Dark Tort

by Diane Mott Davidson

  It would take me at least five minutes to jog up there, and several more to find someone with a cell phone who could call an ambulance. Plus, I was freezing. I needed to find someplace closer.

  I peered along the line of nearby storefronts. Next to the unopened café was Art, Music, and Copies. Inside, a gray fluorescent bulb blinked, as if someone had forgotten to turn it off. Still, I thought I remembered that the copy place, as we called it, was supposed to be open late. I trotted up the sidewalk and banged on the large plate-glass window, which boasted hot pink lettering that screamed “You Own It, We’ll Clone It!” I tried the door, which rattled reassuringly: it was locked, but loose. Someone had to be in there, I reasoned. Still, as I knocked harder, I wondered if I should be running up to the grocery store.

  When there was no response, I hammered mercilessly on the glass door. And it broke.

  Finally someone appeared. I even recognized him: a young fellow, twentyish, Dusty’s boyfriend. Vic Something. I’d seen him over at the Routts’ house from time to time.

  He yelled, “Why did you do that?”

  “I need help!” I called, surveying the shards now littering the inside of the store. “It’s an emergency!”

  “I guess so.” Vic was tall and very slender, his peaked face set off by an explosion of curls the color of straw. As he moved toward me, his young, high forehead wrinkled like folded tissue.

  “Could you just hurry up?” I implored.

  Vic’s long legs finally brought him to the door. “You didn’t have to break the door. Oh, it’s you, Goldy,” he said breathlessly. “Well, I can only let you do a couple of copies, and you’re going to have to pay cash because—”

  “I need a phone!”

  His hand was unexpectedly warm and moist as he grabbed mine. “Take it easy, take it easy. Okay, step over the glass.” His last name swum up into consciousness: Vic Zaruski. Yes, definitely Dusty’s boyfriend, but did I recall that they’d broken up? I wasn’t sure what kind of connection Vic had with Dusty now, if any, because my mind wasn’t working properly.

  “I simply have to call help.” I stumbled forward over the pile of glass and into the store’s warm interior. “Show me the phone. Please. Someone’s hurt.”

  Vic, his wide, dark brown eyes blinking in disbelief, his hair glowing like a ragged halo in the flickering neon, seemed at a loss for words. But he moved to the counter, picked up the phone, and handed it to me.

  As I punched in the three digits, Vic’s worried glance took me in. He reached underneath the counter and pulled out a sweatshirt. “Put this on,” he whispered. I clutched it and nodded thanks. When the emergency operator answered, I told her what I’d found, and where. I said we needed medical help right away.

  Vic drew back, his face drained of color. He said, “What?” But I had to ignore him, as I was telling the operator that in addition to an ambulance, she needed to send the sheriff’s department.

  I pulled the sweatshirt over my head as the operator continued to talk, telling me to be calm, that help was on the way.

  “What’s going on?” Vic demanded. Wind blew through the hole where the door had been, and a couple of curious ticket seekers from the grocery store peeked in. How much had they heard? What if they decided to go across the street to poke around and try to see what I was so upset about? Abruptly, I hung up the phone and bolted for the smashed door.

  “Was there a break-in?” Vic persisted from behind me. “You said you needed an ambulance for Dusty? Why? Why do the cops need to come?”

  When we reached the glass, I suddenly turned back. Vic collided with me and I caught a whiff of his scent, some musky boy-cologne.

  “Vic,” I said, my voice low. “You need to herd these people back up to the grocery store. It’s important that they not go across the street. Please.”

  “I can’t—” he began to protest. But I ignored him, as well as the people staring at me as I stepped over the glass and onto the sidewalk.

  “Hey, Goldy—” came one voice, but I didn’t look back.

  “I’ll get my cell,” a female voice announced, but I didn’t pay any attention to that either. My skin needled under the huge sweatshirt as I walked quickly down the slick sidewalk. I knew I shouldn’t be talking to anyone now except medical and law enforcement people. No sense making more of a mess of this than I already had.

  Behind me, Vic’s excited voice told the curiosity seekers to get back up to the grocery store. He ordered them not to follow us. Us? Dammit. Vic’s footsteps echoed down the pavement behind me.

  “Vic, you cannot follow me,” I shouted. He didn’t answer, and soon he was right at my side. As we walked, he begged me to talk to him, but I just shook my head. Finally we arrived at the grass-covered hill that overlooked the road. We stood, waiting, for what felt like an eternity, but which in actuality was probably not more than fifteen minutes. Vic’s frustration and fear radiated like a negatively charged aura.

  In the time since I’d raced across the street, the darkness had deepened and the cold intensified. On the far side of the street, the parking lot still held Dusty’s forlorn Civic. Vic began to cough in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that he was crying. When I told him again to stay put, he moved away from me.

  Across the street, a long black car moved into the parking lot. Then another dark vehicle, this one coming from the I-70 side, pulled into the lot. Not even a moment later, a third car followed them. Oh, Lord, I thought as I recognized all three cars. Maybe the woman with the cell, or perhaps someone else outside the grocery store, had seen me bolting from the building occupied by Hanrahan & Jule. I had to have looked suspicious, frantic and coatless, as I leaped across the street, ran up the shopping-center sidewalk, and banged on the copy-place door. When I’d broken the glass and shouted for a phone, then called for an ambulance and the sheriff’s department, anyone within fifty yards would have heard me.

  I stopped at the bottom of the hill and glanced back at the crowd of folks outside the grocery store. They were moving en masse, making their way down to where Vic and I were standing. Welcome to living in a small town. Someone had thought, What’s up at this time of night, with the caterer running away from the office building occupied by H&J? That same someone had put two and two together and made a call. And now, across the street in the H&J lot, we were faced with the result.

  The lawyers are coming! The lawyers are coming!

  Great.

  CHAPTER 1

  I tripped over the body of my friend Dusty Routt at half past ten on the night of October 19.

  At first I thought it was a joke. Loaded down with bread-making supplies, I had just pushed through the heavy wooden door of Hanrahan & Jule, the boutique law firm in Aspen Meadow where I’d been catering breakfasts for several months. My foot caught and I stumbled forward. I thought, Those H&J clowns are up to something. Again.

  The bag of flour I was carrying slid from my hands and exploded on the carpet. Two jars of yeast plummeted onto the coffee table, where they burst into shards and powder. My last bottle of molasses sailed in a wide arc and cracked open on the receptionist’s cherrywood desk. A thick wave of sweet, dark liquid began a gluey descent across the phone console. My steel bowl of bread sponge catapulted out of my arms and hit the wall.

  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to change my own trajectory toward an end table. It was one of two rough-hewn, cabin-style monstrosities that the decorator had thought necessary to make Hanrahan & Jule look like what it claimed to be: “your Rocky Mountain neighborhood law firm!”

  I hit the end table, ricocheted over to the desk, cried out, and finally landed on my stomach. I had tripped over I-knew-not-what in a spectacular manner, and now I was prone on an imitation Native American rug. I shrieked, “Very funny, fellas!” But the lawyers who pulled these pranks didn’t appear.

  I wiped flour out of my eyes and waited for the guys to reveal themselves. When they didn’t, I tried to focus on what I could see of the small lobby space. Lamps made
of elk horns sat on the clunky tables. The bentwood couches, which were placed beneath homey paintings of food, were empty. I was lying on a sponge-soaked picture of a tepee. The pain assaulting my tailbone was excruciating.

  Gritting my teeth, I figured I was about as upset as any caterer could be, when the bread for the following morning’s breakfast has been wrecked the night before. I still hadn’t seen what had caused my fall. Nor was there any telltale noise. In fact, the law firm of Hanrahan & Jule was completely quiet.

  I’d ended up on the far side of the massive coffee table, a thick column of wood carved, I’d been told, from the trunk of an ancient blue spruce tree. I rubbed my behind and stared at the dark lacquered bark. Had I just stumbled over my own feet? No, I was sure the small cadre of lawyers who were not in Maui this week, ostensibly engaging in continuing education, was responsible for this mishap.

  I heaved myself onto my back, wondering if the guys—and that’s what all ten H&J lawyers were, guys—would think this was more funny than when they’d put green food coloring into the cheddar omelettes. Or how about the live moths that had fluttered out of one of my folded tablecloths? And then, oh Lord, then—there was the gin-switched-for-water in my espresso machine. Soon after that trick, I’d seen one of the partners pouring vodka into the very same machine’s water well. I’d used my tray to whack him from behind—accidentally, of course—and spewed forty dollars’ worth of Stolichnaya across the firm’s huge kitchen.

  Staring at the ceiling, I sighed. Now that my flour, yeast, molasses, and sponge were kaput, was the partner who’d ordered the breakfast going to run out and buy freshly baked loaves for his Friday-morning meeting with clients? I doubted it very much. I wrenched my body around to survey the damage.

  And there, sprawled on the far side of the coffee table, was Dusty Routt.

  In addition to being a friend, Dusty was our neighbor. She was also in training to become the firm’s second paralegal, and she often got drafted into playing a part in these high jinks. At the very least, she was sometimes pressed into trying to cover them up, as I’d discovered after the spiked-coffee affair, when I’d caught her disposing of a plastic bag holding two empty gin bottles. “Orders from King Richard,” Dusty had whispered conspiratorially. “He says I have to get rid of the evidence. Without you catching me, that is,” she’d added with a characteristic giggle as she slammed the Dumpster lid shut. Since King Richard was Dusty’s uncle, Richard Chenault, the same partner whose Stoly I later disposed of, I knew a confrontation was out of the question. Just this past August, Richard’s secretary had been summarily fired when she’d had the audacity—or stupidity—to send a locket engraved for Richard’s mistress to his, uh, wife. Richard’s wife, a doctor named K.D., had promptly filed for divorce.

  I stared at Dusty’s back, waiting. I couldn’t see her face. Still, I knew it was Dusty. There was her highlighted-at-home hair; there was the like-new beige Calvin Klein suit she was wearing. I’d actually found the suit for her at Aspen Meadow’s secondhand store. Now I wanted to hear her high, joyful voice as she jumped up to cry, “Surprise!” I anticipated a trio of attorneys leaping out from behind the receptionist’s desk and squealing, “Gotcha!”

  But I still couldn’t hear anything at all.

  “Dusty!” I whispered hoarsely. “Get up. Gag’s over.”

  She didn’t move. I did finally hear something, but it was only the steady plink plop of beaten egg dripping onto one of the end tables. My gaze shifted from Dusty to where the sponge liquid had first landed, on Charlie Baker’s painting of peach pie, one of three of his famous pictures of food that adorned the lobby walls. The frame was broken. Had I done that to dear, departed Charlie Baker’s artwork?

  Charlie Baker. I swallowed. Don’t go there, I ordered myself. But then I squinted at some splotches and drips that had stained the painted pie, with its list of ingredients meticulously penned underneath…

  Fear scurried down my back. I hauled myself up onto my hands and knees. Dusty Routt, the pretty, ambitious twenty-year-old whose family had lived across the street from us for the last three years, lay a foot away. She still wasn’t moving.

  “Oh God, Dusty!” I yelled. “Get up!”

  Dusty’s body was twisted, I saw now, and that was why her face was turned toward the carpet. Her twenty-first birthday was the next day, she’d excitedly informed me. The carrot cake I’d made for her still sat wrapped in my caterer’s van. But she hadn’t even twitched since I’d tripped over her.

  “Dammit!” I hollered as I scooted forward and grabbed her wrist. I couldn’t feel a pulse.

  Maybe it’s just weak. Maybe I’m not feeling in the right spot. I struggled to a half-standing position. Dusty looked as if she’d fallen sideways. Her pretty face was obscured by her tumble of blond-brown hair. I gently shook her shoulders, but nothing happened.

  I pushed my fingers into a new place on Dusty’s wrist, then noticed that the beige skirt had somehow gotten caught up around her hips, hips she had ruthlessly slimmed by riding an exercise bike at Aspen Meadow’s new rec center every morning before showing up for work. When King Richard had hired Dusty, as ambitious a niece as any tightfisted uncle could ever hope to have, she’d been determined to look as mature as possible. She’d just finished her associate’s degree and was starting paralegal school, and was set on acquiring—and fitting into—a professional wardrobe. Remembering her happy gratitude when I’d presented her with the suit, I gently shook her again with my free hand.

  “Dusty, it’s me, Goldy,” I murmured as I let go of her wrist and reached under her shoulders with both hands. “I’m going to turn you over.”

  Her body was limp, but warm. There was redness around her neck. I saw now that blood was seeping out of a small gash at the top of her forehead, and her pretty face was flushed on one side. Her blue eyes were half open. Her slack mouth contrasted with her bright, curly hair. She didn’t moan or blink, and I cursed silently. When I shook her again, her legs sprawled like a scarecrow’s; her hands flopped open, palm up. The thoughts I should get out of here and Don’t touch anything competed ferociously with If she’s still alive, I could help her.

  I felt in my apron pocket for my cell phone. Not there. I patted my pants pockets. Again, nothing. I’d been in a hurry to get over here after my van wouldn’t start, and I must have left the phone in the front seat. I gently let go of Dusty and jumped over to the reception desk. But when I picked up the molasses-covered receiver to call for help, there was no dial tone. I raced to the first office on the hall, felt for a light, and found another phone. I jabbed buttons, to no effect. Did the H&J folks shut down all telecommunications at night? I hadn’t a clue.

  I returned to Dusty and frantically started CPR. I noticed that the redness around her neck was quite dark, not just pink. My heart faltered. I wanted to talk to Dusty, to ask if someone had hurt her, and why. But I couldn’t do any of those things, because I was trying to breathe life into her lungs.

  As I worked feverishly on my young neighbor, I kept thinking, This isn’t happening. There was fake blood. There were weak pulses. I still half expected her to jump up, erupt into giggles, and shout for everybody to leap out from assorted hiding places. I felt the other wrist for a pulse. Even if it’s weak, I remembered from my days in Med Wives 101, keep going. I momentarily stopped CPR and waited for Dusty to breathe on her own. She didn’t.

  Leave, that same inner voice commanded me. Get out. Call for help from somewhere else. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I was bent on bringing about the resuscitation part of cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

  After—What was it? Five minutes? Ten? A half hour?—I gave up. Later, the cops wanted to know when I’d left the H&J office. And every time they asked, I told them I didn’t know, that time had turned fluid once I’d discovered Dusty. And why did that matter so much? I wondered. I could not pinpoint the actual moment when I exhaled, got to my feet, and again glanced in vain around the office for something that might explain what was going
on. Feeling foolish, I peeked around the firm’s massive front door to make sure no one was waiting in the hall. Then I dashed out.

  The door closed with a firm k-chook. I pulled the red metal ring with my two office keys out of my pocket. I always kept the H&J keys on a separate ring, because I had been warned that losing them meant a five-hundred-dollar fine. I secured the bolt with the second key and raced down the half-lit hallway.

  If only, if only, if only I’d been here on time, I repeated to myself, Dusty would still be alive. But I wasn’t going to think that way. It was possible she could still be revived. Possible, but not probable. Feeling like a failure, I pushed through the metal service door.

  Outside, the chilly-sweet autumn air smacked my face and made me cough. A sharp mountain breeze was lashing the trees that circled the rear parking lot. Nearby, a neon light illuminated pines, spruce, and a stand of aspens. The golden leaves cloaking the aspens’ white-barked branches quaked and shuddered. Another whip of air sprayed dust and ice into my eyes. I needed my cell phone. Had I locked my van after parking back here in the service lot? I could not remember.

  My breath came out in frosted white tatters as I trotted, half blind, toward my normally trustworthy vehicle, which had delayed me tonight with its drained battery. I could imagine the voice of my husband, Tom, a sheriff’s department investigator, urging me to get cracking. Get out of there. But I didn’t know what had happened, and I desperately wanted to help Dusty. Tom’s voice drilled my inner ear: Never stay alone at a crime scene that hasn’t been secured. Right, right. This was a rule every cop learned at the academy. But I wasn’t sure I’d actually been at a crime scene, because of course, I wasn’t a cop. But being married to a cop, I’d learned the rules—sometimes the hard way. And I often didn’t exactly follow them, as Tom frequently was at pains to point out.

  Hugging my sides, I hurtled awkwardly across the gravel. Dizziness assaulted me, and I slowed to a walk and tried to breathe normally. What was the swooshing noise in my ears? I tried to ignore it, tried to tell myself it was the hum of traffic from Interstate 70. My white shirt gleamed in the neon haze drifting down from the crown of a nearby light pole. Where was my jacket? Inside the van, probably. I rummaged in the pockets of my pants, and realized I had dropped my car keys in the law firm office. With just the smallest amount of hope, I pulled on the van door. Locked, of course.