The Cereal Murders

by Diane Mott Davidson

  Hank Dawson trundled rapidly back into the kitchen. His voice cracked when he announced, “Oh, God, all the ambulances in the entire mountain area are tied up! Is she going to be all right? Should one of us take her to a hospital? Is she gonna die? What?”

  Schulz hustled me out of there. Amid the siren, lights, squeal of tires, and Schulz’s inability to get his cellular phone to work, we hightailed it out of Aspen Meadow North and got onto Interstate 70. As the dun-brown hills whizzed by, I held my hand by the wrist like a tourniquet. I tried to think of the spider venom as a toxic black ink that I was willing to stay in my palm and not travel through my veins into the bloodstream.

  Once we were on I-70, Schulz’s cellular phone kicked in and he announced to Dispatch where he was going. Then he called the poison center. Through the crackle of interference they directed us to Denver General Hospital. It had the closest source of antivenin, they told Schulz. My hand burned.

  Cursing the welling tears and my shaking voice, I asked, “Isn’t this supposed to go away or something? It’s not really poisonous, is it?”

  He kept his eyes on the road as we whipped past a truck. “Depends. Brown recluse would’ve been worse,”

  I cleared my throat. “I have to be able to take care of Arch….” I was beginning to perspire heavily. Each time I took a breath, the bite throbbed. It was like being in labor.

  Schulz said, “Feel nauseated?” I told him no. After a minute he said, “You’re not going to die. I don’t know why you go into that damn café, though. Last summer somebody pushed you into a glass case there. I’m telling you, Goldy, that place and you don’t mix.”

  “No kidding.” Perspiration trickled down my scalp. I stared at my swollen finger, now overcome with a dull, numbing pain. Strangely, I also felt a hardening pain developing between my shoulders. I took a breath. Agony. “I’m beginning to hurt all over. How’m I going to cook? Why did it have to be my right hand?”

  He flicked me a look. “Why did it have to be you at all?”

  Headache squeezed my temples mercilessly. I whispered, “Good thing you came along when you did.”

  “The posse,” he said impassively.

  In the emergency room a bleached-blond nurse asked in a clipped voice about allergies and insurance. A dark-complected doctor asked about how long ago this had happened and what I had been doing to make the spider bite me. Some people. While the doctor examined the bite, I closed my eyes and did Lamaze breathing. The childbirth experience, like the divorce experience, can give you a reservoir of behaviors to deal with crises for the rest of your life.

  The doctor finally decreed that invenomation had not been severe. I did not, he said, need to be hospitalized. He checked my vital signs, then told me to take hot baths this afternoon and tonight, to relieve the muscular pain in my back. When I asked about working, he said I might be cooking again by tomorrow, that I should see how I felt. Before he breezed out he said tonight was for rest.

  “Oh, gosh,” I exclaimed, suddenly remembering, “the red and white cookies for the school! I don’t know if Audrey remembered them!”

  “Goldy, please,” said Schulz, “why not let somebody else—”

  “I can’t, I worked all morning on those things,” I said stubbornly, and scooted off the examination table. Dizziness rocked me as soon as my feet hit the ground. Shaking his head, Schulz held my arm as we walked down the hall to a pay phone. He punched in the number of the café and tried to cut through the barrage of frantic queries from Hank Dawson. Finally, sighing, Schulz handed me the phone.

  Hank’s inquiries about whether I was okay were immediately followed by a volley of questions designed to ascertain whether I was going to sue him. No, I wouldn’t contemplate legal action, I promised, if he would retrieve the platters of cookies from my van and get them over to the prep school. Hank said Audrey had left in her “usual high-strung state” and had forgotten them, but that he would make sure they were delivered. Somewhat ruefully, he added that the Stanford rep had worried aloud about hygiene conditions at the café. To add insult to injury, Hank informed me, the rep hadn’t even stayed for a free lunch. Greer’s future at Stanford didn’t look so hot.

  After what seemed like an interminable wait—I couldn’t decide if the doctor was waiting for me to die, get better, or just disappear—the blond nurse reappeared and announced that I could go. Schulz drove me home. I felt embarrassed to have taken so much of his time, and said so.

  He chuckled. “Are you kidding? Most exciting lunch I’ve had all week.”

  Audrey Coopersmith’s white pickup truck sat in front of my house. Audrey got out, and with her shoulders rolled inward, marched with her long duck-walk stride up to my front porch: the first official greeter. Bless her, she had brought a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of carnations. As Schulz and I came slowly up the walk, she stood, feet apart, hands clasping the flowers behind her back. Her face seemed frozen in anxiety. Schulz still held me gently by the right elbow, but he lifted his chin and squinted his eyes, appraising Audrey.

  Under his breath he said, “Have you introduced me to this Mouseketeer?”

  “Don’t.”

  When we got to the front door, Audrey wordlessly thrust the flowers at me. Then, seeing my bandaged hand, she awkwardly drew the bouquet back and blushed deeply. I mumbled a thanks and reluctantly asked her to come in. It took me a minute to remember my security code. Put it down to spider toxin fuzzing the brain. After some fumbling we all stood in my kitchen.

  Audrey’s eyes widened at the vases and baskets of roses, daisies, freesias, astromeria. The kitchen smelled like a flower show.

  “Gosh. Guess you didn’t need carnations after all.”

  “Of course I did, now, meet my friend,” I said, and introduced her to Schulz, who was already ferreting through the freezer to dig out ice cubes for my finger. Schulz wiped his hands and courteously addressed her. I added that Audrey was a temporary helper for the catering business along with her work at the Tattered Cover. Schulz cocked his head and said he remembered that Audrey was one of the people who had helped me out the night of the Keith Andrews fatality.

  She pressed her lips together. Her nostrils flared. “Well, Alfred Perkins has decided to move the location of the college advisory evenings.”

  “Yes,” said Schulz with his Santa Claus grin, “going down to the bookstore, right? Terrific place. Will you be helping Goldy on Friday too?” Mr. Charm.

  Audrey visibly relaxed and said yes to both questions. The edges of her mouth may have been starting to turn up in one of her rare grins. Then again, maybe it was my imagination. We were saved from more banter by the telephone. Schulz gestured toward it and raised his eyebrows at me, as in, Should I get it? I nodded.

  It was my mother, calling from New Jersey because she had just heard that there had been a big snowstorm in Colorado. I try to tell my parents, This time of year, there is always lots of snow falling somewhere in the Rockies. Why this meteorological condition is so profoundly newsworthy for the national networks is beyond me. We take the precipitation in stride; the dire announcements just worry Coloradans’ relatives who live elsewhere. I wedged the phone under my chin so I could keep the ice cubes on my right hand.

  “Goldy! Is that the policeman you’ve been seeing? Why is he at your house in the middle of the day?” So much for the snow crisis. But if I told my mother what had just happened, there would be another flood of worried questions. I had never even told her Schulz was a homicide investigator. If she learned that, all hell would break loose.

  “He’s just helping me out,” I told her. “I’ve, uh, had a bit of sickness.”

  My mother’s high voice grew panicked. “Not morning sickness …”

  “Mother. Please. It’s past lunch here, thus well after morning. Not only that, but we’ve had only a tiny amount of snow, and Arch is due home any second—”

  “Tell me again,” she pressed, “is Tom Schulz somebody you knew from C.U.?” This query was designed to ascertain
if Schulz was a college graduate. If she couldn’t have a doctor for a son-in-law, Mom would at least go for well educated.

  I said, “No, not from C.U.” I wanted to say, Last night I had my emotional life changed by this guy … today he drove me down to the hospital and back in a life-threatening situation, you’re not going to believe this, Mother, I’ve finally found somebody who really cares about me…. The phone slipped out of my left hand and bounced off the floor.

  Her more distant voice persisted. “But he’s not just … somebody you met, is he? This isn’t going to be someone you just … picked up at a policeman’s picnic or—?”

  I picked up the phone. “Mother. No. This is someone”—I looked at Schulz and smiled—“very special, very smart. He is unique. He knows all about china and antiques and still was able to get a job with an equal-opportunity employer.”

  “Oh, God, he’s colored—”

  “Mother!” I promised to call over the weekend, and hastily said good-bye.

  Schulz eyed me askance. “Didn’t quite measure up, did I?”

  “I heard her,” Audrey said, and mimicked my mother’s voice, “‘Someone you picked up?’ Sorry, Goldy. Why do women of our mothers’ generation worry so much about what kind of man we’re seeing or married to? Why don’t they worry about how we’re doing? That’s what I tell Heather, ‘I’m worried about you, honey, not some boy you might be dating and what his background is.’” Audrey moved to the sink and poured herself a glass of water. She finished with, “You should have told her Schulz went to Harvard.”

  “Oh, Lord, don’t remind me,” groaned Schulz. He turned and gave me a half-grin. “I went out to Elk Park Prep to get a few things cleared up, and the headmaster asked me where I went to school.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know what he meant, so I said, ‘Well, first there was North Peak Elementary—’ and old Perkins waved his hand and said, ‘Stop right there.’”

  I was shocked. This hurt as much as the spider bite. How dare Perkins insult Schulz, who was in every way his superior? I felt the slight as keenly as if Perkins had criticized Arch. “That imbecile!” I blurted out.

  Schulz turned his unruffled, seawater-green gaze at me. I felt my face redden and a flip-flop tighten my abdomen. “Not to worry, Miss G. I know the difference between a person who’s educated enough to handle life’s challenges and a person who just needs to brag all the time.”

  Audrey’s mouth sagged open. She said, “Make that ‘the difference between a woman who can handle life’s challenges and a man who needs to brag all the time.’”

  Schulz said, “Hmm.”

  I didn’t know where this was going and I didn’t care. But Schulz was interested. To Audrey, he said, “Er, tell me what you mean.”

  Audrey’s tone was defiant. “That’s what I’m trying to teach Heather. I say, ‘Get ahead now, honey, while you’re young, you don’t want to get stuck taking care of some man’s socks and ego.’” She took a shuddering breath. “You see, if you don’t get ahead when you’re young, if you just let things go along, if you trust people …”

  A cloud of bitterness soured her features. “Oh, never mind. All I want is for Heather to have things I never had. She is phenomenally talented,” she said, animated again. “She ran the virtual reality simulator this summer for exploring Mars.” She glared at us fiercely. “Heather is going to be a success.”

  Schulz leaned back in his chair and gave Audrey and me a benevolent, questioning grin. “Success, huh?”

  When we had no response, he got up out of his chair and cocked his head at us. “You feeling okay, Goldy?” When I said I thought so, he added, “I’m going to make some tea.”

  We were silent while Schulz rummaged for cups, saucers, and a pot, and then drew water. Finally Audrey said glumly, “Success is what I’m not.” She ticked off on her fingers. “No meaningful work or career, no relationship, no money …”

  Well, I was not going to interrupt my part-time assistant and say, catering is meaningful work for some of us, if not for you. Catering pays the bills. That’s my definition of meaningful.

  Schulz said, “I grew up in eastern Colorado and paid for my own college education until I was drafted. I didn’t finish a degree until I got out of the army. Criminalistics, University of Colorado at Denver.” He frowned. “I’ve killed people and thought it was wrong, killed them and thought it was right. Some criminals I catch and some I don’t. I make a good salary and I’m unmarried, no kids.” He rubbed his chin, watching Audrey. “But I think of myself as a success. In fact”—here he gave me a wink—“I’m getting more successful all the time.”

  “Huh,” said Audrey.

  The teakettle whistled. Schulz moved efficiently around the kitchen, first ladling in China black tea leaves, then pouring a steaming stream of water into the pot. He ducked into the refrigerator and came out with a dish of leftover Red ‘n’ Whites. I glanced at my watch: 3:00. Arch and Julian would be home within the hour, and we had nothing for dinner. Maybe Julian would want to cook. This time he’d get no argument from me.

  Audrey’s hand trembled as she lifted her teacup and saucer. The cup made a chittering sound as Schulz slowly filled it. Audrey did not look at me when she went on. “… I didn’t go to a school where I could make something out of myself. If only I had studied math, instead of …”

  The pain in my hand was getting worse. I was having trouble focusing on Audrey’s voice, whine whine, Caltech, whine whine Mount Holyoke, Heather’s always been so gifted. Sudden exhaustion swept over me. I dreaded telling Arch and Julian about the spider bite. I longed to take my first doctor-prescribed hot bath. But now Audrey was complaining about how the best possible thing for Heather would be a big science-oriented school in California or the Northeast, since they had the best reputations and would assure her of landing a great job once she graduated. Maybe it was the bite, maybe it was my mood, maybe I had just had it with this kind of talk. Enough.

  “Uncle! A big-name school is not going to make a person. You make it sound like it’s sex or something!”

  Schulz turned down the edges of his mouth in an effort not to laugh. He cleared his throat with a great rumbly sound and said, “Oh, yeah? Like sex? This ought to be interesting. Goldy? You haven’t touched your tea.”

  I slouched back and obligingly sipped. “Let me tell you, my college counselor promised me the moon and I believed her.”

  Audrey said, “Really? Where did you go?” I told her; she was impressed. She said, “Gosh! A camel’s-hair coat in every closet!”

  “Spare me.” I remembered undergraduate nights shivering in freezing rain mixed with snow. I didn’t recall ever seeing a camel’s-hair coat. I sighed. “Where do these reputations come from? People think, If you go to this or that college, you’re in. Go to this or that school and you’ll become beautiful and smart and get a great job and be a successful person. What a joke.”

  “She’s getting cynical in her old age,” Schulz told Audrey out of the side of his mouth. Then to me, brightly, “Would you pass the sugar?”

  “I mean, just look at the catalogue.” I slid Schulz the sugar bowl with my good hand. “Look at the close-up shots of Gothic spires … they do it that way so you won’t see the smog. Look at the good-looking well-dressed preppy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant females striding together across the lush green campus. They and their friends vacated the campus over the weekend, while the less attractive girls stayed alone in the dorms, their minuscule numbers at meals an indictment of their own unpopularity.”

  I put down my teacup and held my hands open as if perusing an imaginary brochure. “Wow! Look at the picture of that energetic lecturer and those students eagerly taking notes—that must be a fascinating class!” I gave them a fascinated-class look. “The class is required for your major, but it took you three and a half years to get into it! Complain to your parents, as I did, and they say, ‘For this we’re paying thousands a year?’” I sipped tea and gave them a wide grin. “Man, I just loved going
to a big-name school.”

  Schulz explained placidly to Audrey, “Goldy has an excitable temperament.”

  “Nah,” I said, surprised by the passion in my little diatribe. “What the heck, I even give the school money.”

  The phone rang. Schulz raised his eyebrows at me again, and again I nodded. This time it was Julian. He had heard about the spider incident when Hank Dawson fulfilled his promise and delivered the cookies. Julian was frantic. Schulz tried to lighten it up by saying, “I’ve warned her not to try to cook with spiders,” but Julian was having none of it. I could hear him yelling.

  I signaled, “Just let me talk to him.” When Schulz resignedly handed me the phone, I said, “Julian, I’m fine, I want you to quit worrying about me—”

  “Who put that spider in the drawer?” he yelled. “Miss Ferrell? Trying to take attention away from her other problems?”

  “Whoa, Julian. Of course Miss Ferrell didn’t put it in the drawer. Come on. Everybody knows black widows live all over Colorado. I hardly think Miss Ferrell, or anybody else for that matter, would deliberately try something nasty like that.”

  “Want to bet? She just told me she doesn’t know anything about food science! I’ll bet she doesn’t think it’s worthy. She’s not going to give me a good recommendation, I know it. She’s a class A bitch from the word go.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I volunteered.

  “Lot of good that’ll do,” he replied bitterly. And then he sighed. It was a deep, pained, resigned sigh.

  “What else is going on?” I asked, concerned. “You sound terrible.”

  “We’re all staying until about six. There’s a vocabulary-review thing going on in Ferrell’s room. Arch is in the library, don’t worry. We’ll just be home late.”

  “How was the Stanford rep? Did you have some cookies?”

  “Oh, the room was packed. I didn’t go.” He paused. “Sheila Morgenstern told me she mailed in her early decision application to Cornell. She’s sixth in our class, but she got 1550 combined on her SATs last year. I’m happy for her, I guess, but it’s bad for me. Cornell will never take two kids from the same school. Especially if one of them isn’t going to get a good recommendation from the college counselor.”