Too Rich and Too Dead

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Why?” Mallory asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Carly impressed me as someone who would have loved to become super-famous.”

  “As far as I know, she never gave a definite reason for why she was vacillating,” Harriet replied. “At one point, she said something about the timing not being right. On a few other occasions, she said she wasn't sure Gordon was the best person to make the film. It's not that she didn't like him personally. It was just that once he expressed interest and got her thinking about the whole idea, she started throwing around names like Ang Lee and James Cameron.”

  That I can understand, Mallory thought, since it sounds more like the Carly I knew way back when.

  “What about Brett?” she asked. “Was he in favor of Gordon making the movie?”

  Harriet glanced from side to side, as if wanting to make sure they were completely alone. She seemed to notice Mallory's surprise at her cautiousness because she added, “Sometimes I wonder if these walls have ears. All I can say is that Brett wasn't averse to anything that was likely to bring in more money. I don't think he cared much about where it came from.

  “Anyway,” she went on with a sigh, “Carly's unexpected change of heart at the point when she was this close to signing a contract was a real blow for Gordon. It was making him lose credibility in the Hollywood circles that really count. Here he'd been promising such great things, and all of a sudden it was starting to look like he had nothing. It was making him look really bad.”

  “So Gordon had good reason to be furious with Carly,” Mallory mused.

  While she sounded as if she was merely making an objective observation, her head was spinning.

  Gordon—a killer? she thought. Is that possible?

  She struggled to put what Harriet had just told her in perspective. She certainly didn't want to believe that Gordon could be capable of murder. Not when she'd allowed herself to enjoy his company and even feel attracted to him.

  Am I really such a poor judge of character? she wondered mournfully.

  The whole idea of dating again—of developing an interest in someone of the opposite sex, then taking all the risks that went along with opening one's heart—was frightening enough. The notion of letting someone new in her life also filled her with guilt, since she was still adjusting to the fact that David was gone.

  But the idea that she might be incapable of seeing people for who they really were raised her uncertainty and her anxiety to an even higher level.

  When she and Harriet had both found their way to the bottom of their coffee cups and the scones had been reduced to nothing more than a few crumbs, she glanced at her watch and saw it was almost time for her cooking class.

  “I'm glad to see that you're doing as well as you are,” she told Harriet, still uncertain of whether to view her with sympathy or caution. “But I'm afraid I have to get going.”

  “I should get back to work, too,” Harriet said, eyeing the stack of paper in front of her.

  “I'd better pop into the rest room first.”

  “Be my guest. It's at the end of the hall.”

  Mallory was gone less than three minutes—possibly less time than Harriet anticipated. At least if the surprised look on her face when Mallory reappeared in the doorway of her office was any indication.

  “Mallory! You sneaked up on me!” Harriet cried.

  She was crouched down on the floor, tucking something into the bottom drawer of a file cabinet. She quickly pushed the drawer closed with such force that metal hit metal with a loud bang. Moving just as fast, she turned the small silver key in the lock, pulled it out, and dropped it into her pocket.

  From Mallory's perspective, the expression on her face was decidedly one of guilt.

  “I'm just trying to put things where they belong,” Harriet mumbled as she stood up, brushing the wrinkles in her skirt. When she finally looked at Mallory, her face was beet red.

  “Of course,” Mallory agreed, studying her.

  Something felt very wrong. The atmosphere in the room had changed. She suddenly felt sparks of tension, as if Harriet was disturbed over having been caught doing something she wasn't supposed to be doing.

  Automatically Mallory's eyes drifted toward the bottom drawer of the file cabinet.

  She's hiding something.

  Yesterday, she thought, her head swimming, I spotted Harriet at an out-of-the-way restaurant with Sylvie, a woman for whom she claimed to have nothing but contempt. Not only was she socializing with someone she'd made a point of characterizing as an enemy, she blatantly lied to me about when she'd been released from the police station and what she'd done immediately afterward.

  And now this.

  As far as Mallory was concerned, the police were right to consider Harriet a person of interest. In fact, from what she had seen, she appeared to be a person of great interest.

  While Mallory was becoming increasingly convinced that Harriet was guilty, she knew perfectly well that she had yet to prove anything. Which meant she couldn't yet discount any of the other suspects on her list.

  Including Gordon.

  As she drove along the mountain road that took her away from Tavaci Springs, she wrestled with her ambivalence about seeing him again. After all, even though Harriet was a strong suspect herself, she had certainly made a good case for Gordon having reason to be furious with Carly.

  True, Harriet could have played up Gordon's anger as a means of deflecting suspicion. Yet the fact that he had told her himself that he'd wanted to make a film about Carly's life story was troubling.

  Mallory knew that even if she wanted to change her plans, she couldn't. Not only was she scheduled to meet Gordon at the Cooking School of Aspen in just half an hour, she didn't have his cell phone number with her. She couldn't simply skip the class, either, since she intended to write about it in her article.

  Besides, she didn't want to believe that he could possibly be a killer. She liked him. He was fun to be with, he made her feel good, and she'd been looking forward to taking this class with him.

  She drove on, mentally running down her list of other suspects.

  She started with Brett. The fact that Carly was having an affair with Dusty made her husband look more guilty, not less. After all, if he'd found out about it, he could easily have flown into a jealous rage and killed her. Of course, if he really was living off Carly, the way Harriet and Gordon had said he was, he would have in essence been killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

  That led her to Astrid. Since she was having an affair with Brett, it made perfect sense that she, too, would have wanted Carly out of the picture. Since Astrid and Brett were the only ones who knew if they'd really spent the entire night together, she could have easily been the one who had gone to Tavaci Springs that night, intending to get rid of her rival once and for all.

  Or maybe the lovers had both killed her, conspiring to find a way to eliminate the one obstacle to their love. Especially since Brett stood to become a very wealthy widower.

  Dusty couldn't be discounted, either. No matter how Autumn tried to make his relationship with Carly sound like the best thing that had happened to him since the invention of the snowboard, the simple fact that he was having an illicit relationship with the victim made him a suspect. Being so much younger—and so much poorer—made his situation look even worse. He was someone who was forced to live simply, sharing an apartment with a bunch of other ski dudes, but who clearly had an appreciation for life's luxuries, such as Rolex watches. Which meant that even though he acted like someone without a care in the world, there were definitely other sides to him—along with reasons other than love or even simply sexual attraction fueling his interest in Carly.

  And she certainly couldn't discount Sylvie, especially when even the police thought she was worth looking at. She had been counting on Carly to sell her business to HoliHealth, which would have gained Sylvie the status at her company that she so desperately yearned for. But if it turned out Carly was just stringing h
er along, she would have been furious that she had both wasted her time and gambled her reputation—all for nothing. In fact, it was even possible that Sylvie had been charged with Carly's murder while Mallory was busily running around town, interviewing suspects…

  She suddenly snapped out of her ruminations and realized she was already a third of the way down the mountain road. She glanced around, surprised that she'd been driving for at least five minutes without paying attention to her surroundings.

  It was at that point that she glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that another vehicle was close behind.

  In fact, the mud-splattered pickup truck was a little too close, especially since she'd just reached the part of the road that was particularly twisty. It was also narrow, with dramatic, heart-stopping drops down the side on which she drove.

  “Idiot,” she muttered. “Just because locals like this jerk probably know every inch of these roads doesn't make racing along them any safer.”

  Besides, she wondered, doesn't the fact that I'm driving so slowly clue him in to the fact that I'm not very comfortable driving on this particularly treacherous stretch?

  Or maybe it wasn't a him. She peered into her rearview mirror, trying to see the face of the individual who was exercising such bad judgment—so bad, in fact, that it could get them both killed. But the windshield was spattered with so much mud that she couldn't make out who was sitting in the front seat. From the looks of things, the driver had cleared away a space no bigger than an index card in order to see out.

  She tried to speed up a bit, just to show that she was trying.

  The truck sped up, too. It was still close. Too close.

  This guy is a serious road bully, she thought, her anxiety level escalating quickly. Should I turn on my flashers? Maybe that would let him know I have no intention of going any faster and he'd back off.

  But his front bumper was so close to her back bumper—mere inches away, from what she could tell—that he probably wouldn't even be able to see that she'd turned on her flashers.

  By this point she was fighting serious feelings of panic. She glanced from side to side, looking for a turnout or at least a stretch of road wide enough for her to move over and let the truck pass. But the road was so narrow that there was barely room for one vehicle, much less two. She contemplated moving into the other lane, but the road curved so dramatically that it was impossible to see if anyone was coming up the mountain. If being tailgated was dangerous, it was nothing compared to a head-on collision.

  Realizing she was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her hands hurt, Mallory forced herself to relax them, just a little. She glanced into the rearview mirror every few seconds, wishing she could will the imbecile who was tailgating her to stop acting like such a fool.

  And then, bump! Mallory let out a yelp as she felt her car jerk and heard the loud thump of the truck's front bumper hitting hers.

  “What the—?” she cried.

  She checked the rearview mirror again, expecting the driver to slow down. That was standard procedure whenever there was a car accident, wasn't it?

  Still, there was no place to stop on this narrow mountain road. Not without running the risk of being hit by any other vehicles that came along.

  I can't even see the license plate, she thought.

  That was when she felt another bump, this one even harder.

  Oh, my God, she thought, feelings of panic instantly sending her heart racing and coating her dry mouth with a metallic taste. That nut is doing this on purpose!

  I don't know who's driving, but whoever's behind the wheel is trying to run me off the road!

  “A good traveler has no fixed plans,

  and is not intent on arriving.”

  —Lao Tzu

  Mallory clutched the steering wheel even more tightly, resisting the urge to whimper as she fixed her gaze on the narrow road twisting in front of her. It appeared to be descending at an even more dramatic angle than she remembered.

  I have to stay focused, she thought, swallowing hard. I have to keep going. And I can't speed up, or that crazy driver will hit me even harder.

  So instead of accelerating, she nudged the brake and slowed down. When she dared to take her eyes off the road long enough to check the rearview mirror, she saw that the pickup truck persisted in maintaining the same minuscule distance between his vehicle and hers.

  “You can do this,” she whispered to herself, vaguely aware that her entire body was coated in sweat. “You're doing fine, and you don't have that much farther to go…”

  She yelped as she felt another bump, this one so hard it rammed her car right up to the edge of the road. She could feel the pavement giving way to dirt, which meant her front tire had been pushed onto the three-foot-wide strip of rock-covered terrain edging the road. Beyond, she could see nothing but air.

  Acting on instinct, Mallory wrenched the steering wheel to the left. She could feel the pebbles and dirt sputtering beneath her tire, and for a few terrifying moments she couldn't tell whether the car was going to move in the direction she wanted. But it finally lurched forward, the front nearly smashing into the mountain on her left. In the last fraction of a second, she jerked the steering wheel to the right, managing to maneuver the car back into the center of her lane.

  Even though she had regained control, the ordeal left her shaking.

  I can't do this! she thought, her chest heaving and her eyes burning. All I want is for this to be over!

  But she knew she had no choice but to force herself to keep on going. So she gritted her teeth and drove as slowly as she dared.

  A wave of relief washed over her when she began spotting side roads jutting off, which told her she was finally nearing the bottom of the mountain. Most were little more than wide dirt paths, but at least they provided a way of getting off the main road. Still, while she derived some comfort from knowing she had other options, she was afraid that if she turned off onto one of them, the pickup truck would simply follow.

  And the last thing she wanted was to find herself cornered by the driver who had already made three attempts at sending her barreling off the side of a serious mountain.

  “Yes.” Mallory breathed when she saw a car that was traveling in the opposite direction pass by. Trundling a few hundred yards behind it was a truck. She was filled with gratitude that she was no longer alone, since having other people around made it less likely that the nutcase who'd been trying to run her off the road would try again.

  Sure enough, after she passed one more unpaved road, she glanced into the rearview mirror and watched the pickup turn onto it abruptly. It sped up once it hit the dirt, its dust-covered tires sending mud splattering up into the air like a geyser.

  As she watched the vehicle disappear into the woods, for a fleeting moment Mallory considered following him. But the idea of driving straight into a second dangerous situation when she'd barely escaped from the first held no appeal. All she wanted was to get off the mountain.

  Once she reached flat land, she felt totally depleted. The sweat that covered her body had turned her skin clammy, and she couldn't keep her hands from shaking.

  She was also struck by the harsh realization that while she'd managed to get off the mountain safely, her ordeal wasn't over.

  She knew precisely what the harrowing car chase down the mountain had been: a warning. And that meant there was undoubtedly more to come.

  Even though Mallory had managed to get off the mountain safely, her knees still felt wobbly and her mind was clouded. After she parked in downtown Aspen, she sat in her car for a few minutes, getting her bearings.

  The fact that someone had just tried to send her plummeting down the side of a mountain intensified her lingering uncertainties about seeing Gordon again.

  It couldn't have been him, she thought when she finally dragged herself out of her car. No matter how she tried to picture him as a killer, she couldn't.

  Then again, she'd been wrong before.

&
nbsp; But when she spotted him waiting for her in the spot they'd agreed upon along the Hyman Avenue Mall, the melting feeling in her heart reinforced her belief that there was no way Gordon could possibly be capable of killing anybody.

  “Gordon!” she cried, breaking into a jog as she grew near.

  She expected him to turn and smile. Instead, he stood frozen. It wasn't until she got closer that she realized why: He was imitating the gigantic wooden bear he stood next to, duplicating its posture and even its stern expression.

  Despite her confused feelings about the man, she couldn't help laughing. “I knew I should have brought some salmon with me!” she joked.

  He continued to stare straight ahead, ignoring her.

  “Gordon, this is really getting un-bear-able,” she quipped, wincing at her own bad pun.

  It was so bad, in fact, that even he couldn't resist groaning. Finally turning to look at her, he demanded, “How am I supposed to trick people into thinking I'm a bear if you're going to make me laugh?”

  Squinting in mock confusion, she replied, “Tell me again why you want people to think you're a bear?”

  “To fit in, of course! I'm in Colorado, aren't I?”

  “I think you'd better try another route,” Mallory suggested with mock seriousness. “Maybe you can impress the residents of Aspen with your fine cooking ability. Which means we'd better hightail it over to our class—if you get my meaning.”

  “Unfortunately, I do.” Gordon's shoulders sagged as he returned to a human posture. “I'd try to outdo you, but at the moment I can't think of any puns that incorporate bear anatomy.”