A group of firemen, their yellow outer garments zipped open, was sitting behind one of the trucks. As I came closer, I saw that their faces were blackened with ash. They were drinking water and talking in low tones to the fireman who’d led me up to them.
“Please help me,” I burst out. “I can’t find my son.”
One of the men, his blackened face streaked with sweat, shook his head. “Ma’am, we’ve got at least two hikers who’ve been missing for a couple of days. We didn’t see a kid anywhere, I promise. I saw Bobby Calhoun’s truck come up from one of the fire roads a little while ago. He parked down there somewhere, but I haven’t seen him—”
“Parked down there?” I cried, pointing along the row of parked trucks. “Somebody come with me, please!”
I turned and began trotting beside the trucks. The smoke made it hard to make out details of any of the vehicles. My coughing and hacking wasn’t helping me think, either. I glanced back and saw, thank God, three firefighters jogging along behind me.
And then I saw the pickup. “Visit Nashville!” the bumper sticker screamed. I turned to the firefighters and waved them forward.
“This is it,” I said, indicating the pickup. “I can’t see if anyone’s inside.”
“Okay, ma’am. Stay put.”
The firefighters exchanged a couple of words that I couldn’t hear. Then a pair of them walked toward the truck, one on each side. With a quick nod, they simultaneously opened the driver’s and passenger’s doors.
Arch jumped out of the passenger side and coughed. I shrieked his name. He rushed toward me.
“Why are we here?” he demanded. “Sandee kept asking about Dad’s safety-deposit box and saying we were waiting for you—” He began hacking and thumping his chest.
“Shh, it’s okay now,” I said. I tried to hug him, but as usual, he was not wanting an embrace, especially in front of tough-guy firefighters.
“Hey! Come back here!” the firefighter on the driver’s side of the truck hollered. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Through the smoke, I could just see Sandee Blue/Alexandra Brisbane, clad in some kind of black suit, running into the woods.
“Hey!” I hollered.
I took off after her. The firefighters, cursing, followed us.
The pine forest by the row of trucks ran up a steep hill. Panting, I began stomping through the underbrush, calling Sandee’s name.
When she didn’t answer, I shrieked, “You didn’t have to kill John Richard, you know! You didn’t have to kill him!”
Behind us, the firefighters, whose heavy boots were forcing them to a slower pace, were hollering that the two of us had better stop. Otherwise, their faint voices warned, we were all going to get killed.
Trying to listen to the sound of Sandee maneuvering through the underbrush, I ran blindly up the hill. Four minutes, five minutes, six. The smoke was becoming more and more dense, the air hotter.
Abruptly, the forest opened up at the edge of a wide cliff. There was nothing on the other side of the granite ridge but clouds of smoke. I halted, gasping.
Sandee was standing on top of a gray boulder at the very edge of the precipice. I blinked and squinted into the smoke. She was wearing what looked like a shiny black running suit and black tennis shoes. And…what was that hanging from her neck? A gold chain with a locket? What the hell was she up to now?
The firefighters’ heavy boots crashing through the undergrowth, as well as their raised voices, became louder.
I coughed, tried to get my breath, and peered up at Sandee. “You didn’t have to kill him.” I panted, then said, “You could have had him charged and prosecuted.”
Sandee’s laugh was strident. “The statute of limitations on rape is eight years. Think I would have had a chance? How good a witness do you think a stripper would have been?”
The firefighters slashed through the last bit of undergrowth and arrived at my side. Two of them each took one of my arms. The third one addressed Sandee.
“You crazy bitch!” he shouted. “Get down from here! You want us all to get burned up?” In spite of myself, I shook my head. They didn’t learn negotiating skills in firefighting school.
“No,” she called blithely. “Just me. But you need to listen first. That woman you’re holding, Goldy Schulz, did not kill her ex-husband, John Richard Korman. I did. I stole her gun and a couple more, and then shot him with one of them. My boyfriend, Bobby, wasn’t in on it. I also strangled Cecelia Brisbane!”
Abruptly, she disappeared from the rockface. Had she jumped?
“What the—” I muttered.
“Oh, dammit,” said one of the firefighters, the one who was holding my right arm. “What’s off that cliff, John?”
“Nothing,” John replied. “Raccoon Creek is a hundred yards down. She’s a goner.” He took a deep breath, his shoulders slumped. “We need to get back.”
Three days later, when the fire was finally, finally out, four teams trekked back into the preserve to assess the damage…and look for the remains of Sandee and the hikers.
But they didn’t find any human remains. The preserve is a very big place. So many people were evacuated, so many hikers and campers were forced out of the preserve, that the cops have yet to figure out who’s missing and who’s accounted for.
The team searching Raccoon Creek did make a discovery. On top of a boulder in the middle of the creek, they found a gold chain and locket. Bobby Calhoun, sobbing, identified it as the one he’d given Sandee.
I told Tom, and then Blackridge and Reilly, that it was possible—not probable, but possible—that Sandee had gotten away. She’d been a member of the Explorers’ Club in high school and knew every inch of the preserve, including where the creeks and fire roads led. Besides, I said, who runs into a fire to commit suicide? Sandee had planned everything out—the murders, framing others with fake clues. Why wouldn’t she have planned a getaway, too? Plus, she was a master of disguise, and…
My dear Tom, as well as Blackridge and Reilly, said there was simply no way. The detectives had interviewed the firefighters. They’d examined Cowboy Cliff, where Sandee had disappeared. Yes, there was a very narrow, rocky path down to the creek, but with all that smoke, nobody could have seen it or known its twists and curves. And given the size of the fire, no human could have made it out of the preserve alive.
“It’s over,” Tom assured me, pulling me in for a hug. “I never thought that I would be the one to say this, but we need to let go of this mess and move ahead. Okay, Miss G.?”
I groaned.
We had the memorial service for Sandee and Cecelia Brisbane the next week. Sandee had written up her story and mailed it to the Post, the News, and the Mountain Journal. So much sympathy was generated for her that Father Pete had to tell people to stop sending flowers to the church. Priscilla Throckbottom put an ad in the Mountain Journal saying that donations of pine seedlings could be made in Sandee’s name, and the PosteriTREE committee would plant them in the forest when the skeletons were found. I don’t know if she had any takers.
The church parking lot was filled to overflowing the day of the service. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to make sense out of these deaths. At the reception following the service, the words tragic and pointless kept coming up. Sandee had taken on evil to combat evil, and the whole thing had blown up in her face.
Blackridge and Reilly asked me to make a statement. I began by saying, You think you know people.
I thought I’d known Sandee. A stripper. A blonde. I knew she manipulated men to get what she wanted—first Bobby, then John Richard, then Bobby again. In her interactions with me, sometimes she’d acted ditzy, other times, self-centered. So I’d assumed that was exactly what she was. And all the time, she’d been watching me, watching Arch, asking questions, and taking notes. Did you bring money? she’d asked Marla and me. Planting the idea in our heads: Folks are dropping off money here, doesn’t that seem strange? Only we’d been too dense to get the fact that John
Richard was up to something shady.
Oh my, but Sandee was good.
Following the details from Sandee’s letters, which told how she’d stolen both Bobby’s and Dannyboy’s Rugers, Blackridge and Reilly finally caught Lana and Dannyboy. Law enforcement was planning to bring murder charges against the two of them. The Denver PD was reopening the case of Quentin Drake, husband of stripper Ruby Drake. And then there was the incident of vandalizing John Richard’s rental home, looking for the money he skimmed. The crime lab picked up some latents that matched Dannyboy’s.
The Rainbow is closed now, and the archdiocese of Denver is negotiating to buy the place so it can set up a second soup kitchen. The church is hoping that, in time, people won’t remember what kind of establishment it once was. I wish them well.
Blackridge and Reilly asked why I thought Sandee killed her mother. Because, I said, the mother had failed to protect her daughter. Cecilia Brisbane, who was observant when it came to the faults of those around her, was blind when it came to her husband. She was deaf to the needs of her own daughter, and now both Brisbane parents were dead. Walter had done the irreparable damage, which had been compounded by Cecelia’s complicity.
And then, when Alexandra Brisbane was what—thirteen? fourteen?—John Richard Korman had raped her in a Southwest Hospital room. Nan Watkins had cleaned Sandee up and kept her own mouth shut. The detectives asked, Had Albert Kerr known what John Richard had done to Sandee? Had Ted Vikarios? I countered with, Would they have moved to punish John Richard if they had? I didn’t know, but I doubted it. The only time John Richard’s bad behavior had come home to roost for the Vikarioses was when the Jerk had impregnated their daughter, Talitha Vikarios. And she had left rather than abort the child or have our family embarrassed.
And so the reason for the double murder was—? Blackridge and Reilly asked.
I believed that Alexandra—Sandee with two e s—had not been able to tell her mother directly what Dr. Korman had done. Why would she? Her mother had not believed her before.
So Sandee had gotten out. She’d changed her name, dyed her hair, become a stripper, and saved up enough money for plastic surgery. Sometime before her surgeries, she’d made a trip to Nashville. Here I am, Mom! As Arch would say, Not. And yet Sandee had been the same person inside, with the same pain. Maybe she’d tried confronting her father with that pay-phone call. Rather than face the truth, he had killed himself. What was left of the people who’d failed Sandee?
Well, there was that doctor who had raped her. She’d tried to get her own mother to talk about the Jerk’s misdeeds in the Mountain Journal. But that hadn’t worked. Cecelia had felt…what? Fear? Suspicion as to who had written her an anonymous letter alleging that a longtime Aspen Meadow doctor had raped a teenage patient? In any event, Cecelia had done nothing except mail the note to me.
So Sandee had put all her energy into planning the murder of John Richard Korman. According to Lana, who was working on a plea deal, Sandee had encouraged her to hire John Richard to run the Smurfs, who laundered all that cash that came in to the Rainbow. Sandee had known that John Richard would take advantage, that he wouldn’t be able to resist skimming. As the cops say, “People don’t change. They just get better camouflage.”
You think you know people, and sometimes you do.
John Richard was unable to resist Sandee’s seductiveness. Courtney MacEwan couldn’t possibly compete with Sandee’s years as a stripper. Sandee was good. Most important, she hadn’t forgotten what had happened to her.
She’d had a month to put her plan into action. She’d gathered the materials that would point to other people, acting ditzy the whole time, so we wouldn’t suspect she was up to anything.
Does your mom protect herself? she’d asked Arch. Ooh, a revolver? Where does she keep it?
Where does that pretty Courtney MacEwan keep those pink tennis balls? she’d asked at the tennis shop, during one of her long waits at the golf shop. Ooh, may I see one of those cans?
At Albert Kerr’s memorial lunch, when Ted Vikarios had seen Arch in the kitchen, he’d known immediately that the Jerk was the father of his grandson. The resemblance between the two boys was just too strong. Even I had thought Gus was Arch. So Ted had confronted John Richard in the parking lot, probably just as Sandee was coming back with my thirty-eight tucked in her bag. Aha, she’d thought, one more person to blame this on! She hadn’t had anything of Ted’s to plant at the scene, but she knew what the argument was about: a child whom John Richard had supposedly fathered. So at the last minute, she’d said something like, “Just a minute, honey,” and run back to my van for one more thing: my kitchen shears to cut off a chunk of John Richard’s hair, and make it look as if someone might do a postmortem DNA test.
Maybe it was that argument, the one between Ted and John Richard, that had made Sandee think, Now I have enough suspects. Ginger and Ted Vikarios seemed to be furious with John Richard. In addition to the clipped hair, Sandee could leave pearls that looked like Ginger’s. And of course the very publicly jealous Courtney MacEwan was well known for those pink tennis balls.
And if all else failed, John Richard had a despised ex-wife who owned a gun, easily stolen.
And your theory on the death of Cecelia Brisbane? Reilly asked.
After all that, going over to Cecelia’s house, strangling her, running her car into the creek, all these would have been easy, almost an afterthought. Thanks for nothing, Mom.
What none of this explained, I told them, was the attack on me at the conference center the morning this whole thing had started. I believed I could rule out the Jerk.
There was only one person left: Courtney MacEwan, whose life I had ruined, she claimed. But I hadn’t been to blame for that. As usual, though, John Richard had been as unwilling as ever to take responsibility for his own desires. He’d wanted freedom to live on his own and do what he wanted. So he’d convinced Courtney, I firmly believed, that I was responsible for their breakup. And so she’d hired someone. Marla had even seen her paying him, although I couldn’t prove anything.
Courtney had seen Roger Mannis stalking my events, yelling at me about infractions. It bothered me that I couldn’t say without a doubt that Roger Mannis had messed up my food and attacked me. And yet he knew about the math of spoilage and how to turn off compressors that most people would just ignore. His skinny Uriah Heep body shape certainly matched the one of the person who’d shoved me out of the way and chopped the back of my neck.
What could I do about this? I couldn’t get him fired on a hunch. With John Richard gone, would Roger Mannis become the new jerk in my life? Sort of like Moriarty, running through all of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures as the impersonation of evil?
Courtney and Roger weren’t talking, but that wasn’t the end of it. The next time I catered and Roger Mannis showed up to bother me, I was calling the cops. And I had a new gig coming up: A friend of Brewster Motley had tasted my food and wanted me to come into their law offices to prepare breakfast and lunch. I wasn’t going to worry about Roger Mannis now; I was going to prepare for him. He wasn’t going to hurt me again and get away with it.
And then, after all that, good began to happen.
The day after Sandee Brisbane ran into the fire, I called Ginger Vikarios and told her what I suspected about John Richard being the father of their grandson. Let’s get our boys together, I’d said. Ginger had burst into tears. Fourteen-year-old Augustus Vikarios—Gus—would love to have a brother.
Along with her last will and testament, Talitha Vikarios had left her parents a separate set of instructions. It said that if Goldy Korman ever came into their lives and wanted to see Gus, it was okay, as long as she received the enclosed letter. When I visited Ginger Vikarios that same afternoon, she gave me it to me, along with heart-wrenching photos of Talitha with her little boy, who looked just like Arch, from infant to teenager.
Then, finally, I read Talitha’s letter to me.
Dear Goldy,If you ever do get t
his letter, it means that I died…not a pleasant thought! But you should know that my Gus and your Arch are half brothers. I don’t imagine they look alike, but maybe they do. Anyway, I didn’t tell anybody that Dr. Korman and I had an affair. I thought I was in love, but never mind. He wasn’t. And the main thing is, I wanted you and Dr. Korman and Arch to be a happy family without me, and without Gus.Oh, Goldy, please understand that I wanted my disappearance to be a gift to you. When I heard you were divorced, I wrote this letter and included it with my will, to be opened only if you somehow found out about Gus. I don’t want him to be a burden to you. I just want him to have a family besides my parents, whose career in the church was ruined by his appearance.I tried to do the right thing, a lot of right things, really, and I’m not sure any of them turned out right. But I have a great boy, and I hope you can find it in your heart to love him.Talitha Vikarios
In-Your-Face Strawberry Pie (I)
Crust
1 cup chopped filberts
½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
2 cups all-purpose flour
In a wide, dry frying pan, toast the filberts over medium-low heat, stirring, until they emit a nutty scent and have turned a very light brown. Allow to cool on paper towels.
Preheat the oven to 350°. Butter a 9-by-13-inch or 10-by-14-inch glass pan.
Mix the nuts, melted butter, and flour until thoroughly combined, then press this mixture evenly onto the bottom of the pan.
Bake the crust for about 20 to 30 minutes, or until the crust is set and has turned a very light brown. Set aside on a rack to cool completely before filling.
Topping (see note)
1½ pounds fresh strawberries, trimmed and hulled
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup water
Mash the strawberries with a potato masher until they are crushed. Measure them; you should have about 2 cups. Mix the sugar with the cornstarch. In a large saucepan, heat the strawberries, sugar mixture, and water over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Stirring constantly with a wooden spoon or heatproof spatula, raise the heat to medium-high (low altitude) or high (high altitude), and heat to boiling. (The mixture will be very hot, so be careful of splatters.) Stirring constantly, boil the mixture for about one minute, or until the mixture is very thick and begins to clear. (It will not clear completely.) Remove from the heat and pour into a heatproof bowl. Allow to cool completely.
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