The Whole Enchilada (21 page)

I peered into the backyard. I couldn't see Jake, who was still barking madly. Oh, no, I thought as I scanned our garden for our bloodhound. The gate was open. A bear had undoubtedly once again pushed through, looking for garbage. Well, if it was a she-bear with cubs, I didn't hold out much hope for Jake.

I shoved open the kitchen door and called Jake again. The night air was cool, and provided a welcome break from the basement. And then someone pulled me out the door and spun me around.

An arm wrapped across my neck from behind, pressed hard against my windpipe, bending my body backward while my attacker pinned my arms with his other hand. He seemed to be wearing a mask and had on gloves and a heavy jacket.

“Who knows?” a harsh, low voice growled in my ear. His arm choked my throat tighter. Even if I'd had a clue what he was talking about, I couldn't have said anything. I tried to wrench an elbow free so I could shove it into his stomach, but he shifted his stance. He slammed my hip and the side of my face against the house, scraping my cheek with stinging pain as the shock emptied me of breath again. My bruised leg started to buckle and I half sank to the deck. I gasped when he tried to jerk me upright.

“Where are Holly's notes?” he demanded. Black patches appeared in front of my eyes as I grew dizzy. I gargled something unintelligible. I felt the thump of Jake jumping onto the deck, snarling and barking in a ringing bellow I'd never heard him use before. I struggled to break free as my burning leg twisted awkwardly.
Help me
, I thought.
Doesn't anybody hear Jake?

At this point, Julian must have looked out the kitchen's back windows. His muffled voice yelled, “Hey!
Hey!
”

As quickly as my attacker had appeared, he disappeared. The back alley that ran behind our house, with trees lining it, afforded anyone, man or beast, a quick exit. Jake chased after him, but I managed to croak out our canine's name. This time, he listened to me and turned back. I didn't know if my attacker had a weapon and I didn't want Jake finding out.

Julian, Tom, and Boyd spilled out the door. Tom, his hair wet, was clad only in his undies. He was carrying his .45. Boyd helped me up while Tom shouted, “Why in
the hell
did you come out here alone?”

“I didn't! Jake was barking, and I saw the gate was open—”

“All right,” Tom said, “come inside. Everybody. Now.”

I felt frustrated. And stupid. I meekly followed my husband into the kitchen, where he and Boyd wanted every detail of the attack: Did I recognize the person? The voice? Anything, even a smell? No, no, no, I said. The guy wore a mask, gloves, and a jacket. I hadn't even been able to scratch him. I was so upset at not being able to get any DNA or other evidence from whoever it was, I almost started crying.

Julian made me some more decaf espresso and silently placed it in front of me.

At length, Tom said he wanted me to see a doctor. I said I was
fine,
that there was no way I was going back to the hospital. In fact, I didn't want to see anyone at all, except for him.

He shook his head, checked my cheek, and said I could go have a shower. He was going to call the department to get a crime-scene unit up to the house, just in case the guy had dropped anything at all. He was also going to request extra police cars for both front and back.

Upstairs, I allowed scalding water to surge over my body. I didn't care. I gasped at the heat. I rubbed my cheeks, my still-throbbing leg, and every other inch of my skin so hard it turned red. I was trying to get that touch, that brutal questioning, off me.

When I finally climbed into bed, I reflected on the evening: the dinner, the food, the guests. The attack. Except for the money we'd raised for Father Pete's pet project, it had been a catastrophe.

It was only much later that I realized that after the dinner, when we were cleaning up in my center's kitchen, I'd held the solution to the puzzle of who had killed Holly in my hands. I just hadn't known it, seen it, or understood it.

18

T
hat night, I dreamed I was blind. Arch, Tom, Marla, Julian—none of them were in the nightmare. But Holly was. She was calling, “Why can't you see it?”

“See what?” my voiceless scream had called back.

Tom woke me. My yelling hadn't been so silent after all. I was shivering, drenched with sweat. “It's all right,” he told me, over and over, as he held me. “You're okay.”

With Tom's arms around me, I finally went back to sleep. I told the Holly-in-my-head that if she wanted me to discover something, she should have been clearer.

Her faint reply was, “I couldn't.”

Well. Clearly.

Very early Monday morning, Tom told me again, patiently, that I absolutely, positively could not make a
step
—outside the house, outside the car, anywhere—without Boyd physically by my side.

“You're going to make me a prisoner here?”

“You'll have protection from Boyd.”

I said stubbornly, “The only reason I opened the back door—”

Tom's green eyes regarded me solemnly. “Miss G.?” he interrupted. “Two people have died in this town in the course of a weekend. One of the victims looked like you. Father Pete has been stabbed, and Holly's killer might have been trying to murder or injure Drew as well. Maybe the cases are connected, maybe they aren't. But they have a lot of people in common, including you. You're the one who fell literally into the trap that was Holly's sabotaged deck. You're the one who found Kathie Beliar and Father Pete. So even if we're dealing with people from outside our community, you're a witness and a target.” He paused. “Not only that, but someone, very likely Holly's killer, clearly thinks you know
something
about these notes we can't find. Maybe you have some knowledge we haven't unearthed yet. Yet here you are, giving me reasons why you should be able to go out. Talking to me about our gate being open—”

“I only had the door open for a second—”

“Which is longer than it takes to kill somebody.”

I said, “I'm sorry,” and meant it.

Tom said that the crime-scene techs had set up lights to work out back through the night. They'd been trying to get foot- and fingerprint samples from our yard and the alley. They had packed up the lights at dawn; another team was on its way up and would continue the grid search this morning. Meanwhile, he was headed down to the department. Yes, he said, before I could ask, he'd checked with the hospital. Father Pete had not regained consciousness. I asked if the doctors could tell whether our priest had sustained any serious, as in permanent, injury to his brain.

“As long as blood is getting
to
the brain,” Tom said, “there shouldn't be permanent damage. But the doc told me that Pete's blood is still not sufficiently oxygenated to allow him to regain consciousness.”

And why wasn't the blood sufficiently oxygenated? my own mind asked. Because Father Pete's lungs still weren't bringing in enough oxygen. Sometimes I hated that I had just enough medical knowledge to make me worry over every physical setback.

The only thing Tom had found out during the night was that even though Kathie Beliar had run away from her attacker, Father Pete had apparently been able to dig his short fingernails into the skin of the person who had stabbed him. DNA analysis usually took several weeks, but they were going to put a rush on it. Tom hugged me silently, pointed to the iced latte he'd put on our bedside table for me, and left.

I tried to move through my yoga routine. My breath, rapid and agitated, refused to cooperate. I ordered myself to breathe in acceptance, then exhale forgiveness.

Yeah, fat chance.

Sitting on our bed once I'd finished, I noticed that my neck hurt. A look in the mirror confirmed bruises from where my attacker had choked me. My hip, where the attacker had pushed me into the house, ached, as did my arms and shoulders from having them pinned behind me. I slugged down the latte and mentally reviewed the assault from the night before. Apparently, my attacker was worried about two things:
Who knows?
and
Where are Holly's notes?

Tom was right. Whoever this person was, he was worried about me, or someone else, or several other people, having knowledge of something. But what was that piece of knowledge? And why be worried about it?

Holly's voice in my dream:
Why can't you see it?

I was pretty sure my attacker had broken into Holly's rental, occasioning the need for the security system. It was very possible that the person or persons who had attacked Father Pete and Kathie Beliar were connected to Holly's death, and stole the church file because he or they thought the desired data were in there. But whatever the information was, it hadn't been in that file either.

My mind returned to a familiar rut: Was the secret that Holly had over the person she wanted money from, the secret that could be found in the notes, from her distant past, or from her more recent past? If it was from her distant past, could Marla and I find some clue in my notes from the Amour Anonymous meetings? Could there be a reference in there to something that had happened in the past, but was only now related to what had been going on with Holly more recently? If so, Marla and I weren't making much headway in discovering it. Yet my attacker must have believed that Holly had told me about the notes she had, whatever they were and wherever she had hidden them. Would she have confided her secret to Father Pete? I didn't really see our priest agreeing to be a party to blackmail. Then again, maybe he hadn't really known exactly what Holly had been up to. He'd said nothing to me at her house after her death, when we were helping Drew. But perhaps he didn't feel he could divulge information Holly had given him in confidence. I certainly couldn't ask him now.

So I called Marla, always my default option.

“Lord God in heaven,” she said when she answered the phone. It took her a moment to find and read the caller ID. “Goldy? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

I glanced at our bedside clock. “Ten to seven?”

“Right,” she said. “Ten to seven in the evening. In Tokyo. Where I wish I were at this very minute, about to get a long, deep massage, before drinking an entire bottle of sake. What could you possibly want at ten to seven in the morning?” Before I could say anything, she rushed on: “Friday night and all the dishwashing was bad enough. But last night! You never told me that catering was so exhausting. Every muscle in my body is screaming.”

I smiled. “Sorry.”

“You don't
sound
sorry. You
sound
as if you're grinning.”

“I
am
sorry. But listen, I need to tell you about something.” I gave her the briefest possible account of what had happened in our backyard the night before, and added that the crime-scene techs had been working on trying to find some evidence concerning the identity of my attacker.

She was immediately awake. “Wow. Okay if I come over? I want all the details. Plus, we could keep going through the Amour notes.”

“Yes, absolutely. Thanks.”

“I'm going to need a quintuple espresso with cream when I get there. And none of your decaf stuff.”

“How about a sextuple-shot latte with whipping cream?”

She groaned. “If only it were as romantic as it sounds.”

I assessed myself in the bathroom mirror, and tried to ignore the blackness still blooming around my neck. Somebody tries to choke you, you're going to show it. Of course, I knew this well enough from my years with the Jerk. I smoothed concealing makeup over it, which didn't help much.

In the kitchen, Julian had pulled up the menu for that night, the twenty-first-birthday party for Ophelia Unger. Since Ophelia's deceased mother had been Greek, Neil Unger had thought it would be “fun” to have a menu featuring Greek food. Julian and I had offered a menu of Greek lemon soup, aka
avgolemono
, filo dough filled with spinach and cheese, aka
spanakopita
, marinated lamb-and-vegetable skewers, aka
shish kebabs
, a Greek walnut cake, aka
karadopita
, and saffron rice and Greek salad, neither of which, as far as I knew, had an aka.

We'd made the cake the previous week and frozen it. Julian had thawed the lovely creation, and now was spooning a luxurious homemade honey syrup over the top. The cake would bathe in the glaze until we took it to the Ungers' place that night.

“Ready to start on the spanakopita,” Julian announced as he put the pan in the sink and headed for the walk-in. He pulled out bunches of fresh spinach. As he came out, I went in for the lamb roasts. My job was to trim and marinate the meat. I wondered if I could get it done before Marla arrived, then knew that I probably could, since Marla would want to shower, try on several outfits before deciding on one, then sashay over in her own time.

I set the lamb aside and began heating dry red wine with garlic and herbs for the marinade. Since I always believed you could learn new aspects of cooking, I'd been open-minded recently when I'd discovered that the way I'd been marinating meat and chicken all these years was incorrect. The new thinking was that alcohol should be cooked out of a marinade before it was poured over meat. All this time I'd thought that it was the wine itself that imparted flavor to meat. Well, it did, according to the book I'd read. But the alcohol in the wine did not. It just made the meat mushy.

“Goldy,” said Julian.

“Yes?” I'd been leaning in too close to the steaming wine mixture.

“You're not looking too good. Is that bruise where the guy—”

“Indeed it is.” I stood up straight and decided my doctor might kill me for not calling him the previous night when I'd been injured, but he wouldn't, after all, if I had a second espresso. “That's better,” I said, after dousing the espresso with cream and taking an exploratory sip. I began to sharpen one of my knives.

“I should have come outside earlier,” Julian said suddenly. “I should have heard Jake barking and—”

“Will you stop?” I asked. “You didn't know someone was out there. Obviously,
I
didn't know someone was out there, or I never would have opened the door in the first place.”

“But still,” he insisted, “I should have figured it out.” His sneakers squeaked across the kitchen floor as he transferred all the washed spinach to several large pots. “I should have—”

“Woulda, shoulda, coulda,” I interrupted as I began trimming fat from the first of several lamb roasts. “Stop putting yourself on a guilt trip.”

Julian sighed loudly as the front doorbell rang. Quarter past seven? No way it was Marla yet. And then I heard Boyd talking to men he seemed to know. Ah, the second team of crime-scene guys. Boyd went outside to direct them toward the alley.

Holly had had Catholic guilt, I reflected as I cut the lamb into cubes. She'd had so much of it that she'd come up to see Father Pete
once a quarter
for her confession. Once a quarter? Had she done one thing that was hounding her conscience, or was she committing lots of sins? If so, had she resolved to do better, been absolved, and then done more bad deeds?

Had Holly indeed been blackmailing someone? Did it have anything to do with her fighting with George over child support for Drew? Did she tell Father Pete about that?

And what was the relationship mess she'd wanted to talk to me about? Was she talking about Warren Broome? Had Holly been a patient of his? Maybe all this mess was connected to Womanizing Warren's tendency to seduce his patients. Yet I'd also learned that Holly had met Warren many years ago at that doctors' conference in Boulder. Would Tom's team be able to find out the nature of their relationship? I doubted they had enough to secure a warrant to search his house or his office.

I set aside the first pile of cubes.

Holly had said that the artist I now suspected was Yurbin was trying to manipulate her into giving him money. Did he think she'd cheated him out of a client? She'd seemed frightened at first, then just annoyed. Had he threatened her? Did it have to do with her art career, or something else?

Had anything happened when Holly went to the church, the morning of the birthday party?

Why did Holly give Audrey the puzzle with the strange instruction about “if something happened to her”?

Why would Holly's killer set a deadly trap for Drew, the one I walked into? Had it actually
been
for Drew?

And were Holly's death, the assault on Father Pete and Kathie Beliar, and the attack on me truly connected?

Round and round my mind went, with no answers appearing.

Once I had the lamb all cut up, I threw the stainless-steel knife into the sink. It clattered so loudly that Julian jumped.

“Sorry,” I said.

“What's wrong now?”

“I feel like I should be able to figure this out.”

“Shoulda,” said Julian as he turned down the flame under the pots of spinach.

“Well, I do.”

I removed the marinade from the heat, set it aside to cool, then started washing mountains of vegetables. We would be threading skewers with cherry tomatoes, squares of green pepper, and quartered onions. We'd do the lamb separately. Despite all those women's-magazine photographs of grill-marked kebabs featuring juicy chunks of meat, cubes of tomato, crisp pepper squares, and tangy onion slices, there was one thing I'd learned the hard way. When it came to making shish kebabs, cooking the meat on the same skewers as the vegetables meant digging charred, petrified, unrecognizable-except-to-an-archaeologist produce off the floor of your grill—for the next six months.

“Sorry I said that about the
shoulda
,” Julian said.

“Don't worry about it.” I stopped peeling onions, blinked madly, and turned to him.