Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series)

by Diane Mott Davidson

  Before leaving I had written a note for Patty Sue:

  Gone to see Driver Educator. Back late. Please give Arch nonchocolate supper.

  And one for Arch:

  Am out at Pom’s getting honey. If P.S. not back by supper, have tuna casserole in refrig. Lich costume needs cotton batting. Please ride bike to Aspen Meadow Drug and charge some. I need to make costume tonight because tomorrow I have to cook for party.

  Love, Mom

  Arch, Arch. I swerved to avoid a pothole full of snow melt and remembered how it had been even muddier in April when he had jumped up and down in enthusiasm each time I’d picked him up after working with Pom. That effervescence, that love for his teachers and for learning, was all gone now.

  “The bees are so neat, Mom,” he had said. “They swarm once a year, and they usually come back to the same place. They come back to Pom’s because of all the great wildflowers out in the Preserve. And they know where all the flowers are! You see there’s this, like, navigator bee who goes out and finds bushes and stuff and comes back and tells the other bees how to get there. It’s very complicated. Bees are smart.”

  “Bees? Smart?”

  “Oh yes,” he said enthusiastically, “they are very intelligent. Pom and I wear white because the bees like it. They’re afraid of black because that reminds them of bears. It’s way back in their memory. Sort of like how you hate snakes, and in the Bible somebody says women don’t like snakes? Bees know that bears steal their honey so they all learned to hate the color black and to attack big black animals on two feet. So we have to wear white.”

  “I thought honeybees didn’t sting.”

  “Of course they sting,” he protested. “Why do you think we have to wear those nets over our faces? Actually, what makes them sting is if they get scared. You know, somebody invades the hive or something. That’s why you’ve got to smoke them out before you go in for the honey. You see,” he concluded in his patronizing tone, “there’s really a lot to learn if you want to become a bee-keeper. You’d better not try it, Mom.”

  I rolled down the window to look for elk or deer trying to get into the Preserve before hunting season began. The day was warm, but a cool breeze buffeted the stands of pine that bordered the road. From a distance I could see the stone chimney of Pom’s cabin. Although I knew his honey shed was large enough to also serve as a garage, he had left six vehicles in varying states of abandonment parked every which way on the surrounding property. Growing up in New Jersey, I had noticed that the natives accumulated hydrangeas. Coloradans, on the other hand, collected cars. And parked them in their garages and yards so they could use the nearly new four-wheel drive to get out in the snow, the old pickup to haul stuff, the old Scout with the plow to do the driveway, the station wagon to take everybody skiing, and the gutted VW and Chevy because they had such great parts.

  “Glad you could make it,” Pomeroy said and gave that heart-melting half smile before stepping aside for me to enter.

  I said, “I kind of miss coming out here. Arch loved doing work with you.”

  “And I liked working with him. He’s a great kid. You’re lucky.”

  I sighed in spite of myself. “Being a parent is not all roses, Pom. It’s almost as hard as being married.”

  He blushed an absolutely purple hue. Then I thought again of what Marla had said. Was he that hung up on his ex? Even Marla and I weren’t that bad about John Richard. Whatever the reason, I already felt I’d blown it.

  He said, “Why don’t you sit down and have some herb tea? Got some great honey for it.”

  I looked around the one-room house. It had probably been a hunter’s cabin before the area was declared a preserve. In front of the picture window were two telescopes. These I assumed could be trained on the beehives, which I knew to be upwind of the cabin, at a small distance in the meadow.

  “Watching the birds and the bees?” I said while he was filling the teapot. I peered into one of the scopes.

  “No.”

  “Watching wildlife?”

  He didn’t say anything. Maybe he still felt guilty about the driving lesson. In any event, his mind was elsewhere.

  “I got a car,” I said. “Vonette’s loaning me one.”

  “Great.”

  More silence.

  I said, “Are you coming to the club’s Halloween party?”

  A nod.

  I said, “Don’t tell anybody, I’m making the food.” He snorted. “Cleaning the place, too. Hey!” I had moved the scope to focus on the area just below the hives. “You have a garden.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “in springtime. Want your honey now?”

  I took three large jars from him and gave him a check. Then I looked around the room for something else to talk about.

  “Has it snowed up here yet?” I said brightly. “Do you see more or less wildlife when there’s snow on the ground?”

  Pomeroy reached for two mugs, placed a teabag in the pot, and cocked his head at me.

  “You want to see wildlife, Goldy? Look through the other telescope. This is Wednesday, lunchtime, warm weather. Should be right on schedule. This is what I wanted you to see.”

  I gave him a sideways glance and stepped over to the other scope. Without moving it I looked in. Far out in the meadow there was movement. My skin went cold.

  It was people. One on top of the other. One was Patty Sue. With Fritz Korman.

  Nobody had to tell them about the birds and the bees.

  CHAPTER 21

  I don’t believe this.”

  No response from Pomeroy.

  I looked at him. “Do they come here often?”

  He poured the water into the teapot and steam clouded his face.

  “Twice in the last couple of weeks. Weather’s been nice. You know how people like to do it out-of-doors in this state. The hikers generally save it for summer, though.”

  My eyes scanned the room. He set the tea tray on the table. It was disconcerting to be witnessing the sexual activity of another couple while in the company of a man to whom one was attracted.

  Pomeroy filled the mugs with tea. I couldn’t help noticing the way his shoulders moved under his soft flannel shirt. I wondered who did his laundry, and looked around the room for a washing machine. His couch, tables, and chairs were rough-hewn pine scattered with store-bought pillows. The furniture looked homemade. There were no modern conveniences besides a refrigerator and oven in the open kitchen. In the living area were several lamps, and by his bed in one corner were a radiophone and alarm clock. So he had electricity and water, anyway. If Patty Sue and Fritz had wanted a cool drink or piece of toast for a postcoital snack, they could have marched on up. Right.

  I looked again at Pomeroy, this engaging hermit in the middle of his homemade couch in the middle of his homemade cabin in the middle of nowhere. I ran my fingers over the green-brown coffee table made from pine beetle-killed wood.

  He said, “Well?”

  I moved a ceramic pot filled with ivy from one side of the table to the other, and thought.

  “It makes sense,” I said finally. “I was in his office last week looking for some files. Patty Sue had gone in to see him, but I never saw her come back out. This Monday I was over there and Arch showed me the back door to the office, which I never knew existed. So.”

  Pom said, “What were you looking for in his files?”

  I stood up and went over to the window. Patty Sue and Fritz were walking through the tall grass toward the trees where the Jeep was just visible.

  “Oh,” I said dully, “you know I’m trying to get my catering going again. The cops aren’t making much headway so I’m looking into things myself. Trying to figure out what the connection between Fritz and Laura Smiley was, why someone would try to poison him at her funeral. Trying to answer big questions like that while he’s banging away on my roommate.”

  “Find anything?”

  “No.”

  He stood up and walked to his cooking area, then came back
with a plate of hot biscuits and a bowl of honey.

  He said, “I made these for you. The honey’s from a new batch of bees I sent away for from a catalog. South American. Mean as can be—sometimes they chase me off. Good producers, though.”

  He split one of the steaming rounds, plastered it with honey, then handed it to me on a paper napkin. It was delicious.

  He said, “Surprised at a man’s cooking?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Pom, will you get serious? Even the police have told me more than you have, which is that Fritz cheats on Vonette, which is something I already knew from his past, thank you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Do you know why Laura went to see Fritz? If you two were such pals, why wouldn’t she tell you something as important as that? She left an article in her locker. She was going to show it to Patty Sue and Trixie. It was about a mistrial. Was she trying to warn them about something?”

  “I already told you, she didn’t tell me everything. She had known a student, Vonette’s daughter, who was her friend. Since Laura was the daughter of an alcoholic, she relived the whole scenario by seeing this neglected teenage daughter, who then had a stepfather coming on to her. She tried to stop it. When that backfired, and Laura’s parents died, she tried to let it go in Al-Anon. But she was shocked when I told her what was going on out here.”

  “That was recent, wasn’t it?”

  He looked at me and nodded. “Last few months.”

  I said, “Was it at the athletic club, and Marla stumbled in on your conversation?”

  “Yeah. Laura said, ‘He told me he’d cleaned up his act.’ ” Pomeroy looked at me. He said, “Those were her words. ‘After twenty years,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe he’s up to his old tricks.’ ” He paused and bit into a biscuit. “After we talked, she came out to work with me. She saw them out there in the meadow. She was angry, seeing this again after all these years, him going after a younger woman. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she kept saying, ‘he swore to me when I first moved back here that he’d changed.’ ” Pomeroy cleared his throat. “I do know this. She had something on Korman besides what I’m telling you. She said, ‘This time there will be justice, you can count on it.’ She was beside herself. I had to drive her home. That’s when she left the science text in my car, by the way. Anyway, maybe seeing them was what triggered her. The next thing you know, suicide.”

  “It must be convenient for Fritz,” I mused, “the women in his life just offing themselves when the going gets rough. First Bebe Hollenbeck, then Laura Smiley.”

  “Better keep an eye on your roommate,” added Pomeroy.

  Suddenly I was exhausted by it all. Now that the landscape was empty of people I turned my attention out the window. Several gently sloping acres in what could roughly be termed Pomeroy’s front yard eventually met the creek, one of the high tributaries of the Upper Cottonwood. The white-hives where Arch and Pomeroy had worked so diligently last spring ranged along the hill.

  “What are the bees doing now?” I asked. “Still producing honey?”

  “When it’s warm in October like this, they’ll fly. Not many flowers now, of course, so the production’s real low.”

  A series of posts jutted along the creek front, with rope between some of them. The rope led to several of the hives.

  I said, “What’s all that heavy twine?”

  He laughed. “Old-fashioned burglar alarm. Arch just loved it, said he was going to use it in one of his dragon-adventures, or whatever they’re called. Somebody comes up from the creek trying to break into your place, trips over the rope, the hives topple over and you’ve got yourself a swarm of bees that’ll do more damage than a shotgun.”

  We were quiet for a few minutes.

  I said, “Arch really thought you were the greatest.”

  “I enjoyed him. I like all the kids. With Laura gone, I don’t know if the teachers will be willing to let the students come out here for projects. I’ll miss them. A lot.”

  “Did you notice anything strange about Arch? I mean last spring, was he secretive or—”

  “No.” Pomeroy waved his hand at me. “We had great talks, he was always very serious about everything. I could see why Laura got such a kick out of him.” Pom gave me a long look with those brown eyes, full of sadness and pity.

  My voice was hard. “I’ve been thinking that she shared too much with him. I’m not convinced it was healthy.”

  He shrugged. “I loved to talk to Arch, too. Sometimes it was like talking to a little adult. Maybe Laura felt the same way, I don’t know. But I know she and Arch did admire each other.” He paused. “Something else you should know, if you’re worried about your relationship with Arch.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Arch said his mother was pretty tough. He even said one of the reasons he wasn’t cool was that all the kids complained about how bad their mothers’ cooking was, slime and worms and mold and so on. But to be perfectly honest, he would tell me, his mother’s cooking was pretty good.”

  And with that shred of good news amidst all the bad, I said goodbye to Pomeroy and smiled all the way down the dirt road through the trees, back toward town.

  “Mom, I got the batting,” Arch announced when I strode into our house and banged the door behind me. “I opened the book to the lich illustration, so you can see what I need to look like. I’m going to wear it to the athletic club. Maybe some of the people will think I’m a midget and not a kid.”

  I hugged him. “Not likely. Midgets aren’t as neat as eleven-year-olds.”

  He patted my back. “Did you have a good day or something?”

  “Do I have to have a good day to give my own kid a hug?”

  “Sorry. You just haven’t seemed happy lately. Neither has Patty Sue.”

  No kidding.

  “Did you have a snack?” I said.

  “Well, they had burritos for lunch at school and I hate them, so I ordered from the Chinese place when I got home because I didn’t exactly want tuna casserole. I charged it. Hope that’s okay. Patty Sue came in a little while ago and she was hungry, too.” He paused.

  “Go on.”

  “Well,” he said as he pushed his glasses back up his nose, “when the guy came with our order and we opened all those little boxes, I said, Hey, this is like the boxes I used to get my goldfish in from the pet store. I felt real bad because then Patty Sue went into the bathroom and threw up.”

  “Oh, God. Is she sleeping now?”

  “I think so,” said Arch with a rueful twist of his mouth. “I knocked on her door and asked her if I could bring her some sweet-and-sour pork on a plate, sort of like breakfast in bed, but she said the smell of it made her sick, and please don’t talk about the goldfish.”

  “Any more good news?”

  “Vonette called. She sounded real upset. Said she’s a wreck and wants you to call her about the car.”

  I shook my head and headed down toward my sewing room. I said, “That can wait.”

  “Good,” said Arch as he retreated, “because I need to use the phone and I didn’t want to use the business line.”

  We parted and I reluctantly plugged in the Japanese sewing machine I had bought from a traveling salesman who had failed to mention the all-Japanese instruction booklet. But I had been smart enough to figure out how to go forward and backward, and, staring at the illustration for the lich, I figured that was all I needed.

  A robe like a Druid priest’s with batting in the shoulders and sleeves like a magician’s, the description said; the costume should have a ragged but costly aspect. The lich face was terrifying, like a skull. I drew on the material with a tailor’s pencil, then cut and sewed until the hood and shoulders were done and all it needed was a hem. Arch could paint the muslin any colors he wanted, and knowing him, he would.

  The picture in the book was black and white. My gaze wandered to the caption, which read:

  The lich specializes in vengeful activity. It uses spells,
charms, traps and poison potions to punish the wicked. One spell of particular use is raising the dead. By communicating with deceased victims, the lich gathers evidence against evildoers. It carries out its plan of vengeance using small sharp weapons and clerical spells such as deep sleep, fireball, and scaring its victims to death. The lich stops only when the wicked one is dead.

  I set aside the costume. Jesus wept, I remembered, before he raised Lazarus. I had no such grand plans. But I wept anyway.

  CHAPTER 22

  Todd?” came Arch’s whisper over the phone, “I can’t talk long. I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.”

  “Our phone’s been broken. What’s wrong? Does she suspect something?”

  “No, she’s sewing,” Arch replied. “But I’ve still got to be careful.”

  I’d wiped my face, blown my nose. Now I breathed oh-so-shallowly as I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece.

  Todd said, “I can barely hear you. Do you want me to come over?”

  “No,” said Arch, “no time before dinner.” He paused. “Listen, you’re not going to believe this. I got it.”

  Todd asked, “Got what?”

  “A weapon, silly,” Arch said with an impatient hiss. “It’s better than a knife too, because it’s just like in the book. Small and sharp. I found it in a plastic bag in my grandmother’s car. We’ll have to clean it later. It’s under our woodpile now.”

  “Great!” replied Todd. “What spell are you going to use?”

  “How about fireball?”

  “Ever done it before?”

  “Well,” admitted Arch, “not in real life.”

  “Easy,” said Todd, “you could just make a Molotov cocktail. Get yourself a bottle, see, and fill it with gasoline—”

  “Who’re you talking to?” asked a sleepy Patty Sue as she slouched into the room.