Dark Tort (14 page)

“Good God.”

“I feel so sorry for Sally. Oh, and by the way, remember how she said she didn’t trust the police? Do you want to know why?” I mentioned the stories of Edgar dying in custody, of the drama teacher and Dusty supposedly having an affair, which the drama teacher had vociferously denied. “Do you remember this story about Ogden, the drama teacher?”

“Where were you, Mars?” Marla said.

“When the Jerk used to bother me, or when I get busy with catering, I don’t even glance at the papers.”

“Well. That was back when ‘blame the woman’ was the first thing everyone did.” Marla’s tone turned bitter. “He claimed Dusty was a slut, and that he’d had a vasectomy anyway, and people believed him. That man has a lot to answer for, but I doubt he ever will. Poor Dusty.”

Marla piloted the Mercedes down the mountain toward Denver. We didn’t talk, which was unusual for us. I tried just to focus on what I had to do next, which was to check out Charlie Baker’s artworks, to pick up Arch and Gus, and to bring them home. And then, hopefully, to visit with Wink Calhoun over dinner.

The Christian Brothers High School lies on twenty acres snuggled at the base of the foothills, just on the westernmost edge of Denver. Set up in the twenties as an orphanage for boys, the institution had evolved into a boys’ boarding and day school in the forties, then a boys’ day school in the sixties. With the population of Denver and environs burgeoning in the eighties and nineties, the demand for parochial high schools had shot up. Under pressure from hordes of Catholic parents, CBHS had gone coed and soon doubled its student body to a thousand kids.

But the thing I liked best about CBHS, I thought as I turned off of the interstate and headed south, was the energetic, can-do attitude of the place. Unlike Elk Park Prep, the status-conscious, materialistically driven school where Arch had spent three miserable years, the main money emphasis at CBHS was: “We Need to Raise the Money for More Needy Kids’ Tuition!” To my astonishment, different parent groups and committees enthusiastically ran all manner of fundraisers throughout the year, and ended up bringing in half a million dollars annually, earmarked entirely for need-based scholarships. And what competition there was to raise more money than the other groups! And what medals and buttons and ribbons did they all vie for at the end of the year, given to folks who had shown the most devotion to fund-raising! The place never ceased to amaze me.

I turned into the parking lot in front of the long, squat brick school building with its mansard roof composed entirely of asphalt tiles. As usual, the front steps and sparse lawn were sprinkled with students engaged in their customary activities: chatting as they put cans from a drop box into paper bags for the Catholic Soup Kitchen, calling to one another as they threw footballs back and forth, or counting out bills from a cash box as they sat at card tables, readying themselves to sell tickets to one event or another. Why weren’t these kids in class? I always wondered. They must have the last period off, I figured. And they wanted to get the jump on parents arriving to pick up their kids. Who knew? Anyone arriving might order a dozen tickets to Bye Bye Birdie!

Marla ran the gauntlet with me. I followed as she scampered through, donating fifty bucks to the Halloween canned-food drive and purchasing a pair of tickets to Twelfth Night. We pushed through the doors to the lobby. It was as unprepossessing as the building’s exterior, a wide, low-ceilinged space lined with much-fingerprinted glass cases filled with CBHS hats, gloves, and sweatshirts for sale. Four metal chairs were set up at odd angles on the linoleum floor, as if students waiting for this or that permission never stayed in them for very long.

“Goldy!” cried Rose, the receptionist, who sat behind a half wall that stretched the width of the lobby. Rose, who had to be in her late fifties, had a mop of silvery gray curls, a thin, pretty face, and enormous brown eyes that were magnified by oversize silver-framed glasses. She rushed out into the lobby to greet us. Clad in a gray sweater with matching pants, Rose had the figure of a twenty-year-old. At night, she’d told me, she taught aerobics at her church. Whenever I saw her, I felt tired.

“Rose,” I began, after introducing Marla, “we’d like to see Charlie Baker’s paintings, if you don’t mind—”

“Oh, I’m already prepared for you.” She held up a formidable bunch of keys. “Just follow me.”

We dashed along behind her, following her trail of faint floral cologne that was somehow at odds with the atmosphere of office paper, floor wax, and metal lockers that stretched down echoing hallways. We walked past numerous large prints depicting saints in one or another act of goodness, and at length came to an oversize double wooden door.

Rose proceeded to unlock one of the wide doors. Then, with practiced dexterity, she switched keys to open what looked like a cage door, the kind you see in front of a bank vault.

“I was so sad when we had to do this,” Rose explained as the cage door shuddered and creaked open. “But the school was broken into once, and my cash box was stolen. It only had a hundred dollars in it. Just think if the thieves had gotten one of these!” She reached in to flip on an overhead panel of fluorescent lights, which buzzed and then flickered to life. Rose shook her head before leading us into the gallery.

About two dozen paintings by Charlie Baker hung on yellow-painted cement-block walls. They were all pictures of food—that is, of the dishes he’d loved to prepare. Charlie had laughingly told me that he was a “recovering chef,” one who had turned to cooking for friends and painting—for himself, for fun—after a distant aunt died and unexpectedly bequeathed him “a packet,” as he jokingly put it. After quitting his job—he’d been one of the early chefs at the Roundhouse, in its heyday—Charlie had gleefully retired. But he hadn’t stopped working. Instead, he treated friends and neighbors—yours truly included, since we baked cookies and pies together each year for the St. Luke’s bazaar—to his exquisite, lovingly prepared dishes.

And here some of them were, in paintings that stood out against the bland yellow walls: Braised Chicken Breasts with Fresh Tomatoes and Scallions, All-American Apple Pie, Chocolate-Dipped Dried Fruits, even the Asparagus Quiche Julian had mentioned. Charlie had reveled in painting pictures of the dishes he prepared, and he always rendered the ingredients underneath in perfect calligraphic letters. Those of us who had been lucky enough to eat at his house were able to ooh and aah over the artwork, once we’d oohed and aahed over the dinner.

I think Charlie would have been content just to keep cooking and painting for himself and his pals forever. But then Father Biesbrouck, a former rector at St. Luke’s, had urged him to try selling his paintings at the bazaar. Somehow, a reporter for a national magazine had ended up at our yearly event, and she’d been so taken with Charlie’s art that she’d written a long piece about them, including photographs. She’d entitled the article “Hidden Food Treasures in the West.” And the rest, as they say, is history.

Or was. Charlie became prolific and expensive. Oddly, the rector who’d recommended that he sell his art had had a nervous breakdown— cause unknown—and had committed suicide. This past January, Charlie had been diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that should have been his death knell, if he hadn’t suffered a fatal fall in March. Late at night, he’d lost his balance and slipped, the police had hypothesized, so that he’d tumbled down the long, curved staircase at his house. He’d broken his neck. With no signs of foul play and no suicide note, law enforcement had concluded that Charlie’s death had been an accident.

Reportedly, he’d left his estate, plus a huge inventory of paintings that were meant to be sold, to benefit two causes: the Christian Brothers High School, where he’d been raised, and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, with the proviso that the funds be used to build a clergy retreat house in Aspen Meadow. Charlie had told me that he wanted clergy to be able to rest and pull themselves together when they were feeling low, instead of taking Father Biesbrouck’s suicidal route.

“Look at this one,” Marla said, startling me. It was entitled Chocolate Pie with Pecan Crust. Charlie’s thick brushstrokes and lovingly rendered rich tones of brown and gold made the crust look realistically crunchy and the pie filling beckoningly thick and creamy. “Makes me hungry just looking at it,” Marla said, her tone morose.

“You see anything you want to make?” Rose’s voice rose querulously in the hushed space. “The booklets with his recipes are over here. I just thought you might want to look at these before you made your decision.”

I blinked once, twice. Okay, so I hadn’t had more than two hours of sleep since . . . well, when? Wednesday night? And now it was Friday afternoon. But still, I couldn’t help but reflect that my dear, sweet, young neighbor was lying in the Furman County Morgue, and I was here looking at artworks and talking about recipes, trying to figure out if Charlie could have messed up ingredients for any other dish. It was all too much.

“Maybe we should buy that recipe leaflet from you now,” I said to Rose, my voice cracking. “I need to pick up Arch and Gus. Thanks for showing us the paintings,” I added belatedly.

“I understand,” Rose said in a soft voice, and for a moment, I wondered if she had heard about Dusty, too.

Leaflet in hand, I followed Marla back out to her Mercedes. En route, she purchased another fifty dollars’ worth of grocery coupons; the kids could use them “however they wanted,” Marla said, for their canned-food drive. I shook my head, but my friend muttered that it made her feel good and was cheaper than therapy.

Once Marla had started the engine and eased behind a line of vans and station wagons filled with waiting parents, she asked, “Couldn’t we just have gone to the door where the students come out and waited for Gus and Arch? If there was a big crowd of students, we could just call out to them.”

I actually laughed. “Not if you value maintaining any shred of your relationship with Arch. Or Gus either, for that matter. You want to embarrass them to death by calling out to them? Forget it. We can just hold on until they notice us. Trust me.”

It didn’t take as long as she thought it would, for Arch’s antennae worked pretty well in the pickup department, even if it was Marla’s car and not my trusty van. Gus, who had started chatting with a group of girls, quickly slung his book bag over his shoulder and followed his half brother out to the Mercedes. Belatedly, I remembered Gus’s junior-varsity practice. Would we have to wait for him?

“No practice today,” Gus announced, as if reading my mind. He tossed his book bag on the floor and scooted into the backseat beside Arch. “Coach is on a business trip. Thanks for getting us. Hi, Marla.”

“Yo, kid. You, too, Arch.”

“Marla,” Arch said patiently, “don’t try to talk jive. It doesn’t work, okay?”

Marla sighed and hit the pedal. Soon we were on our way back up the interstate. How was I going to gauge if Arch was upset about Dusty? He hadn’t ever known her very well, which, at this juncture, I took to be a good thing.

I turned around and faced the boys. Gus, ever energetic, had brought with him the clean smell of boy sweat and notebooks. As he rustled around in his book bag, Arch, quiet and always worried, sat very still and frowned at me for paying undue attention to him.

“What is it, Mom?”

“Just checking on you, that’s all.”

Gus stopped rummaging around in his books and flopped back on the seat. He raised his eyebrows at Arch, as in What’s she talking about?

“Our neighbor, Dusty Routt, died this morning,” Arch said quickly. To me, he said, “Does Tom know anything yet?”

“No. Sorry, hon.”

“Does that mean we can’t sell magazine subscriptions tonight?” Gus asked. “I mean, are the neighbors going to be all upset? We’ve got a deadline on this drive. Maybe we could go to another neighborhood. Marla, could you drive us?”

Marla opened her eyes wide at me, as in How did I get dragged into this? But she said, “I suppose so.”

Thick pillows of gray cloud had moved in while we were waiting for the boys. As we ascended the steepest part of the interstate, snow began to fall. First there were just a few flakes, rushing toward Marla’s windshield at a slant. When we crested the peak of the interstate and entered the wide downward curve to Aspen Meadow, the fall of tiny flakes suddenly thickened. On either side of us, cars began to slow; wipers started sweeping away new layers of flakes.

“I guess this means we won’t be able to sell subscriptions,” Arch said, with the relief audible in his voice.

“Oh, it’s okay to sell stuff when it’s snowing,” Gus replied, his voice as confident as ever. “I used to do it all the time in Utah. Especially if you don’t wear a hat and you have, like, icicles frozen in your hair. Then people buy all kinds of stuff, ’cuz they feel sorry for you.”

Arch snorted. “I hate people feeling sorry for me. I’ve had it my whole life, and it sucks.”

Gus said, “Trust me, Arch. It’s like power. People feel sorry for you, you can get whatever you want.”

I wasn’t sure that was true. But with the memory of Dusty’s inert body so fresh in my mind, I was reluctant to venture an opinion. In our cooking lessons, I’d come to feel heartily sorry for Dusty, with her lack of money and her high ambitions. Now I’d heard the sad story of her bad luck and mistreatment at the hands of a drama teacher. And then, just when she’d gotten a good job and was moving up in the world, someone had strangled her.

Yes, I felt very sorry for Dusty. I also felt painfully sympathetic toward her mother, Sally.

As Marla pressed the accelerator and urged the Mercedes back up the mountain, I bit the inside of my cheek. Gus could talk all he wanted about sympathy generating power. But it seemed to me that neither Dusty nor Sally had, or had ever had, any power at all.