The Whole Enchilada

by Diane Mott Davidson

  I sighed. “I have no idea. I’ll call Tom later about it.”

  Julian and I worked side by side without talking for the next ten minutes. Out back, the second squad of crime-scene guys was checking for any usable footprints, bits of clothing snagged on bushes, or fingerprints on the gate, garage, or back wall of our house—anything the team from the previous night might have missed. I didn’t hold out much hope.

  Without warning, Julian asked me, “Why do you do this?”

  “Catering?” I replied. “Same reason you do. I love to work with food. Most people don’t. That translates into money.”

  “I’m not talking about catering. Here, let me fix you another espresso.”

  “Uh-oh. More caffeine. I might just explode.” But I’d finished prepping the vegetables. I bagged the peppers, onions, and tomatoes separately, then washed my hands again, and plopped into one of our kitchen table chairs.

  “I’m talking about getting involved with these crimes,” Julian said as he put two cups of espresso onto the table. I closed my eyes while he dumped sugar into his. “Nobody pays you for it, and for crying out loud, it’s dangerous.”

  We’ll get together soon, and talk. Holly’s last words to me made a fist around my heart and squeezed. “I do it,” I said quietly, “because I care about these people. The Jerk ripped my sense of self to shreds. Helping victims, people I know, helps me recover that self.”

  Julian didn’t have time to respond, because Marla was banging on our front door. When I heard her arguing with Boyd—“Goldy didn’t tell you she invited me over?”—I quickstepped down the front hall.

  Boyd gave me a tired look. “You need to inform me when you ask people to come to the house.”

  “It’s just Marla,” I said.

  “You need to inform me—” he began again.

  I interrupted him. “Okay. Sorry!”

  Boyd pulled the door ajar, and Marla marched through, staring daggers at Boyd. Neither one of them spoke.

  Thank goodness Julian had had the good sense to fix Marla that multiple-shot drink I’d promised her. The oversize china cup sat, steaming, on a gold linen place mat. When Marla, who wore a red-spangled black top and matching pants, stormed into the kitchen, Julian was busily slicing Gruyère onto a plate. On any diet, people need to eat. If they don’t eat, their blood sugar slips down around their ankles. They get cranky. It was my bet that this was what had led Marla to shout at Boyd.

  “Boyd was just doing his job, Marla,” I murmured.

  She had already sat down and was sipping gratefully from her cup. She shut her eyes, waiting for the combination of caffeine and cream to hit. When she opened them again, she inspected my face.

  “You look even worse than you did yesterday.”

  “That’s what everybody keeps telling me.”

  “I want all the details of this attack on you last night.”

  I told her. Fatigue threaded through my voice when I finally said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

  She took a bite of cheese and then regarded her cup. “This is gorgeous.”

  “The cappuccino?”

  “The cup, silly.”

  I smiled, and told her that it was from a set that Tom had given me for our most recent anniversary. A drug dealer had shot a police officer, and was on his way to prison. His assets—undoubtedly bought with drug money, since the criminal had no income—had been seized. At the forfeiture auction, Tom had picked up a dozen place settings of French porcelain decorated with an intricate blue-and-gold design. It wasn’t the kind of thing you pictured a drug dealer going for, but apparently, this one had.

  Marla picked up the saucer and turned it over. “It’s by Bernardaud,” she said appreciatively. “The pattern is called Grâce.”

  “I know that.” When Tom had given it to me, he said the china reminded him of me, that I was a slice of capital-G Grace in his life. I was suddenly glad that Julian had pulled the cup out for Marla.

  “Gruyère, boss?” Julian asked me.

  “Sure. Thanks. But no more coffee.”

  “Boyd knows me,” Marla was complaining. “I’m here before eight in the morning, and he thinks I’m going to attack you?”

  “Eat your cheese, will you?” I told her, then put one of the slices Julian had set before me into my mouth. It was salty and creamy at the same time, and tasted sharply of smoke. I always tried to picture the caves in France where they aged Gruyère, and usually only got as far as seeing the cheeses hanging upside down from dark ceilings, like bats.

  “All right,” said Marla. She sighed. She’d eaten; she felt better. “Should I go apologize to Boyd?”

  “If you want,” I said. “It’s just that he has to keep track of who visits, and let the department know.”

  Julian offered to wash the cups, saucers, and dishes by hand, but I told him I would do it. While I rinsed the china Julian said we were done until tonight, except for the saffron rice. So should he start on it? I said yes, and thanked him.

  “Act of contrition complete,” said Marla as she reentered the kitchen. “I suppose we’re off to the basement again?”

  “Don’t you want to keep looking through the notes?” I asked anxiously, as I felt an unexpected jolt of guilt myself.

  “Of course I do,” said Marla, although she didn’t sound convinced. “I’m just tired from doing that dinner last night. I’ll revive.”

  We descended to our lair. Marla started in with six months’ worth of notes from later meetings; I took earlier ones. My handwriting, or at least the ink from my cheap ballpoints, had faded on one side of each sheet, and then, perversely, bled over from the other side. Sometimes even I couldn’t make out what I’d written.

  It was hard to concentrate. I was tired and in pain. But that wasn’t entirely it. I had realized something that morning, while we were cooking. It had been important. But the insight had flashed by like a dark shadow. It reminded me of a mouse you see out of the corner of your eye. In Aspen Meadow, the little buggers come inside in October, when we’re enveloped in our first chill.

  Holly’s words in my nightmare: Why can’t you see it?

  See what?

  My brain had seized up, and nothing was forthcoming.

  So I went back to reading that Holly and I had realized that we’d probably become pregnant at the same time, at that conference over in Boulder.

  I sat back in my chair, remembering. Holly and George and the Jerk and I had attended the same three-day meeting eighteen years ago, with the gloriously interesting name Setting Up a Medical Practice. What I recalled about the conference was that the sessions had been so stultifyingly boring, I’d had a hard time focusing, just as I was now. In order to keep my attention sharp, I’d forced myself to make up acronyms: BAD, for Billing, Affiliation with insurance companies, and Documentation, and UHIT, for Uniforms, Hiring a staff, Insurance files, and Training a staff to protect privacy.

  Bad U Hit, indeed. The Jerk and I had had a furious fight before we arrived, and I was all set to file for divorce once I’d pulled together a little money. But at the conference, the Jerk had been at great pains to convince me that the argument was my fault. To keep the peace, I’d agreed. We made up. During the day, to show my devotion, I’d sat through the sessions and taken notes, as the Jerk requested. One of the nights, I’d become pregnant with Arch. And that was that. There would be no divorce, I told myself. I would stick it out, “for the baby.” I could do it. At that point, I thought I could do anything. At that point, I was twenty years old.

  I’d never seen Holly at the conference, she’d laughingly told me later, because she’d gone off to hike the Flatirons, a set of peaks that erupt at a steep angle west of the flat plain of Boulder. She, too, had become pregnant at the conference, she’d said, blushing. But she and George had made love because she’d felt so guilty about not going to a single presentation. George, studious and dedicated, had gone to all of them.

  And then the dark shadow flashed again. I ha
d knowledge from Med Wives 101. That was where the insight had come from. I knew, or suspected, something.

  Yet even a suspicion had to be confirmed. Telling Marla I had to stretch my legs, I walked over to the computer Tom used for the Internet.

  From the notes I’d already taken, I remembered that Holly and I had talked about how our first attempts at cooking had met with disgust. The Jerk had tossed the tomato aspic I’d made into the trash. Why hadn’t he told me before then that he was allergic to tomatoes? He said that he had, and I’d forgotten.

  Edith Ingleby had ground up a molded salad that Holly had made, one with hard-cooked eggs and homemade vegetable stock. I’d kept trying to perfect my cooking for the Jerk. Holly, on the other hand, had thrown in the kitchen towel, the spatula, and every pan she owned.

  Then, last night, at the conference center, when I’d cleared the dishes, I’d noticed that George hadn’t even touched the strawberry molded salad. It didn’t have vegetable stock or hard-cooked eggs. Yet he hadn’t even tasted it. Why?

  I tapped into a medical search engine that Tom used from time to time. Allergy to gelatin, I wrote, and soon was rewarded. An allergy to gelatin usually reveals itself when a child has the first shot for measles, mumps, and rubella. The mumps vaccine is made with gelatin, so a child with an allergy to gelatin should not have the booster shot for mumps.

  Okay, so far, so good. Then I typed in Boys who contract mumps.

  Boys who contract mumps, the search engine spit out, will sometimes become irreversibly sterile.

  Even though I’d known what I was looking for, I sat back from the computer, stunned.

  Who knows? my attacker had demanded.

  I picked up my cell phone and tapped out a text to Tom: Ask George Ingleby if he is sterile.

  Tom texted back: Why?

  I wrote: Because I think he is. Based on scientific evidence.

  Tom: What evidence?

  Think he’s allergic to gelatin, I typed. Ask if he contracted mumps when he was young. After a moment, I reflected on Lena’s rage, which had seemed so out of place. I recalled Edith saying “my daily miracle” when we visited the Inglebys on Saturday. She’d nodded when Marla asked her if she meant the muffins I gave her, but she hadn’t been paying much attention to us . . . and right before that, she’d complained about Tom sending Drew away.

  Tom had found out Holly was suing George for back child support. Lena had made a crude suggestion about having sex with Tom.

  I typed, Ask when he found out he was sterile.

  Tom’s text said: Will do. Remember: reveal nothing to anyone but Boyd & Marla, no matter how much you trust that person. A moment later, he texted, We talked to Broome again. He’s not happy.

  He didn’t say anything else, so I had time to think. Marla stopped reading and said, “Okay, I’m over here busting my butt trying to read your squiggles, and you’re secretly doing something, checking the computer, sending texts. So what in the world is going on that you’re not telling me?” When I turned to her, she said, “Uh-oh. You found something out.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I countered. “Say two parents have a child. The parents get divorced. The father, who’s helped raise the child, finds out when the child is a teenager that he did not actually, I’m talking biologically here, father the child. Does he still owe child support payments?”

  “He does,” replied Marla, the maven of all things not only medical but also financial and legal. “The child was born into an existing marriage. Once the marital knot is tied, all bets are off in the sperm department. The guy doesn’t pay, he’s going to get hauled into court.”

  “Which Holly was trying to do to George—”

  “But it usually takes a while—” She stopped talking and gazed at me. “Are you saying that George Ingleby is not the biological father of Drew?”

  “He’s his father,” I said immediately. “That man helped raise Drew, and is devoted to him. But Edith calls Drew her ‘daily miracle,’ and won’t explain herself. George and Holly only had the one child.” I went on: “What we should have seen is that Drew is tall and lithe, and looks nothing like George, whose shape resembles Stalin’s. I’d always thought that those height genes came from Holly.”

  “But you’re thinking differently now.”

  I stared hard at Marla. “Maybe Edith finally got around to telling George that she’d been told he was sterile. She thought Drew’s birth was a miracle. Or maybe it came up in a medical test, and that’s how George found out. So then imagine Lena saying, ‘Either you cut off funds to that slut, or I’m going public with this story. All of Colorado will know you’re sterile.’ ”

  “That sounds like Lena, actually,” Marla said thoughtfully. “But if what you’re thinking is true, then why would they show up at the birthday party, and pitch a fit about not being invited? Why protest about being escorted out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, when will you know for sure about the fertility thing?”

  “I texted Tom. He’d go Chernobyl if we went over to the Inglebys’ place again, escorted by Boyd or not escorted by Boyd.”

  “So wait,” Marla said at length. “Do you think George and/or Lena are after you? That you ‘know’? Was Holly threatening to expose the truth if George didn’t go back to paying child support? Maybe she just pointed out that he’d still have to pay the support because they’d been married when Drew was born, and George and/or Lena didn’t like that prospect. But would they crash the party, just to drop the antibiotic into the tortas, to murder Holly? And who is Drew’s biological father? Do you think he’s even aware he fathered a son?”

  “I don’t have a clue. Drew’s biological father might not even live in the state. It could be that Holly never told him. Or he might not care. Then again, Holly might not have known for sure that George wasn’t Drew’s biological father, since she probably didn’t know his being sterile was a possibility.”

  Marla said, “There’s another question lurking here. With Drew in school up in Aspen Meadow, why exactly did Holly buy a house in Denver nine years ago? Okay, she went to art school. Do you think that’s related?”

  “Good question.” I walked over to the file cabinets. “Do we know where she lived, so we could ask the neighbors?”

  “From a decade ago?” Marla scoffed. “You must be joking. I think she rented first, before she bought the house. And anyway, we never visited her down there.”

  “Let me look at one of my files.”

  “If it’s addresses for Holly,” Marla insisted, “I think you’re wasting your time.”

  “That’s not what I’m looking for. Can you keep going through the notes? We still haven’t found any mention of Holly being in therapy. It might be in there somewhere.”

  “I can’t wait,” Marla said sourly.

  I searched the file cabinets until I found the medical-meeting notes from eighteen years ago. Tom’s accusation was correct: I kept everything. I leafed through the pages until I found a printed list of the attendees.

  “Whoa, wait a minute.” I swallowed. “You’ll never guess who was there, giving a talk on getting cut-rate uniforms for medical office staffs.”

  “Not Neil Unger.”

  “The same. Looks like he wasn’t yet smitten with the idea of cleaning up America.”

  Marla shook her head. “How old was he back then?”

  “Early forties. Athena would have still been alive. Ophelia would have been three-ish. But maybe Neil was on the prowl.”

  “Gosh,” said Marla. “Do you think he and Holly could have hooked up?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose anything is possible.” I went back to the list of M.D.s who’d attended the Flatirons conference. Ingleby, George, Cardiology, was there, as was Korman, John, Obstetrics and Gynecology. As was Broome, Warren, Psychiatry. So. He had been there, too.

  I said, “Well now, isn’t that interesting?”

  “What is?”

  “Warren Broome was indee
d at the Flatirons conference eighteen years ago.”

  “Are you saying he was her lover,” Marla asked carefully, “or she was his patient, and they had sex that way?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m saying, because I don’t know.”

  19

  I exhaled and tried to think. What else did Holly and Warren Broome have in common?

  Audrey Millard, I remembered suddenly. The other jigsaw puzzle map. I raced up the steps, with Marla calling behind me, wanting to know where I was going. I didn’t answer. In Tom’s and my bedroom, I dumped out the contents of our hamper. I pulled out the pants I’d worn the night before, then retrieved the folded map from deep in the right pocket.

  I opened it, smoothed it out, then held it carefully as I descended to the basement.

  “Goldy,” Marla said in a singsong tone, without looking up, “you’re beginning to scare me.”

  “I’m trying to find out how Holly and Warren could have been connected.”

  “And?”

  “Okay, check this out,” I said as I pressed the map down, right next to the one I’d photocopied from the atlas.

  “Hunan Province,” Marla read aloud. “Both of them. If Holly meant for us to distill meaning from either of these maps, that meaning is eluding me.”

  Frustrated, I flopped into one of the basement’s metal chairs. Whatever it was Holly wanted all of us to see, it just was not visible—not to Marla, not to me, not to Tom, nor to any other member of the sheriff’s department investigative team.

  I couldn’t face the Amour notes anymore just then. We hadn’t found any mention of Holly being in therapy. I knew we should be looking, but the chicken scratch of my notes was giving me a headache. I asked myself if there was anything else I hadn’t yet followed up on.

  As I tortured my poor brain with questions, Julian clattered down the basement steps. He clutched a large tray with plates of much-welcome field greens topped with poached eggs and pan-grilled asparagus. He poured sparkling water into frosted glasses. “Hate to mention this while you’re doing your note taking, ladies.” He looked over at us nervously as he set place mats and napkins on the one long worktable that wasn’t papered with our notes. “In about an hour, we need to shove off for the Ungers’ place. Also, Arch called the house line. The Passat had a flat.”