Dark Tort (15 page)

When Marla swung into the driveway of Aspen Meadow Imports, a tall mechanic with long, droopy cheeks and a gray ponytail came out waving a rag.

“Wait,” he called to us. When he was beside the Mercedes, he said, “You can’t leave that food truck here. That van. What does it say? Goldilocks’ Catering. We’ve had trouble with a bear coming down every night and foraging in our garbage.”

Under her breath, Marla said, “One bear’s food is another bear’s trash. But still, can mountain bears read?”

I hated it when people made fun of my Germanic maiden name, but I was prepared to ignore my best friend. To the mechanic, I said, “I’m moving it. I was just helping out a friend.”

The mechanic’s cheeks drooped even farther. “Okay, lady. Those bears can smell food. I wouldn’t want to be responsible if one of ’em broke into your vehicle.”

“I’m moving it!”

Marla laughed, then promised she would call if she heard anything. I thanked her for the ride and bustled Gus and Arch into the van.

At the boys’ request, I left them off three blocks from our house. They swore they’d be home by half past five, because they’d be famished, Gus said, his smile huge. As usual, Gus was upbeat at the prospect of being a fund-raising vendor of magazines. Arch, on the other hand, was morose, as he hated selling more than having his teeth pulled without anesthetic. But I couldn’t even try to cheer him up the way I usually did. In point of fact, I didn’t feel as if I had any cheer left.

I pulled my van into the driveway rather than parking it on the street. If by some miracle the plow came through that night, I didn’t want to get walled in by a hardpacked, man-made snowdrift. I also didn’t want to risk leaving my van on the curb again. When I stepped out into the three-inch-deep icy carpet of snow, I shrieked with surprise. But that didn’t stop me from traipsing up and locking the van doors with the remote. I pressed the button twice, so that the security system beeped. This time, I wanted to be sure the van was locked.

Completely chilled, I raced through the fall of flakes to the front of the house. Once I’d slammed the door, I leaned on it and shuddered. I let my coat slip to the floor, limped to the living room, and flopped onto the couch. Tom was rattling around in the kitchen, for which I was thankful. Apparently, he hadn’t heard me come in.

But our animals had. Scout the cat and Jake the bloodhound rushed to greet me. Well, I shouldn’t say that Scout rushed, because that cat never went quickly to anything, even food. But he did stride into the living room and, sensing I might need comfort, dropped his back on top of my shoes and rolled over, all in one smooth movement. You can pat me if it will make you feel better. I did, while Jake slobbered kisses on my cheeks. The large hound also began to whine between large liquid tonguings. Don’t tell me animals can’t sense moods.

“There you are,” said Tom as he whisked into the living room carrying a silver tray sporting two glasses of sherry, homemade crackers, and a wedge of sharp English cheddar, his favorite. “It’s a bit early for a cocktail.” His tone was cheery, his handsome face the picture of confidence. “Then again, I thought you might need one.”

“What I need most of all is to talk to you.”

“One thing at a time, wife.”

I smiled my thanks and left to change and wash my hands. By the time I’d pulled on sweats and returned to the living room, Tom had built a cozy fire and set the silver tray on his antique cherrywood butler’s tray, which he’d judiciously placed in front of my old sofa when he’d moved into the house. The scene was typically Tom-and-Goldy. On the one hand, there was Tom’s lovingly purchased, laboriously polished cherry furniture. He said taking care of his pieces helped reduce stress from the job. And then there was my old sofa. Once I’d kicked out the Jerk, I’d wanted to remove as many memories of his presence as possible, and I’d had every piece in the living room reupholstered in the cheapest fabric available. It was a sunny orange that I’d determinedly told myself was going to match my new circumstances. Unfortunately, the orange had turned somewhat dingy, and I kept thinking I was going to have everything redone one of these days. But so far, that day had not materialized.

And then there was the sherry, aged and golden, bought by Tom. He’d poured it into antique cut-crystal glasses that had belonged to my grandmother. These, too, felt like Tom’s, since he’d salvaged them from a basement cardboard box that I’d hidden behind our Christmas decorations. Talk about erasing memories: I hadn’t even remembered packing up the crystal and putting it out of sight some years before. In any event, the glasses were what remained of my breakables, as I’d come to think of them, after John Richard had smashed every dish of our Minton bone china, in one of his numerous fits of rage. Thinking about the Jerk didn’t do much for my mood. Squinting at Tom’s tray, I stood at the edge of the living room, immobile.

“Miss G.! I can tell you’re not doing so hot. Come and sit by me. Talk to me. I know what you need.” Tom’s eyes were steadily trained on my face. “You need to eat, drink, talk, and go to bed. How many hours has it been since you had some real sleep? Too many. Way too many.”

“The last thing I want to do is go to bed,” I heard my voice say. “I want to be with you, and with Arch . . . and I’ll eat and drink and—” What was that last part? Oh yes, talk. There was that.

“All right,” Tom said gently, patting the couch. “Maybe you won’t be merry. But at least sit down until you can start cooking and doing again.”

“Okay, okay.”

I moved with a kind of stiff uneasiness onto the couch. I tried not to think. After a minute, I took the glass Tom proffered, and sipped. The sherry tasted like liquid fire. But it helped. So did the crunchy, surprisingly flaky homemade crackers. I took a second bite and looked at Tom. Sharp cheddar cheese? Tangy English mustard? Imported cayenne pepper? I couldn’t get my mind even to work on that superficial level: food, work, prepping, catering. I blinked at the fire, and realized this was the first time I’d been sitting still and relaxing in the past twenty-something hours. Even so, all my muscles felt bunched up, tense with despair and confusion.

I felt the glass slip between my fingers. In a voice that seemed to be coming from across the room, I said, “What the hell is going on?”

Tom snagged my glass and put it on the table. “You’re tired, wife. You’re drained. Maybe you should just go to bed.” But instead of ordering me upstairs, he pulled me close and rubbed the small of my back. After a few moments of this, the tautness began to melt.

“I’m afraid to . . . to think.”

“I know, I know,” Tom murmured. “Why do you suppose I polish furniture? Just take it easy for a few minutes and don’t try to use your brain.”

But I couldn’t. I pulled away from him. “Tell me what’s going on at the department,” I demanded. “What have they learned?”

Tom ducked his chin. His sea-green eyes assessed me. Then he pulled his mouth into a straight line. “Let’s go into the kitchen and work. We can talk there.”

Mechanically, I followed Tom to our cooking space. He’d thawed a tenderloin of beef, and I helped him tie it into a perfect roll. Tom had become obsessed with beef lately, and had added to my mail order—the best way to get prime, I’d learned, if not the cheapest—on more than one occasion. In fact, I was serving tenderloins at Donald Ellis’s birthday party . . . oh Lord, I didn’t want to think about that.

Tom used one of my new sharp-as-the-dickens Japanese knives to insert slivers of garlic all along the surface of the beef. Then he rubbed the roll with oil, sprinkled it with dried rosemary and thyme, packed it with a gravelly layer of ground black peppercorns, and sprinkled it with our French sea salt. And suddenly, with that small detail, I felt my mind drifting back here, to our family, to our life together. Salt. Salt. What had my son said about it, when Tom had waxed lyrical on the taste value of the new crystals?

“Yo, Tom! NaCl is NaCl,” Arch had observed, shaking his head.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Tom had intoned, before serving us steaks sprinkled with the little nuggets of flavor. I’d thought it was wonderful; Arch had remarked that it was “still just salt.”

Remembering this now, I began to cry. No sobbing, mind you, just a wholly unexpected spill of tears. Oh, what was the matter with me?

Dusty, Dusty. She had been part of a family, too, the Routts, a loving family whose loss I could not begin to contemplate. My mind brought up the image of her pronated wrist, my seemingly endless attempts to breathe life into her limp body. I’d seen dead people before, of course. But Dusty had been so young, and so loved . . .

Tom had not seen me start crying, as he was busy inserting a thermometer into the meat. When he placed the pan into the oven next to half a dozen baking potatoes, I ordered myself to get my act together.

Without much forethought, I marched determinedly to the walk-in refrigerator, wrenched open the door, and stared into the cool darkness. What would we have with this particular tenderloin?

Why, béarnaise sauce, I thought, and reached for a small tub of Tom’s meticulously clarified butter and a bunch of fresh tarragon. Charlie Baker made a great béarnaise, that’s what he would have served, I thought instinctively. Be quiet, I told my mind. Concentrate.

I melted the butter, separated the eggs, and pulverized a handful of tarragon leaves in my herb grinder. Once I’d beaten and warmed the egg yolks and swished in some tarragon vinegar, I whisked in drops of melted butter. The concentration required for these tasks finally began to soften the agonizing tension in my brain. Beside me, Tom was assembling a salade composée of Wagnerian proportions: steamed fresh grean beans, asparagus, and peas, arranged on a lush bed of arugula leaves.

“What have they looked at, Tom?” I asked. My gaze never left the sauce. “The cops, I mean? The detectives. What have they found?”

Tom continued carefully to lay out rows of green beans. “Well, they haven’t found much yet, except that it looks as if she was slapped in the face, got her head bashed into a painting, and then she was strangled to death. The questions they’ll ask, investigating? First, was this a robbery gone bad? Was Dusty supposed to be there, or was she an unexpected complication?”

“It didn’t look like a robbery. I mean, I didn’t see any signs of a break-in.”

“There wasn’t a forced entry. So it didn’t look like a robbery to you. But with so much information on computers and disks these days, who knows? Maybe the office had valuables, too.”

“You mean, the kind you’d keep in a safe?”

Tom shook his head. “No. The kind you put on display. Gold clocks. Sculptures by famous—”

“Wait. There were expensive paintings on the walls. You know, by Charlie Baker. Fifty thou each, why wouldn’t somebody steal those?”

Tom shrugged. “Kind of hard to shove those into a getaway bag, although you could. That partner, Richard Chenault? He’s helping them with an inventory. So is the office manager. Louise Upton.” I scowled, but Tom grinned. “I haven’t talked to her, but Boyd did. She told him to call her ‘ma’am.’ ” He went on: “Then again, maybe it wasn’t a robbery. Say Dusty knew something, had discovered something, had asked questions she shouldn’t have, was making a pest out of herself . . . any of a number of things. So somebody says he wants to meet her before she helps you with the bread. Your unlocked van is on the street, so first he turns the lights and radio on, draining the battery so you’ll be late. It doesn’t take long to kill someone.”

“So, the department is constructing scenarios about what could have happened? Developing suspects from that?”

“Not yet. They have to ask lots of other questions first. Who were her enemies? Did she owe anybody money? Was she doing any dangerous work? Did anyone resent her for any reason? If so, who resented her, and why?” Tom sighed. “But as I say, the very first thing they have to figure out is if she walked in on a burglary, or if someone was waiting for her. Right, no forced entry, so somebody might have had a key. On the other hand, the security at that office was not that tight. Somebody could have come in, posing as a client or delivery person or whatever, and then never went out. He or she waited until everybody left, and then started to rob the place. Dusty could have surprised this person, and he might have killed her to avoid apprehension.”

“Or maybe someone was waiting for her and then wanted to make it look like a burglary.”

“That, too.” Tom’s tone was rueful. After a moment, he said, “We did find out one thing concerning her work. From Richard Chenault, her uncle.”

“I’m listening.”

“He said that Dusty spent quite a bit of time working with Charlie Baker, once he found out he had pancreatic cancer. Charlie wanted to tidy up his correspondence, his bank accounts, his legal affairs. He and Dusty got along well, and he liked having her there to help him out.”

“I know she knew Charlie, but I guess I didn’t know she was actually working closely with him. How long had this been going on?”

“Since the beginning of this year.”

“Have the cops found any connection between Charlie Baker and Dusty that could have spelled trouble for her?”

“Not yet. But they’re looking into it.”

We worked in silence for a while. I set the heavenly scented béarnaise sauce over barely simmering water and hoped Arch and Gus would arrive home soon. The October evenings were already rushing toward early darkness, and with someone who might have sabotaged my van out there, I felt uneasy.

“Look,” I said, “I keep going back to my van. If I hadn’t been late to the H&J office, then what? Would I have been strangled, too? Or could I have saved her?”