I said into the receiver, “This had better be good.”
“Ho-ho!” came Tom Schulz’s too cheerful voice. “In your usual good mood, too. What’d you do, tie one on last night?”
“Please.”
He said, “I thought you might be interested in helping us investigate that scalpel. Because that’s what it was, you know.”
“A scalpel. I told you it was a frigging scalpel. I passed Med Wives 101, you know. Did you have a blood match?”
“Easy now. They’re working on the blood match. It’s coming. Right now I need more to go on than what you’ve given me. Including why your son would have that scalpel stashed.”
“I told you. He found it in the Kormans’ car, and my theory is that someone put it there after using it on Laura.”
“Theory?” Tom Schulz yelled. “That’s what I’m supposed to go to the DA with? A caterer’s theory?”
“Seems to me, Tom,” I said, “that you need to find out who would have access to Just One Bite.”
“That’s easy. Anybody can get it to kill rats.”
“Lots of folks think Fritz is just that. A rat.” I told him about the creekside activity with Patty Sue.
“Incredible,” said Tom Schulz. “He’s irresistible even to a woman with a broken arm.”
“You don’t understand,” I said in Patty Sue’s defense. “My housemate respects authority with a capital R. That’s how people like Fritz get their power.”
Schulz asked again, “Are you going to tell me what your kid was doing with that scalpel?”
“I don’t know what he was doing with it,” I replied truthfully. “I’m going to try to find out. But there’s more. I got into a mess with Trixie last night.” I told him about the intruder, the mirror, and the Volvo.
“Trouble just follows you around, you know? Be careful. Because whoever our guy, or gal, is, they’re going to try again to do in Fritz. You don’t want your kid to get in the middle. And chances are our culprit won’t mess with a few pellets of rat poison this time.”
“Why not?”
“Bright little Goldy can’t figure that one out?”
“Excuse me. Let me go get a cup of coffee and my brain will get into gear.”
“Our murderer will probably use something else, and there will be a next time,” Schulz said, “because the first time, he or she flunked Poisoning 101. Just watch it.”
“I plan to,” I said, and hung up.
I spent the next day hustling around the house to get ready for the Amour Anonymous meeting. Looking at the treats from the pastry shop made me wonder if we might need more. I could always use any surplus from today on the Halloween party. I slathered fudge frosting on brownies for Patty Sue. I stuffed crêpes with sugared ricotta cheese and smothered them with apricot sauce for Marla (“I spent the last two days in Vegas,” she’d called that morning to tell me. “I thought it would be a good break. Ended up spending the whole time with a glass of Jack Daniel’s and bag of peanuts in one hand and a roll of quarters in the other. Pretty soon the coins sounded like peanuts and the peanuts smelled like coins and I thought, now I’m really crazy. Guess I need the group, Goldy, don’t you think? I’ll bring the dessert sherry, you just make lots to eat.”)
The phone rang again. Alicia couldn’t come: she’d had a blowout on I-70. Her load of pumpkins had exploded like grenades when they hit the concrete. Two dozen cars had spun out in orange slime … no one was hurt … the road was closed so it could be cleaned … traffic had backed up for six miles. With significant understatement, she added, “You can’t imagine the mess.”
A couple of other women called with excuses, none so spectacular. When I finally got back to cooking I melted sugar into a dark syrup for Vonette’s favorite, Burnt-Sugar Cake. Pondering what Trixie would fancy, I decided she could manage with cookies. Marla would finish them if Trixie was holding out for health food.
And speaking of which, I could use Pomeroy’s honey to make my marvelous Honey-I’m-Home Ginger Snaps. This was my very own tasty invention. They were popular with the station-wagon set. Plus, they kept well.
The spicy scent of baking cookies filled the kitchen. When I was done I surveyed the spread. If we were going to be involved in telling all our sad stories we could do with a few sweets.
Marla arrived first. She swept in wearing a bespangled tent-type dress and a long scarf that said Club Mediterranée.
“God,” she fumed, “I’m exhausted. It’s a good thing I don’t take drugs. Someone could have sold me some speed and I would have spent another six hundred bucks on those slot machines and put Planter’s out of business. Tell me you’ve made something fabulous to eat.”
“In there.” I gestured toward the dining room.
“Where is everybody?”
“Coming. They’re eating dinner.”
“I ate dinner,” she said as she picked up a dessert plate and attacked the brownies. “I just saved room for dessert.”
“Did I hear someone mention dessert?” asked a yawning Patty Sue as she descended from upstairs, where she had been napping.
“You bet,” said Marla, “come quickly before I eat it all.”
Running suit–attired Trixie trotted in carrying hand weights. I begged her to leave them by the door, which she did.
“Hoo-hoo!” yodeled Vonette from the front door. She was already tipsy. Her orange hair looked like an abandoned robins’ nest.
* * *
Honey-I’m-Home Gingersnaps
2 cups all-purpose flour (high altitude: add 1 tablespoon)
2 teaspoons baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1½ teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
¼ cup solid vegetable shortening
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
¼ cup honey
¼ teaspoon finely minced lemon zest
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Butter two cookie sheets.
Sift together the flour, soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Set aside.
In a large mixer bowl, cream the shortening, butter, and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and the honey until well combined. Stir in the flour mixture and the zest, stirring until well combined, with no traces of flour visible.
Using a 1-tablespoon scoop, measure the cookies onto the cookie sheets, keeping them two inches apart. Do not attempt to make more than one dozen per sheet. Bake the batches one at a time, until the cookies have puffed and flattened and have a crinkly surface, 10 to 12 minutes per batch.
Cool the cookies completely on racks.
Makes 32 cookies
* * *
“Time to get started,” I warned them as Vonette splashed dessert sherry into her coffee.
“What we do here,” I began, “is talk, share, and give support.”
Trixie said, “I just don’t see how this can help.”
I said, “Then why don’t you go first? Tell us what’s bothering you.”
“I hate doctors,” she said evenly, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Aw, c’mon honey,” coaxed Vonette. “I don’t mind. And I’m married to one.” She took a healthy swig from her coffee cup.
Patty Sue said, “I’m feeling sick.”
“You see?” accused Trixie. “Somebody starts talking about doctors and right away, somebody feels sick. Why do we depend on them so much?”
“Chocolate’s more reliable,” said Marla, who was waddling out to the kitchen to replenish the brownie platter, which I had stupidly put within her reach.
Patty Sue said faintly, “I think we have to trust our doctors. Either that or the treatment doesn’t work.”
“Trix?” I said. “Do you want to talk or not?”
Trixie ground her teeth. “I did trust a doctor and look at where it got me.”
&n
bsp; Marla plopped back down at her place. Patty Sue gave me her wide-eyed look.
I concentrated my gaze on Trixie and said, “You feel angry.”
“What do you think?”
“And so,” I went on, “you throw—”
Marla said, “Oh my God. You throw up? What a waste.”
“Please don’t talk about throwing up,” said Patty Sue as she stood to go out to the bathroom.
“This is great,” Marla commented. “We say we’re going to talk about men and all we talk about is food and barf.”
Vonette cleared her throat. “Well, girls,” she began, “I can talk about it without talking about food. You see, I know something about doctors. I can tell you—” She stopped to pour sherry directly into her cup, an action I felt I should stop, since she was already pretty sloshed.
I said, “Tell us, Vonette.”
But Trixie interrupted her. “If you’re angry too, Vonette, why don’t you do something? Talk, talk, talk! How about a little action?”
“Temper, temper,” said Marla. “Have a ginger snap.” To demonstrate, she had one herself.
A limp-looking Patty Sue sat down again. I turned back to Vonette.
“So what do you want to tell us, Vonette?”
She took another long sip from her cup. “Do you girls talk about sex in here?”
Everyone was immediately quiet.
“Sure,” said Marla.
“He’s impotent with me,” Vonette said finally, her voice dropping. “But not with everyone else. He says because I drink too much, our lack of a sex life is all my fault.”
Patty Sue said, “I wish we could change the subject.”
Marla rolled her eyes at me.
“Everybody thinks I don’t know what goes on,” Vonette was saying, “but I know. It’s just that … thinking about it gives me these awful headaches. Thirty-six years,” she muttered into her cup before draining it. “For what? Oh, my little Bebe.” She started to sniffle. “I miss you. Bebe, Bebe.”
“Do you think Laura had,” I said tentatively, “something on Fritz, that she was going to confront him—”
“Confront?” yelled Trixie. “Confront? Why do we have to listen to shrink talk all the time?”
“She had something,” said Vonette. “Of course she did. Oh, my.” She reached into her purse and pulled out what I knew was her Valium pillbox, then downed one of the green pills with her newly filled coffee cup of sherry.
“You see,” said Marla as she sliced a piece of the Burnt-Sugar Cake. “This is what happens when you abandon food for other palliatives.”
“What palliatives?” asked Patty Sue.
“Forget it,” said Marla, with her mouth full.
“This just makes me so angry,” said Trixie, her forehead wrinkled into a scowl. “Yak, yak, yak. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to come.”
“Trixie,” I said, “how else could you express your anger?”
“What’s that,” she said, “more shrink talk? How about having some of these doctors pay for the damage they inflict? I mean really pay?”
I said, “What would that look like?”
Trixie groaned and got up from the table, then flopped down on my living room couch with her arms folded across her chest.
“This is getting out of control,” I said under my breath to Marla.
“Don’t tell me,” she said after swallowing, “I learned all about control when I had to deal with the Jerk’s lawyer.”
“Laura,” came Vonette’s drunken voice. In her stupor at the end of the table, she had heard little of the previous conversation. “Laura had something. But not just on him, if you see what I mean.”
I said, “I’m not following you.”
“You don’t?” said Vonette with a confused look. “Don’t you see that stuff Bebe wrote to her teacher about her home life said something about me, too?” She finished what was in her cup. “At that moment, when my Bebe died, my life was over. Laura had something on us, all right. It’s not over, though. I’m going to get him. I’m going to go home and call him an impotent old ass. I’m going to tell him I’m going to turn him in to the Colorado Board of Medical Examiners. Ha! That man screwed anyone, even his own patients!”
Marla and I looked at each other.
Trixie screamed, “You see what I mean?”
Patty Sue had her usual reaction to acute stress. She fainted.
CHAPTER 25
Halloween.
A thick shroud of October fog clung to the ground as I drove back up to the mountains at five-thirty Halloween morning. Already Colorado was in costume—a shroud mourning the loss of Indian summer. Or perhaps the loss of innocence.
Patty Sue was in the hospital. The doctor had said she was about two months pregnant. After the women’s meeting she hadn’t felt any better, even when I brought her back to consciousness with a little ammonia on a paper towel. She was in pain; a couple of pills “to relieve periodic suffering” did no good. It was late anyway, so I’d sent everybody home. Vonette was still babbling on about getting Fritz, even after we’d stuffed her into Marla’s car.
About three A.M. Patty Sue’s cramping from what she’d thought was her period had become so intense that even I became frightened. There was more blood. I scuttled the idea of an ambulance, figuring I could get her down to a Denver hospital more quickly myself. After a quick call to the Emergency Room, we were on our way.
The on-call gynecologist was courteous, informative, and even sympathetic. Trixie should have been there to see a few stereotypes break down. He said they’d have to keep Patty Sue for a while. It looked as if there had been a small separation of the placenta. The fetus appeared healthy and had a good heartbeat. I was worried that the X-rays for Patty Sue’s broken arm might have harmed the fetus, but again the doc said not to worry. Poor Patty Sue.
In her room I swabbed her face with a wet cloth.
Her eyes, dulled by the loss of sleep, fixed on my face.
“I feel awful,” she said.
“First three months are the worst,” I said. “I should have figured it out … the way you’ve been sick.”
“Doctor Korman is the one—” she began, but tears started rolling down onto her pillow.
“It’s okay,” I said, and then stopped to take her hand. I said, “That’s what you told Laura Smiley, isn’t it? That he had been having relations with you.”
She nodded. “He said it would help my condition. Laura already knew what was going on. She told me she needed to talk to me about it.”
I said gently, “What did she say?”
“She said I had to get him to stop. But I told her I was afraid of him. What did I know about medicine? Maybe he was right. And he told me that if I told anyone about the treatment he would call my parents and tell them I was uncooperative.”
She started to cry again, a miserable sobbing that erupted from her chest. I leaned over and hugged her until she stopped.
I said into her ear, “Can you just tell me what Laura said when you said you couldn’t confront him?”
Patty Sue coughed before whispering back, “She said she could get him to stop. She thought he had changed from the way he was before, you know, from what Vonette told us. Laura said she thought Fritz had reformed. Then it was strange because she said she could ruin his practice. She said she had the power to do that.”
“Do you know what she meant?”
“The next time I heard about Laura, she was dead.”
I called Patty Sue’s parents. Her mother answered. When I related my news there was a long silence.
Patty Sue’s mother said, “She didn’t tell us she had a boyfriend.”
I told her Patty Sue would tell them all about it. She said she and her husband could be at the hospital shortly after eight that morning.
Now the mist clouded my windshield so thickly that I slowed to twenty miles an hour and pulled over into the far right lane. When winter approaches in Colorado, it comes like the poet’s cat.
It pads along the back roads and darkens the sky earlier each evening until finally, near mid-December, it plops on its ample backside as the cold sets in. During those months of early darkness, the residents take refuge by their firesides or bulk themselves up with Coors and ski stories to await the coming snows.
And it began this way, not with the ferocious onslaught of thunder and hail that mark spring’s arrival, but gently, subtly, with a cold cloud of mist.
Fog swallowed the cars around me. I straightened up to peer through the glass and thought about Patty Sue. When she came to live with us she had worked hard learning to cook. She had asked questions about my life, and she had told me about hers. It was in September that she wafted off, first into indifference, and late in the month into distraction. The distracted behavior coincided, I now realized, with the confession to Laura and Laura’s death.
My heart tugged for this twenty-year-old about to learn the rigors of motherhood. I would have stayed with her longer but I was worried about Arch. He had been very drowsy when I had told him of the impending trip to the hospital.
Arch, Arch. What was he up to with liches and magic spells and lessons in making Molotov cocktails? Worse than that, what were his plans for a used surgical kit?
I pushed open the front door. The house’s air was warm and still, a place wrapped in sleep. Soon Arch’s alarm broke the silence. I ground coffee beans, ran water, and turned up the radio news, which warned of clouds and wind and possibly snow in the mountains Halloween night.
The phone rang: Marla.
She said, “Vonette overdosed last night. She’s really in bad shape. There’s a possibility it was a suicide attempt.”
“Oh my God. How’d you hear that?”
“Fritz called the priest from the hospital and the churchwomen set up a phone tree. I feel horrible. What do you think we should do?”
“Not sure. I have to get Arch off to school. How about if you call John Richard? We have to keep up with how she’s doing.”
Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series) Page 24
