled on his back, demanding that his stomach be rubbed. Sometimes I thought that cat could read my mind. My own need for comfort, he seemed to be saying, could be assuaged by comforting him. Jake, meanwhile, gobbled his food, stepped on the cat to get to me, and whined as his tongue slobbered kisses on both of my cheeks. I told him, “Okay, boy, okay,�
� and turned my face away. He whimpered and started licking my hands and arms. Well, my animals loved me. When you’re a suspect in a murder case, you’ll take affection wherever you can get it.
I went back inside, took a shower, and changed into clean clothes. Reentering the kitchen, I resolved to put the life and untimely death of John Richard Korman out of my mind—for a few hours, anyway. I needed and wanted to prepare food for others. My eyes caught on two things I had not noticed that had fallen out of my bag, along with the guest list: the envelope with Holly Kerr’s check to me, and a recipe. Holly had written:
Thought you might enjoy this. It’s the recipe for the brioche! And thanks again for a lovely lunch in remembrance of my dear Albert. Goldy, I am sure all will be well soon.Holly
That was nice. I glanced over the recipe, which seemed straightforward enough, and would give me the opportunity to work with my hands, as in pretending I was wringing the neck of…whoops! Wasn’t going to think that way for a while. From our walk-in refrigerator, I took out yeast, eggs, milk, and unsalted butter, then searched the cabinets for bread flour, sugar and salt, lemons and oranges, extracts, and a jar of glistening honey from a local producer.
Soon the yeast was proofing and I was creaming the butter, honey, and eggs into a fluffy, fragrant mixture—the beginning of the journey into making bread. I kneaded in the flour, and didn’t pretend it was anybody. I allowed myself to float into the meditative, repetitive movements that cause bread making to be so therapeutic. Soon the dough beneath my wrists was a lovely, silky, smooth texture. It took me several moments to realize the phone was ringing. Marla must have turned on one of my ringers.
“Uh, Goldilocks’ Catering?” My hands, covered with flour and bits of dough, inadvertently let the receiver slip away. I fumbled it as I tried to wipe one hand clean on my apron. The phone banged hard on the floor.
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