The Cereal Murders gbcm-3

by Diane Mott Davidson

  I dressed quickly, gave Schulz a long, wordless hug, and hightailed it toward home in the Rover. It was just past midnight. The snow had stopped and the clouds had parted. The moon shone high and bright in the sky, a pure white crescent. The clean, cold air gushing through the car windows was incomparably sweet. I felt wonderful, light-headed, lighthearted, giddy. I steered the Rover with one hand and laughed. An enormous weight had lifted from me; I was floating.

  Unfortunately, my hope of sneaking quietly to bed was not to be realized. When I pulled up curbside, it was my house, and mine alone on the snow-covered street, that shone like a beacon. Lights blazed from every window.

  “Where have you been?” Julian accused when I came through the security system.

  The house reeked of cigarette smoke. Julian had beer on his breath. He looked horrid. His face was gray, his eyes bloodshot. His unwashed mohawk haircut stood up in tiny tepees.

  “Don’t tell me you had more trouble with someone throwing – ” I began, stunned out of my idyll. When he shook his head, I said, “Never mind where I’ve been. What is going on here? You don’t smoke. You’re a swimmer, for God’s sake! And what’s with the beer breath, Mr. Underage?”

  “I have been so worried!” Julian hollered as he slammed into the kitchen ahead of me.

  So much for my great mood. What in heaven’s name was going on? How had Julian gotten himself into such a state? I came home late all the time, although now I recalled belatedly that Julian and Arch usually checked the calendar to see where my catering assignment was on any given evening. Maybe Julian just wasn’t used to not knowing where I was. On the other hand, maybe he was worried about something else. Stay calm, I resolved.

  .I followed him into the kitchen. “Where is Arch?” I said in a low voice.

  “In bed,” Julian tossed over his shoulder, and opened my walk-in refrigerator. Next to the sink were three glass beer bottles, empty, ready to be recycled. Three beers! I could be put in jail for allowing him to drink in my home.

  Chinese stars were scattered over the financial aid books stacked on the gingham tablecloth. Chinese stars are sharp-edged metal stars about the size of an adult’s palm, which is where you can hide them, I had once been told. I had learned about the weapons unexpectedly, when a boy at Arch’s elementary school had been caught with them. The principal had sent the students home with a mimeographed note about the weapons. Used in Tae Kwon Do, Chinese stars were banned at the school because when thrown, the letter explained, they could inflict great damage. The fellow who had brought them to Furman Elementary School had been summarily suspended. Looking straight at Julian, I scooped them all up and placed them in a pile on the counter.

  “What is going on?”

  Julian emerged from the refrigerator. He held a platter of cookies. In times of stress, eat sweets.

  He said, “I’m going to kill the kid who threatened Arch.” So saying, he popped two cookies into his mouth and chewed voraciously.

  “Really. If you have cookies on top of beer, you’ll throw up.”

  He slammed the platter down. “Don’t you even care? Do you realize he’s not safe at that school?”

  “Well, excuse me, Mr. Mom. Yes, I realize it. Mr. Perkins seems to think it’s a joke, however. A seventh-grade joke.” I took a cookie. “Arch called Schulz, though, and told him all about the snake.”

  Julian slapped his compact body down on a chair; he ran a hand through the sparse crop of hair. “Do you think we could hire a bodyguard for Arch? How much would that cost?”

  I swallowed. “Julian. You are very protective and sweet. However. You are overreacting. A bodyguard is not the answer to Arch’s problems.”

  “You don’t know these people! They’re vicious! They steal and cheat! Look at what they did to Keith!”

  “What people?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “You just don’t get it. You’re just… indifferent. The Elk Park Prep people, that’s what people. Perkins is always talking about trust and responsibility. Two coats, a cassette, and forty dollars were stolen out of my locker last year. Trust? It’s a crock.”

  “Okay. Look. Julian, please. I’m not indifferent; I agree with you that there’s a problem. I just don’t know what to do. But I can tell you a bodyguard is out of the question.”

  His eyes opened; he scowled. “I went to the newspaper because I know there’s a snake lady in Aspen Meadow. You know, she comes into the schools and does demonstrations with live snakes. Maybe we can find out who got the rattler by contacting her, I know she sells them – “

  “Julian! For heaven’s sake!” “Don’t you understand what’s at stake here? He’s not safe! None of us is safe!”

  With a third cookie halfway to my mouth, I gaped at him. “Couldn’t you please cool off? The way to react to this is not to smoke, drink, pullout your weapons, and put the screws on the snake lady, okay?” I put the cookie back on the platter and took a deep breath. “Won’t you please go up and get some sleep? You’re going to need your energy, with that midterm tomorrow and the college boards right around the corner. I need to go to bed too,” I added as an afterthought.

  “Do you promise me you’ll follow through with Schulz?”

  “I’m way ahead of you, Julian.” He thought about that for a minute, then shot an accusing look at me. “You never told me where you were.”

  “Not that I need to answer to you, but I actually had dinner with Schulz. Okay?”

  He glanced at the ceramic clock that hangs over my sink. One o’clock. “Kinda late for dinner, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Julian, go to bed.”

  8

  My phone rang at seven o’clock. I groped for it. “Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything – “

  “Ah, Goldy the caterer?” said Father Olson.

  “Oh, Lord!” I gargled into the mouthpiece. “Who told you?”

  “Er – “

  “I mean, how could you have found out? It was just last night!”

  “What?”

  I pressed my face into my pillow and knew better than to speak. An awkward silence ensued while I involuntarily recalled the Sunday school teaching on sexual activity between single adults – “… either single and celibate or married and faithful.”

  Oh well. The silence lengthened. Father Olson cleared his throat.

  I sat up gingerly, wondering if priests were frequently greeted with early morning guilt. Maybe they learned to ignore it. After a minute, Father Olson resumed a normal tone. “I’m sorry to call so early, Goldy. Ahh . . but I have an all-day clergy meeting in Denver, and I wanted to give you the final count on Friday’s luncheon board meeting. There’ll be twelve of us.”

  I swallowed hard. “Twelve. How biblical.”

  “Can you tell me the menu? Because of our theological discussion.”

  “Fish,” I said succinctly. When I didn’t elaborate, he mumbled something that was not a blessing, and disconnected. The phone immediately rang again. I flopped back down on the mattress. Why me?

  “Come to Aspen Meadow,” intoned Marla’s husky voice, “the promiscuity capital of the western United States.”

  I rolled over and peered blearily at the early morning grayness. Clouds shrouded the distant mountains like a woolen blanket.

  “I don’t know why George Orwell bothered to write 1984. He obviously never had to live in a small town, where Big Brother is a fact of life.”

  “So you’re not going to deny it?” Marla demanded.

  “I’m not saying anything. Tell me why you’re calling so early.”

  “In case you’re wondering how I suspected that something was up, so to speak, my dear, I called your fellow I like so much, that teen housemate-helper – “

  “His name is Julian.”

  “Yes, well, I called you numerous times last night and got young Julian, who, as I say, is somewhat more forthright than his employer. He said your calendar didn’t show any catering assignments.” She stopped to take a noisy bite of something.
“When he still knew nothing at eleven, but was obviously quite besieged with worry, I thought, This is our early-to-bed, early-to-work much-beloved town caterer?” She took time out to chew, then added, “Besides, if you’d been in an accident, I would have heard before now.”

  “How reassuring. Marla, I have a full day of cooking ahead, and so – “

  “Tut-tut, not so fast, tell me what’s going on in your love life. I don’t want to hear about it from anyone else.”

  Well, you’re not going to hear about it from me, either. I laughed lightly and replied, “Everything you suspect is true. And more.”

  “From the wounded warrior, Miss Cut and Chaste? I don’t think so.”

  “Look. I had dinner with Schulz. Let me reflect a little bit before I have to analyze the relationship to death, okay?”

  That seemed to satisfy her. “All right. Go cook. But when you take a break, I have some real news for you concerning the Elk Park preppies. Unless you want it now, of course.”

  This was so typical of her. “Make it fast and simple,” I said. “I haven’t had any caffeine yet.”

  “Don’t complain to me that you’re still in bed, when you could be trying to figure out what’s going on out at Colorado’s premier prep school. All right-that German pseudo-academic guy out there? The one who wrote the Faust dissertation?”

  “Egon Schlichtmaier. What about him?”

  “He helped you with that dinner, right?”

  “He did. I don’t know much about him.”

  “Well, I do, because he’s single and has therefore been the subject of the usual background investigation from the women in step aerobics.”

  I shook my head. How women at the Aspen Meadow Athletic Club could manage to step up, down, and sideways at dizzying speeds while trading voluminous amounts of news and gossip was one of the wonders of modern-physiology. Yet it was done, regularly and enthusiastically.

  I ordered, “Go ahead.”

  “Egon Schlichtmaier is twenty-seven years old,” Marla rattled on, “but he and his family immigrated to this country when there was still a Berlin Wall, in the seventies. Despite his problems learning English, Herr Schlichtmaier got a good education, including a Ph.D. in literature from dear old c.o. in Boulder. But poor Egon was unable to get a college teaching job.”

  “So what else is new? I heard the ratio of humanities doctorates to available jobs is about ten to one.”

  “Let me finish. Egon Schlichtmaier is also extremely good-looking. He works out with weights and has a body to die for.”

  I conjured up a mental picture of the history teacher. He was short, which meant I could look right into his olive-toned baby face with its big brown eyes. He had curly black hair and long black eyelashes, and whenever I had seen him he had been wearing khaki pants, an oxford-cloth shirt in some pastel shade, and a fashionable jacket. Ganymede meets Ralph Lauren.

  “What else?” The lack of coffee was beginning to get to me. Besides, and I was astonished that I even had this thought, Schulz might be trying to reach me.

  “All right, here’s the scoop… he was a teaching assistant at C.O., and he was caught having affairs with no less than three female undergraduates. At the same time. Which is his business, I guess, except that the word got around at the Modern Language Association convention. The universities, when they got wind of it, wouldn’t offer him a job scrubbing floors. Seems they thought the last thing they needed was a prof who would cause trouble among tuition-paying undergraduates.”

  Since I was no longer what we would call pristine in the lust department, I avoided judgment. But three at a time? Consecutively or simultaneously? I said, “Did all the academics from coast to coast know these details?”

  “The way I heard it, only the hiring schools knew.” She chewed some more of whatever it was. “The headmaster at Elk Park Prep owed the head of the C.U. comparative literature department a favor from some kid the department chairman helped to get into C.U., so Perkins hired Egon Schlichtmaier as a kind of interim thing to teach U.S. history. Mind you, this was after he had fired another American history teacher, a Miss Pamela Samuelson, over some unknown scandal last year. This year Egon was supposed to keep looking for a college teaching job.”

  “Miss Samuelson? Miss Pamela Samuelson? Why is that name familiar?”

  “Pamela Samuelson was in your aerobics class before you quit the club, dummy.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, still unable to conjure up a face. “What about Egon Schlichtmaier’s history with the female undergraduates? How could Perkins justify having that kind of guy around?”

  Marla sighed gustily. “Come on, Goldy. First of all, as you and I both know, if nobody squeals about how awful a guy is, then his reputation remains intact.”

  “So the undergraduates weren’t talking. And the news didn’t outlive the MLA convention?”

  “Apparently not. And if anybody else did find out, I think the spin Perkins was looking for was that this was youthful excess that people would soon forget if the issue were left alone. The word is, Perkins warned Egon not to get involved with the preppie females, or he’d be teaching French to the longhorn steers down at the stock show. And there’s no evidence Egon went after anyone who wasn’t close to his own age. More on that later. Here’s the problem. How willing do you think a college would be to hire Schlichtmaier if his background were exposed in a series of articles for the Mountain Journal by an ambitious student-reporter aiming to spice up his application to the Columbia School of Journalism?”

  “No, no, not Keith Andrews…”

  “The same. And guess who was trying to get Keith not to publish the articles? Your dear Julian!”

  “Oh, God. Are you sure?”

  “So I hear. And guess who was sleeping with Schlichtmaier until she supposedly heard the whole background thing from none other than her favorite student, Keith Andrews?”

  “I can’t imagine, but I know you’re going to tell me.”

  “Mademoiselle Suzanne Ferrell. I don’t know whether they have broken up irreparably, but I’m supposed to find out at the nine o’clock step class.”

  “Tell me about this unknown scandal with Miss… who was Schlichtmaier’s predecessor?”

  “Pamela Samuelson, I told you.”

  “Could you check on it? I’d like to get together with her.”

  “She’s moved to another aerobics class, so it’ll be tough.”

  “Okay, let me tell Schulz all this.” Marla giggled suggestively. “Really, I just told this story so you’d have an excuse to call him this morning.”

  She rang off with the promise that she would do all this snooping if I paid her in cookies. I promised her Chocolate-Dipped Biscotti, and she swooned.

  I did my yoga, then reflected on the communications network in Aspen Meadow as I dressed. When the town developed from a mountain resort to a place where people lived year-round, the first social institution had been the fire department. In a climate so dry a fire could consume acres of forest in less than a blink, the need for mutual protection had drawn even rugged loners into social contact. With the weather and roads unpredictable in winter, now it was the telephone that people used to tell everything about everybody. That is, if you didn’t have the benefit of step aerobics. But sometimes I would hear so much news about somebody that the next time I saw the person in question, he would look as if he’d aged. Egon Schlichtmaier could easily sprout gray hairs in the next week, and I would never notice.

  By the time I got downstairs, the sky had turned the color of charcoal and was beginning to spit flakes of snow onto the pine trees around my house. But the enveloping grayness brought no dark mood. In fact, I realized suddenly, I felt fabulous. The weather was a quilt over a delicious inner coziness. I didn’t want to admit-to Marla, Schulz, Arch, even to myself – what this new state was, but it felt a lot like falling in you-know-what.

  Seeing Arch and Julian in the kitchen, however, gave me a jolt of alarm. Julian’s skin was as ashen as the sky
outside, and the pouches under his eyes were deep smudges. When we lived and worked at a client’s house over the summer, he went to bed early, was up at six to swim his laps, shower, and dress carefully before setting off for Elk Park Prep. I couldn’t remember when he’d taken the time to swim in the week since Keith’s murder. This morning he looked as if he had had no sleep at all, and he was wearing the same rumpled clothes from the night before. I was beginning to wonder if living with us was the best thing for him. But I didn’t want to get him upset by asking more questions, so I just gave Arch, who was dressed in three layers of green shirts complemented by dark green jeans, a cheery smile. Arch smiled back gleefully.

  “Julian’s heating his special chocolate croissants!” he announced. “He says we don’t have time for anything else!” To my look of dismay, Arch added, “Come on, Mom. Have one with your espresso.”

  While a chocolate croissant would hardly be Headmaster Perkins’ idea of a nutritious breakfast, I quickly surrendered. Julian was not just a good cook, he was an artist. He had the touch with food and the love of culinary creation that are truly rare, and he’d had early and excellent experience as an assisting pastry chef at his father’s bakery in Bluff, Utah. Given his preference for healthful food, his experimentation with puff pastry was a delightful aberration. In helping with my business, Julian had turned out to be worth his weight in Beluga caviar. Or radicchio, which he would prefer. But I knew he had a calculus midterm that afternoon, and I didn’t want him to be bustling around making breakfast in addition to everything else.

  “Julian, let me do this,” I said gently.

  “Just let me finish!” he said gruffly. He pulled a cookie sheet from the oven. The golden-brown pastry cylinders oozed melted chocolate.

  I was saved from having to deal with Julian’s hostility by the phone.

  “Goldilocks’ Catering – “

  “Feeling good?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “How about this, then,” Tom Schulz said. “Are you feeling great?” I could hear his grin. Unfortunately, I could also feel myself blush.”