Dying for Chocolate (20 page)

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Where would the contacts be?”

She shook her head. “Not in your eyes,” she said. “We usually remove the enzyme buildup in the ultrasound machine while the patient is in the exam.”

“This machine disinfects?”

“No, that’s to get rid of bacteria. But there’s another kind of—” She looked at me sympathetically. Didn’t want to use too many big words, apparently. “Another kind of—stuff—that grows on the lenses and can make them foggy and uncomfortable. Patients use a separate procedure to remove that buildup weekly, but when they come in for their exam we do an extra-good job with the machine.” She smiled weakly. “Shall I call Doctor back?”

“No, thanks. I’d like to see the machine. I can’t manage any more exam today.”

She said, “Well, Doctor was almost done,” but led me down the hall to the machine anyway. “This is it,” she said, and pointed to a metal box on a shelf.

“What’s in it?” I asked. “I mean besides ultrasound.”

“A peroxide solution.”

I looked at her. “A peroxide solution dissolves the buildup?”

“Yes, kind of burns it off, you’d say. But, don’t worry, we rinse that solution off before we give the patients back their lenses.”

“Rinse it off with what?”

She picked up a bottle of saline solution and handed it to me. “Believe me,” she said, “if even a trace of the peroxide is left on the lenses, the patient will scream bloody murder because of the pain. Most of them wear prescription sunglasses out of here, because when people actually
finish
the eye exam,” here she gave me a stern look, “their pupils are dilated and they don’t want to wear their contacts anyway.”

I thought for several minutes. She asked me if I wanted to finish the exam. I said no.

“Then do you want to leave? We do have other patients coming in.”

I closed the door to the room with the ultrasound machine.

“Please,” I said, “I need your help.”

“If you want contacts, you have to finish the exam.”

“I don’t want contacts,” I said slowly. “I just need to ask you about a contact-lens patient of yours.” I gave her my most beseeching look. “His name was Philip Miller.”

21.

She shook her head. “You must know I can’t talk to you about patients. Especially,” here she paused for effect, as if I were a criminal, “since the
police
have already been in.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But please listen. Philip Miller was a friend of mine. A good friend,” I added earnestly. “And you don’t have to tell me anything about him personally or his medical history. I just want to know a couple of things about his visit.”

She hesitated. Her experience with odd patients was clearly limited.

“You see,” I went on in a rush, “I was behind him when he crashed. I’m trying to help the police.” Sort of, I added mentally.

She was mellowing. “So what do you want to know?”

I picked up the saline-solution bottle. “This—” I said after a minute. “Do you remember this from his appointment?”

“I told the policeman all about it. Miller was the first appointment of the morning.”

In good Rogerian fashion, I said, “The first appointment.”

She took the bottle and shook it. “I always do that before I rinse off the lenses. There was just a little bit left in the bottle when he came in. I used it to rinse off his lenses, and then I threw it away. That’s all. That’s it.”

“And did he put the lenses in?”

She nodded. “I watched him do it.”

Whatever happened, I thought on the way home to the Farquhars, must have been something of a delayed reaction. Philip had not excused himself from the brunch, had not left me for more than a moment. I didn’t believe he could have done anything to his lenses—or had anything done—without my noticing. Still, though, figuring on an hour for the appointment, how could you account for that half hour from leaving the optometrist’s office, coming to Elk Park Prep, and then driving back to Aspen Meadow? Why didn’t Philip feel any pain? Why did he suddenly go blind?

As usual, cooking was the cure for distress. The rain had cleared and the air was filled with a sweet, moist smell. I turned off the security system that guarded the first-floor windows and opened them all. Out back, Arch and Julian were splashing and yelling in the pool.

With Julian in for dinner I decided on a crustless quiche made with Jarlsberg and two other cheeses, a salad of lovely greens the general had picked up on one of his shopping expeditions, and some cloverleaf rolls I had brought frozen from my old house. I grated the Jarlsberg into a golden mountain of creamy strands. To my surprise the phone only rang once. It was my lawyer telling me Three Bears Catering had a legitimate case and it would not cost too much to have my name changed. Of course, to him nothing cost too much. I told him I would think about it.

After plugging in the recorder I let my mind wander back to what it was Elizabeth had said about Philip studying an abused woman. One thing I had noticed about making a marital mistake: you compounded the error by spending even more emotional energy ruminating on why you made the mistake, even if you corrected it by divorce. Furthermore, if Philip was so interested in why I had stayed with John Richard for so long, why hadn’t he asked me himself?

I melted the butter and stirred in flour for the cream sauce that was the actual base for the quiche. While I stirred in the milk, I imagined myself hiking with Philip and having him pose the question to me himself.
Why did you stay?

Because, I saw myself saying to him. Because I ignored the evidence. I believed that John Richard would change. Because that was what I wanted to believe, just like those poor suckers who went to great lengths to demonstrate that the world is flat. No matter how strong a person you are, if you want to cling to a falsehood, you will. By the same token, I had known that someday I would have to get out. That realization led me to study catering systematically. If I could cook well enough and learn the business, I could keep Arch and have enough money to live on.

In my mind’s eye I could see Philip, see his questioning look. It reminded me of the questioning look I had received from a male social worker at a National Organization for Women meeting, the first and last one I ever went to. The social worker had talked about spouse abuse.

“Look,” I’d said defensively to the social worker during the break, incipient tears closing my throat, “sometimes it’s hard to leave.”

He had given me a questioning look.

“I guess I need to see a shrink,” I’d whispered to him then. “Are you available?”

Sage that he was, the social worker had said I should work with a woman. Which is what I began to do. It was very hard to be verbally vulnerable, to let down defenses and admit that I was staying in an insane situation.
You’re so together,
people always said to me.
You’re so articulate.
No one said to me,
You’re so crazy.
Until that NOW meeting, I had not admitted that I might indeed be losing my mind.

CRUSTLESS JARLSBERG QUICHE

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 ½ cups milk

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 ½ cups small curd cottage cheese

1 teaspoon Dijon-style mustard

9 eggs

11 ounces cream cheese, softened

¾ pound Jarlsberg cheese, grated

1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 350° (high altitude: 375°). In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium-low heat, add the flour, and stir just until mixture bubbles. Slowly add milk, stirring constantly. Stir this cream sauce until it thickens. Set aside to cool. Stir baking powder, and mustard, and salt into cottage cheese. Beat eggs well, then beat in softened cream cheese and cottage cheese mixture. Slowly beat in cream sauce, then thoroughly incorporate Jarlsberg and Parmesan. Pour into 2 buttered 10-inch pie plates. Bake for about 45 minutes or until puffed and browned. Cut each quiche into eight large wedges.

Makes 16 servings

“I know what losing your mind is,” Arch had said to me once as I drove him to first grade.

“You do?”

“It’s like when you can’t remember someone’s name, just for a minute. And just for that minute, you’ve lost your mind! Then it comes back.”

“Ah,” I’d said.

It came back. My mind. The counselor was wonderful. The cooking was salvation. André, who trained me in catering, was a friend. In his big Denver kitchen the activity swirled all around me as I tried to keep tears from falling into the bread dough I was mixing.

“You know salt slows down the action of the yeast,” he had said once over my shoulder. He saw me crying but never asked about it, just handed me gifts of food to take home to Arch. He would ask me, How did that dinner for Mrs. Sweeney go? Those chile rellenos stay hot? André offered his presence and his faith in me. It sped up the healing process.

Cooking helped, both before and after I told John Richard I was divorcing him. That was what I would have told Philip, I decided as I scooped the egg, cheese, and sauce mixture into two pie plates. Cooking anesthetized my feelings. I could throw myself into a complicated recipe and within an hour I would feel better.

Wait a minute.

By the time I was done, I would feel better.

The cooking took the pain away.

Anesthetic. That was it.

Philip Miller. He had not felt any pain in his eyes for thirty minutes
because he had had anesthetic in his eyes from the glaucoma test.
He could see. He just couldn’t feel the damage that was being done to his eyes until it was too late.

I reached for the phone.

Tom Schulz was not at his desk. I left a message and finished preparing the dinner. The quiches puffed up to golden-brown perfection. Arch had two slices, Julian four. When we finished, General Farquhar surprised us with a new jar of macadamia-nut sauce for our pound cake.

Later, I tucked Arch in over his protestations that he was getting too old to be tucked in. I asked him if he remembered when he was six, telling me that losing your mind was when you forgot something.

He said, “Why? Did you forget to call the people for the magic party?” I had promised to do it as soon as I got home.

I apologized. I promised to get the list from tue Poe book and make the calls first thing in the morning. Kids could do things on the spur of the moment, couldn’t they?

He said, “I guess,” and gave me a brief hug.

I went into my room and waited for the house to get quiet. I was going to sneak out. I didn’t want anyone in the household to know my intentions.

Ten o’clock: Adele tap-stepped her way up to the master bedroom, ran water for twenty minutes, and then settled in after a therapeutic soak.

Eleven: The general’s muffled telephone voice stopped and the door to his study gently opened and closed. Then there was the sound of more water, then quiet.

Midnight: The faint boom-boom and twang of Julian’s rock music stopped wafting up from the ground floor.

Finally there were no sounds except the breeze sighing in the pines. I had left my van on the street. Now all I had to do was get out of the house without making a catastrophic amount of noise.

General Farquhar had closed the windows and reset the security system. If I set it off and no one interrupted the automatic dial, an armed representative of Aspen Meadow Security would arrive in a pickup truck at the bottom of the driveway. He would then wait for someone to come out and give the secret password, signaling the all-clear. If no one came, the security man would call the police. Julian had provided the password: CHOCOLATE.

But I should have problems with none of that, I reflected as I tiptoed down the staircase, pressed buttons, and slid through the front door. An ocean of summer stars glittered overhead. As on most moonless nights in the high country, the Milky Way shone like a wide ribbon across the inky sky. At the end of the driveway, the security gate yielded to the code my fingers punched in, and I was off.

I had broken into an office once before. It had been the ob-gyn office of my ex-father-in-law, Fritz Korman. Alarms had gone off instantaneously. But that time, I had known what I was looking for. This time I was not so sure. I ground the gears into third and started up toward Philip’s office at Aspen Meadow North. This is crazy, I thought. It’s not as if I’m being paid to figure out what happened to Philip Miller. It had been an accident. Involving peroxide. An accident with the man whom I thought had loved me. He had not loved me; he had been studying me. I felt betrayed. I wondered if he had betrayed anyone else.

If someone had decided to kill Philip Miller, how would that someone have gone about it? What would you need?

In addition to having a motive, and I was still unclear on what that was, you would have to know his schedule. Know when he was going to the eye doctor. You would have to plan. And, I thought regretfully, you would have to have some way of killing a psychologist so that it looked like an accident.

You would have to be smart.

The parking lot at Aspen Meadow North was empty. Neon security lights glowed like fluorescent plants in the asphalt. Not wanting to look conspicuous, I pulled into a far corner of the lot under the shade of an ancient pine. The wide branches swaying in the breeze made a pocket of darkness. The office building’s angles and corners, so innocuous during the day, cast long geometric shadows. I got out and was startled by a buzzing sound. But it was only a neon bulb. I tried not to think of it as warning me off.

One thing I had learned from the general about security: Most burglars will try to make it look as if they had not broken in. That delayed any action being taken against them. I climbed up the wooden stairs to Philip Miller’s office wondering how I would do that. A step creaked loudly. Immediately there was a brushing sound in the trees. I froze and stared at the place where the noise had come from. Without a moon, it was hard to make anything out. My eyes adjusted slowly. After a few minutes a bull elk stepped gingerly from behind the trees and then trotted toward the brush behind the building. Welcome to the mountains.

I made my way quickly down to Philip’s office door and wondered if I could slide a charge card into the area between the lock and the door frame, the way they did on television. My charge cards were of limited use in charging things, anyway.

No luck. Finally I just kicked hard. Two, three, four times. The door opened. No alarms. You should have been more careful, Philip.

Schulz had told me that the Sheriff’s Department had taken the files to look through them regarding the clients. Had Elizabeth told Schulz that Philip thought one of them was homicidal? I did not know. The schedule, I told myself. Who saw him that last week?

I looked for a calendar on the secretary’s desk and on Philip’s. Nothing. Then I opened a closet in his office and turned on the light.
Voilà:
a large paper month-to-month calendar was tacked on the back of the closet door.

The last week he was alive, Philip Miller had appointments with General Bo Farquhar, Adele Farquhar, and Julian Teller. On the day before he died, he had lunch with Weezie Harrington.