Killer Pancake (10 page)

It was my turn to give him an incredulous look. I pressed my lips together and nodded.

6

The second time I saw Marla that afternoon she slept through the whole ten minutes of my visit. Her chest rose and fell weakly inside the drab blue hospital gown that was nothing like her customary flamboyant outfits. I closed her hand lightly so as not to disturb her. Her lips, ordinarily lush with lipstick, were dry and cracked, and her breathing seemed uneven. I had seen a young woman dead that morning. Now more than anything I wanted to hold on to this friend who was closer to me than any sister could have been.

I resolved to call our church as soon as I got home. Marla was both popular and active at St. Luke's. She chaired the annual Episcopal Church Women's jewelry raffle and animated the monthly vestry meetings with her irrepressible brassiness and wit. If I didn't let the parish know what was going on, I'd be the recipient of some very unchristian phone calls. I also needed to find out about arranging for a private nurse to come in as soon as the hospital discharged Marla.

I tried to make more mental lists but ended up driving home in a stupor. When the tires crunched over the gravel driveway, I was thankful to see that Tom had squeezed his Chrysler into our detached garage next to Julian's Range Rover. Arch bounded in my direction as soon as I came through the security system. He was sporting the result of his afternoon of tie-dying: a

T-shirt big enough for a quarterback and a pair of knee-length shorts streaked with vivid orange and purple splotches. I didn't care what he looked like. I swept him into my arms and twirled him around in a circle. When, breathless, I let go of him, he stepped back, astonished.

"Hey, Mom! Get real! What's going on? I mean, what's happening?" He pushed his glasses up his nose and eyed me.

From his puzzled but happy response, I guessed Tom had not yet told Arch about the events of the morning. "Where've you been?" he continued suspiciously. "Tom brought Julian home but he's lying down. Everybody around here is out of it. But look."

He stepped back dramatically and held out his thin arms. "Is my outfit cool or what?" A proud smile broke out over Arch's freckled face as he waited for my assessment. I was not about to tell this just-turned-thirteen-year-old that the spotted, too-large outfit hung from his bony shoulders and small torso like something salvaged from a large person's clothesline.

"It is cool," I agreed emphatically. "Really. You look absolutely, positively great."

He turned his mouth down in an exaggerated frown. "Mom? You're not tripped out or anything, are you?"

"Do you know what being tripped out means?" Arch scratched his belly under the shirt. "Forgetful? That's what they used to say, 'I can't remember anything, man, I was tripped out - "

"Look, I'm fine. I'm only in my thirties, remember, and I was just a kid during the period you're talking about. Where's

Tom?"

"Cooking. I told him to fix something groovy from the sixties and he said the only groovy food he knew was hash brownies.

That's disgusting! How can you put corned beef hash in brownies?"

It was going to be a tiresome hobby. When I entered the kitchen, Tom was bent so intently over a recipe that I repressed the greeting on my lips. The walls had been cleaned of the cocoa powder thrown by the Jerk, and lump crabmeat glistened invitingly on the countertop next to a tall green bottle of white wine. A seasoned cr�pier waited next to a wide saut� pan, where butter for a sauce sizzled in a slow, circuitous melt. Tom relished cooking even more than gardening. I happily let him do both. I'd take cr�pes stuffed with crabmeat in white wine sauce any day. Especially when it was made by somebody else.

As I watched, Tom leaned over the crabmeat and methodically nabbed and tossed bits of shell and cartilage. I felt a surge of pleasure. It was not only that I now lived in a household where people vied to prepare the food. Nor was it, because of the day's events, that I'd developed a sudden appreciation for life. This unsettling joy surfaced because I still didn't know why I'd been so reluctant to marry the man who now stood in what used to be my domain and was now our kitchen.

I watched the butter dissolve into a golden pool. Of course, my hesitancy stemmed from all that bad history of my first marriage. After I'd left the Jerk I'd come to relish those years of single motherhood and solitude. Except for the celibacy, which I kept telling myself I'd get used to, being single constituted the perfect life for me, I'd decided. Until Tom.

Nevertheless, transition from my fiercely maintained aloneness to daily companionship did have its glitches. There had been the financial questions. Years ago, the divorce settlement from Dr. John Richard Korman had paid for the expensive retrofit of my kitchen for commercial food service, and I couldn't leave it and still maintain my business. So Tom had moved in with Arch,

Julian, and me, and found a renter for his cabin in a remote mountain area. He insisted on putting the rent money into a vacation fund for the four of us. Of course, as a self-employed woman with the only catering business in town, I'd forgotten what the word vacation meant.

These and other material aspects we'd been able to work out fairly well. Our biggest problem was anxiety. Tom worried about me and I returned the favor. Tom had seen some of the damage done by John Richard Korman before our split. He knew my left thumb didn't bend properly because John Richard had broken it in three places with a hammer. Tom had examined the hutch glass I'd never replaced after John Richard had shattered it in one of his rampages, and the buffet permanently dented from the Jerk's repeated kicking when I'd been hiding behind it. After Tom moved in, one of his first acts was to replace the hutch glass and sand and refinish the buffet's dents.

My apprehension over the dangers of his job were legion. Whenever I heard over the radio of a shooting, whenever a midnight phone call brought him out of our warm bed, whenever that midnight phone call meant that before he left he was cinching the Velcro bands around his white bulletproof vest, my heart ached with fear. My anxiety had not been eased when a murderer had kidnapped Tom for four days this spring, just as we were about to be married. He scoffed and said that had been a bizarre event. He hadn't even believed it himself.

Nor did Tom and I quite know how to talk to each other about our work. Tom claimed he enjoyed discussing investigations with me as long as I wouldn't get upset. Or worse, tell anybody what he or I had uncovered. To me, Tom always appeared either in control: when he was surrounded by his team in an investigation, or in relaxed good humor, when we were together and he was telling me about bloodstain patterns or check-kiting. I, on the other hand, did not relish rehashing the trials of cooking for, serving to, and cleaning up after the rich and shameless. Occasionally I would regale him with stories about the Thai guest at a reception for two hundred who'd insisted on giving me his recipe for whole baked fish-in Thai, or about the drunk Polo Club host who fell off his horse before eating one bite of the vegetarian shish kebabs.

Reflecting on all this, I'd failed to notice that Tom had stopped cooking and was staring at the cupboard above the kitchen counter, his face twisted with pain.

"Tom! What is it?" Startled, he dropped the shell bits he was holding. I apologized and helped him wipe them off the floor.

By the time he straightened up, he had assumed his normal end-of-the-day relaxed look. Still, I was taken aback. In the two months that we'd been married, I'd never seen him look agonized. Until now. Despite his disclaimers to the contrary, the job did take its toll, after all.

He forced a wide grin. "Hey there, Miss G."

"What's wrong?"

"No more than usual." He rinsed his hands and dried them on a dish towel. "Julian's okay, he just needs to rest. I think he's asleep. Did you get in to see Marla?"

I hugged him briefly and murmured that I had. Which reminded me. I phoned the St. Luke's answering machine and left a brief message about Marla's condition, then left another message for a woman in the parish who had once hired a private nurse.

Did she have any recommendations? I asked her tape. Then I washed my hands and glanced at the recipe before retrieving some fresh garlic. Alas, the Jerk had carried off my knives somewhere.

"Marla was very angry. Claimed she hadn't had a heart attack," I commented over my shoulder as I looked around the dining room for my knifeblock. This seldom-used space was a monument to my former life as a doctor's wife. It looked like a furniture store. I'd bought the solid cherry buffet, hutch, and dining room suite right after my first wedding. Then I'd feverishly crocheted an enormous tablecloth and undertaken the tiresome needlepointing of floral covers for the chair seats. I should have been taking a karate class. Better yet, shooting lessons. I hefted up the knifeblock from the table and brought it back to the kitchen.

"I'm guessing Marla will be home at the beginning of next week," I told Tom as I sniffed a clove of garlic. The garlic was fresh and juicy; its pungent smell filled the air. I told Tom what the cardiologist had told me about Marla's condition and her upcoming angiogram and potential atherectomy. "I'm going to go in and see her every day," I added defiantly as I minced. But of course Tom wouldn't be jealous if I made a daily visit to a friend. I shook my head and reached for another clove of garlic. Old reactions died harder than I thought.

Tom turned back to his recipe card and abruptly changed the subject. "How did Korman get through the security system?"

"Look, it was a fluke... I was in the middle of un- doing the dead bolt, and the phone rang, and he hollered that there was some bad news... and before I knew it, he was right beside me... I just wasn't careful."

"Are you all right?" He glanced up from the recipe card, his mouth in a thin line.

When I said I was, he frowned disbelievingly. "Sorry," I amended, "it won't happen again." And there went my summer breeze through the unsecured up- stairs windows, I thought. "What did the hospital say about Julian? Is there any special treatment?"

He dropped ingredients into the melted butter. The delectable scent of crabmeat and garlic rose from the pan. "He just needs to rest. We probably shouldn't talk about the accident around him. Not just yet, anyway, although we'll have to eventually."

He reached for a wooden spoon and stirred in flour to make a roux.

"Why not talk to him about it? And why will you have to eventually?"

Tom exhaled deeply. "Goldy, he looked god-awful coming home from the hospital. I just don't want to upset him anymore.

He cried off and on all the way up the interstate. I don't think I've ever seen that kid in tears."

"Maybe if he talks about it he'll feel better."

Tom stopped stirring and gave me a half-grin. "Well, Miss Psych Major, I know that's true. But we've got a lot of unknowns right now, and I'm not sure Julian should hear about them just yet."

"Unknowns?"

He whisked broth into the sauce, set it to simmer, and then trundled over to the walk-in refrigerator. A moment later fie emerged with two bottles of carbonated apple cider, one of Arch's favorites. He opened a bottle and poured us each a glass full of spritzy gold bubbles. The icy drink was heavenly after the heat of the day.

Tom said, "This mess with Claire Satterfield looks real bad. I'm going to be tied up with it for the foreseeable future."

"But I thought the state patrol handled traffic accidents - "

"It wasn't an accident," he said curtly. He drained his glass. His deep green eyes regarded me grimly. "The patrolman and

I saw acceleration marks on the garage floor. They're very different from deceleration marks. That's what you get when somebody's trying to stop."

"You mean you can - wait! Acceleration? Somebody saw her? Somebody saw her and... sped up? Oh, my Lord - "

He nodded. "And our one eyewitness," he said, "or the one person who thinks he might be an eyewitness, observed a dark green truck veer out of the garage." He stood up to check on his sauce. "We found an eighty-seven green Ford pickup parked by the outside entrance of Prince & Grogan. Stolen. Dented on the grille where it could have hit someone. Coroner's office will match that up with impact marks on the victim."

I said weakly, "Impact marks? You mean bruises? And wasn't there any blood on the grille?"

"The body doesn't have time to bruise." I closed my eyes. "Sometimes there's blood on the vehicle, sometimes there isn't," he went on. "This time there wasn't. The only blood was on the garage floor, from when her head hit the pavement.

Unfortunately, there's not a single discernible hair or fingerprint inside the truck. At least so far. Our guys are working on it. We're grasping for anything." He paused. "But here's something. You were the closest person that we know of to the scene of the crime.

Relatively near the body, you found that flower."

"You don't think - "

"I have no idea, it's probably nothing. But every now and then you get a hunch. When a flower so perfectly fresh is found by the scene of what we're now realizing was a homicide, we have to get it analyzed. So I took a picture of it and sent it to the

American Rose Association."

"Sheesh, that is grasping for straws. What do you mean, our guys are working on the truck?"

He measured out white wine and stirred it into the bubbling crabmeat mixture. "As I said, we're now treating Miss

Satterfield's death as a homicide. State patrol's out, we're in." His big body sighed. "So. Now all we have to do is figure out who would want to kill her. That's why I'm going to have to talk to Julian as soon as he's feeling a little better. The team's working on the evidence too. We need to figure out who could smash into her like that and then leave. Without being seen. We're thinking the perp either had another car right there, or went right back inside the mall."

"I don't believe somebody could do that without anybody seeing."

"Believe it. People usually are just minding their own business." He swirled Parmesan cheese into the sauce. "Poor