The Cereal Murders

by Diane Mott Davidson

  I reeled away from him. Damn you, damn you, damn you. I had to find a way to get him. But for now I had to think, to walk, to do what he wanted until I could figure out how to escape. “I’m not going to be able to find the grade book unless I get my light. Okay if I get it?” I said to the stinking form behind me.

  “Walk ahead of me with it. You so much as move an inch out of line and I’ll put a bullet through your back.”

  I did as directed, walking slowly and trying not to think of Julian. Or of Hank’s gun.

  I bent and slowly, very slowly, picked up my flashlight. “Why did you kill Keith Andrews?” I asked, straightening slowly.

  “He was in the way,” Hank muttered. “Pompous little creep.”

  “You sure planned it out. Break his windshield so he’ll mess up with the Princeton rep. Psych him out. Just like in the NFL. But Keith didn’t psych easily. So you looked up someone with the same initial and last name and stole her credit card so you could plant it in one of the Marenskys’ coats and try to psych them out. But Kathy Andrews caught you stealing her mail, so you had to kill her.”

  “I didn’t care about that Lakewood woman. You haven’t had to listen to the Marenskys brag for eighteen years. Getting them arrested for Keith Andrews’ murder would have killed two birds with one stone.” He chuckled. “Too bad it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Someone saw the van you used, Greer Dawson the Hammer’s van, down in Lakewood, with the initials GD HMR,” I ventured. “All the person who saw it could think of was, too early, something out of place in October. That person thought the initials stood for Good Humor, but I didn’t figure that out until tonight. I saw”—I gritted my teeth—“something out of place, and I thought how out of place an ice cream truck was in the fall.”

  “Brilliant,” he snapped. “Put you in the fucking Ivy League.”

  We were half a room away from the window display.

  “And then you tried to intimidate Julian. Number two kid in the class, you figured if you scared Arch and me, you could get to Julian, right? Shake him up badly enough so that he’d blow his aptitude tests. And you almost succeeded, throwing a rock through our window, putting a snake in Arch’s locker, stopping up our chimney, planting a spider in your own immaculate drawer, manufacturing a conflict with Audrey tonight to get rid of me—”

  “Shut up!” Again he chuckled horribly. “You know what they always say, Goldy. You gotta make the other team sweat, make them think they’re going to lose. It was going well until the cops started watching your house.”

  “Yes, they scared you off.” I hesitated. “And then Miss Ferrell. She wouldn’t give Greer an A in French, but you figured you could go to Perkins about that. After all, it had been done before at that school.”

  “Don’t I know. Now, I told you to shut up.”

  I stopped by the magazines. “Why did you have to kill Miss Ferrell?” I persisted.

  “I didn’t pay over a hundred thousand dollars for Greer to go to that school so she could end up at some podunk place in the Midwest. Now, quit talking and move.”

  Some podunk place in the Midwest? You went to a school in the Midwest, didn’t you? Only, as Stan Marensky had pointed out so cruelly, you flunked out of Michigan before you could ever end up anywhere, Hank. Macguire’s words haunted me: I’m nobody. And who was nobody most of all in his own eyes? A flunk-out with a restaurant whose two pastimes in life were lifting weights and expressing his violent hostilities on Sunday afternoons in front of a televised playing field. But he was a nobody who would become somebody if his offspring went to Princeton. I should have known.

  One last section of magazines loomed before we got to the window displays. I tried to think of how I would shove him into the door, try to knock him out the way I had before with the wire display.

  He poked my shoulder hard. “Where is this damn grade book?”

  “It’s less than twenty feet away. If you don’t let me get it, all your plans will fall through….”

  Apparently satisfied, Hank poked me again. “Go get it.”

  Actually, I wanted to tell him, you don’t need it anymore. In that streetfront display, no one would find it for weeks. Even then, it probably would be discarded. To bookstore workers, who was Suzanne Ferrell? How could she, have had anything to do with Goldy the caterer and her assistant, Julian Teller, found murdered in their bookstore?

  Stop thinking like this.

  “We have to squeeze into a display,” I warned Hank.

  “If you are lying, I’ll kill you right now, I swear it.”

  “We’re close. Good old Hank,” I said grimly, “it’s like your final goal line, isn’t it? My one Bronco buddy, turned on me.”

  “Shut up.”

  I played my flashlight over the last shelf of magazines. I couldn’t hear a thing from Julian. There were no sirens or flashing lights. Desperation gripped me. We arrived at the narrow entrance to the platform.

  “Now what?” demanded Hank.

  “It’s in here. Underneath a pile of cookbooks.”

  “Is this a joke?” he demanded. “Get in there and get it for me. No, wait. I don’t want you going out some door on the other side. Get in there, then you tell me where it is.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. I put down my flashlight. “Flash your beam over on this pile.” I motioned to the small table between the window and where I stood. “It’s right under the first book.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw Arch. Adrenaline surged through my body as I moved laboriously across the platform.

  “Move over,” Hank ordered impatiently. Obediently, I moved a few inches to my right and spread my feet to steady myself. There was about a foot of space between Hank and me, and then another eighteen inches between him and the window. He tucked his gun in his pants and reached greedily for the pile of cookbooks. One chance.

  I bent over and shoved into Hank Dawson with all my might. I heard a startled oomph! as my head sank into his belly. He hurtled into the glass with an explosive crack. I felt the plate glass breaking. The window broke into monstrous falling shards. I pulled back. Hank Dawson screamed wildly as his body crashed through the shattered glass. The heavy blades fell like a guillotine.

  “Agh! Agh!” he screamed. He writhed on the pavement, howling.

  Shaking uncontrollably, I crept to the broken window. Beneath me, Hank Dawson lay sprawled on the snowy sidewalk. His face stared up at mine.

  “Agh … argh …” He was reaching desperately for words.

  I started to say, “I’m sorry—”

  “Listen,” he rasped, “Listen … she … she could read when … she was … only four….”

  Then he died.

  22

  “I swear, Goldy,” said Tom Schulz an hour later, shaking his head, “you get into more damned trouble.”

  The ambulance carrying Julian pulled away from the curb. He had been shot in the calf, but would be all right. I had several bumps, none of which were life-threatening, according to the paramedics. “I swear also,” Schulz went on grimly, “that’s the last time I leave you or Julian in a potentially dangerous situation.”

  I looked around at the police cars and fire engines. Clouds had moved in again, and snow was falling in a gauzy, unhurried way from a sky tinted pink by urban streetlights. Audrey had shown me some of the Tattered Cover’s charms. But it was great to be out of the bookstore and into the sweet, cold air, especially at one o’clock in the morning.

  “You didn’t know. And I did try to call you,” I told him.

  Tom Schulz grunted.

  The Denver police officers who had answered my 911 call had questioned me repeatedly: the same story over and over. “For college?” they said, bewildered and disbelieving. “Because of class rank?”

  Indeed. I wondered vaguely if Headmaster Perkins would face any charges. Altering grades was probably not illegal, even if you had the damning evidence of a teacher’s grade book. The only crimes I knew of besides Hank’s had bee
n Macguire Perkins’ drug use and Brad Marensky’s thefts. I was hardly going to turn the boys in. Sadly, both teens had merely followed the example, both implicit and explicit, of their purported mentors—their parents.

  “This was over who was first in the class?” a bewildered Denver sergeant had asked me at least six times.

  Yep. With Keith Andrews gone, with an A in French and an uncooperative college counselor out of the way, with Julian incapacitated or dead, Greer Dawson would have passed Heather, been at the top of her class and on her way to the Ivy League, to all the things Hank coveted for his daughter—and for himself.

  But this was not really over who headed the class. It was—heartbreakingly—about trying to make your child the kind of success you never were yourself. I felt a terrible pity for Greer Dawson. I knew she would never be able to measure up.

  “How can you buy grades?” the cop kept asking.

  “Same way you buy drugs,” I answered.

  “Huh,” Schulz grunted under his breath. “Cynical, Miss G.”

  I asked the Denver police officer to phone Elk Park Prep, to alert the headmaster to some strange inquiries he might get from parents who might have been worried by Heather Coopersmith’s calls. How Alfred Perkins would react to this last event in the saga of collegial competition I could not imagine. Nor did I really, care.

  Now the picture takers were done. Hank Dawson’s corpse was being removed. I did not look. The sergeant said I could go.

  Schulz suggested that we exit through the brick walkway between the Tattered Cover and the Janus Building. His car, he told me, was on Second Avenue. He took my hand. His was warm and rough, entirely welcome.

  “You were brave,” he said. “Damn.”

  The memory of Hank Dawson, sprawled bloody and dead on the pavement, made my legs wobble. I stopped and tilted my head back to catch a few icy snowflakes in my mouth. The air was cool, fresh, sharp. Sweet. I drew it deep into my lungs.

  “There’s just one thing I never figured out,” I said. We were standing on the pink-lit brick breezeway between the two buildings. Several late-night passersby had been halted by the police activity. I could hear their engines humming; music lilted from a car radio.

  “One thing you haven’t figured out,” repeated Schulz. “Like how to get on with your life.”

  “Yes, that …” A breeze chilled my skin, and I shivered. Schulz pulled me into his warm chest.

  “What else doesn’t Miss G. understand?”

  “I know it sounds petty after all that’s happened, but … the scholarship for Julian. What was Hank hoping to gain from that?”

  “Ah, nothing.” Tom Schulz kissed my cheek, then hugged me very gently, as if I were breakable. The tune on the car radio changed: “Moon River.” The bittersweet notes filtered through the snowy air.

  I said, “You seem pretty sure of that.”

  Schulz sighed. “I’m just so happy to have you and Julian alive—”

  “Yes, but … is the money gone now, or what? Julian will need to know.”

  He let go of me. Snowflakes drifted down onto my face and shoulders.

  “The money is not gone,” Schulz said. “It is not gone because I donated it, and I got your friend Marla to go in halvsies with me.”

  “What?”

  He cupped my hand in his, then said, “Smart detective like Miss G., I should have thought you’d figure that out. I told you I didn’t know what to do with my money. Good for Julian I’m a saver. Without kids of my own, this felt like a great thing to do. Marla likes Julian too, and God knows she has enough money. She said”—and here he drew his voice into an astonishingly accurate imitation of Marla’s husky voice—“‘Oh, oh, I’ll never be able to keep a secret from Goldy!’ And now look at who told.”

  “Aah, God …” I said, faltering. I was losing consciousness. My body was falling, falling, to the pavement, and I could feel Schulz’s hands gently easing me down. It was all too much—Keith Andrews, Suzanne Ferrell, Hank Dawson … death everywhere.

  “You’re going to need counseling,” Schulz warned. “You’ve been through a lot.” He stroked my cheek.

  The pavement was cold. Yes, counseling. I had witnessed too much. After all the death, my own mortality again loomed large. What really kept me going? What was I going to have faith in? I had Arch, Julian. I had … An ache filled me. What else?

  Hank Dawson had wanted desperately to have a successful family. So had Audrey. The Marenskys. Headmaster Perkins with hapless Macguire. And so, too, had I. We had all reached out for success—or the image of success we had in our minds. I’d had a picture of John Richard, Arch, and me, a happy family, and that had certainly failed. What had gone so wrong?

  This was what was wrong: my idea, Hank’s idea, Caroline’s, Brad’s, Macguire’s … that if you have this educational pedigree, this money, this fill-in-the-blank, you will be successful.

  But really, I thought as I lay on the cold pavement and looked up into Schulz’s concerned face, success was something else. Success was more a matter of finding the best people and then going through life with them … it was finding rewarding work and sticking with it, through thick and thin, as if life were a succession of cream sauces….

  Suddenly my head hurt, my stomach hurt, everything hurt. Schulz made patient murmuring noises, then helped me up.

  I was shivering. “I’m so embarrassed,” I said without looking at him.

  “Aah, forget about it.”

  I tilted my head and again tasted a few blessed flakes of snow. Schulz motioned at the sky.

  “Too bad Arch won’t be able to look for galaxies tonight.”

  “Oh, well. You know how he’s always complaining to me about the clouds obscuring the stars. The way all my troubles have obscured my appreciating you,” I added.

  “Listen to this woman. She’s using metaphors like some headmaster I know. And it sounds as if she’s gone soft—”

  “Tom, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  He took my hand and waited. Finally he said, “Go ahead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?” said Tom Schulz.

  “Yes,” I said, firmly, with no hesitation. “Yes, I will marry you.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DIANE MOTT DAVIDSON lives in Evergreen, Colorado, with her family. She is the author of eleven bestselling culinary mysteries.

  If you enjoyed Diane Mott Davidson’s The Cereal Murders, you won’t want to miss any of the tantalizing mysteries in her nationally bestselling culinary mystery series!

  Look for CHOPPING SPREE, the newest mystery, at your favorite bookseller’s.

  CHOPPING

  SPREE

  by

  Diane

  Mott

  Davidson

  Turn the page for an exciting preview….

  Success can kill you.

  So my best friend had been telling me, anyway. Too much success is like arsenic in chocolate cake. Eat a slice a day, Marla announced with a sweep of her plump, bejeweled fingers, and you’ll get cancer. Gobble the whole cake? You’ll keel over and die on the spot.

  These observations, made over the course of a snowy March, had not cheered me. Besides, I’d have thought that Marla, with her inherited wealth and passion for shopping, would applaud the upward leap of my catering business. But she said she was worried about me.

  Frankly, I was worried about me, too.

  In mid-March I’d invited Marla over to taste cookies. Despite a sudden but typical Colorado blizzard, she’d roared over to our small house off Aspen Meadow’s Main Street in her shiny new BMW four-wheel drive. Sitting in our commercial kitchen, she’d munched on ginger snaps and spice cookies, and harped on the fact that the newly frantic pace of my work had coincided with my fourteen-year-old son Arch’s increasingly rotten behavior. I knew Marla doted on Arch.

  But in this, too, she was right.

  Arch’s foray into athletics, begun that winter with snowboarding and a stint on his sch
ool’s fencing team, had ended with a trophy, a sprained ankle, and an unprecedented burst of physical self-confidence. He’d been eager to plunge into spring sports. When he’d decided on lacrosse, I’d been happy for him. That changed when I attended the first game. Watching my son forcefully shove an opponent aside and steal the ball, I’d felt queasy. With Arch’s father—a rich doctor who’d had many violent episodes himself—now serving time for parole violation, all that slashing and hitting was more than I could take.

  But even more worrisome than the sport itself, Marla and I agreed, were Arch’s new teammates: an unrepentant gang of spoiled, acquisitive brats. Unfortunately, Arch thought the lacrosse guys were beyond cool. He spent hours with them, claiming that he “forgot” to tell us where he was going after practice. We could have sent him an e-mail telling him to call, Arch protested, if he only had what all his pals had, to wit, Internet-access watches. Your own watch could have told you what time it was, I’d told him, when I picked him up from the country-club estate where the senior who was supposed to drive him home had left him off.

  Arch ignored me. These new friends, he’d announced glumly, also had Global Positioning System calculators, Model Bezillion Palm pilots, and electric-acoustic guitars that cost eight hundred dollars—and up. These litanies were always accompanied with not-so-tactful reminders that his fifteenth birthday was right around the corner. He wanted everything on his list, he announced as he tucked a scroll of paper into my purse. After all, with all the parties I’d booked, I could finally afford to get him some really good stuff.

  And no telling what’ll happen if I don’t get what I want, he’d added darkly. (Marla informed me that he’d already given her a list.) I’d shrugged as Arch clopped into the house ahead of me. I’d started stuffing sautéed chicken breasts with wild rice and spinach. The next day, Tom had picked up Arch at another friend’s house. When my son waltzed into the kitchen, I almost didn’t recognize him.