English Trifle (40 page)

Sadie stood as Pete approached their table. He undid the button of his tux so it wouldn’t wrinkle when he sat down. Dang, but the man looked downright dapper in his patent leather shoes and bow tie. His well-trimmed silver hair and beard were a perfect complement to his formal attire, and for a moment, Sadie thought he might kiss her hello; on the cheek if nothing else. Instead, he gave her a quick hug. “Sorry I’m late—paperwork.”

“Not a problem,” Sadie said as she sat down and he helped push her chair into the table for her. He was always such a gentleman—too much of one sometimes. In the three months they’d been dating, he had yet to kiss her even once. It was beginning to give Sadie a complex.

Pete had met Gayle twice before and said hello while Sadie introduced the other people at their table, including Trixie, whose real name turned out to be Michele. Apparently she was Frank’s niece and an English literature major at CSU. Who knew?

Pete shook hands with the other people at their table—some of whom he already knew—before finally taking his seat. Sadie was nearly bursting with pride to be the girl on his arm. “I’m sorry you missed dinner,” she offered. She should probably offer him some of her cake, but she wasn’t sure their relationship was at that level just yet. Certainly a little lip-locking was prerequisite to sharing devil’s food cake, right? Instead, she waved to get the attention of one of the servers and pointed at her plate and then at Pete. The server nodded and headed toward the doors to the kitchen. Sadie pulled her plate a bit closer to herself in hopes that Pete wouldn’t get any ideas before they returned with his food.

“They’re getting your dinner,” Sadie said.

“Oh, good, I’m starving,” Pete said. He looked toward the stage, drawing Sadie’s attention back to it as well. “I haven’t missed the main event, have I?”

Sadie shook her head. Thom was still fiddling with the microphone. They had someone from the hotel helping him, too. Weird that they were having problems now. The sound system had worked fine for Sadie’s introduction of the evening forty-five minutes earlier. The hotel had a wooden podium with a detachable wired microphone offstage as back up, but everyone had agreed the wireless system was better. She wondered how long they would keep trying to make the wireless microphone work before moving to plan B.

“He doesn’t look much different, does he?” Pete commented, nodding toward Thom.

“Did you know Thom when he used to live here?” Gayle asked, leaning toward them and speaking in a high, sweet voice. Sadie felt a flash of jealousy that surprised her. Was it her imagination or was Gayle being flirtatious? Or was she just insecure about the no-kissing-for-three-months thing?

Pete looked from the stage to Gayle. “I was one of the detectives on his son’s case,” he said.

“Oh,” Sadie and Gayle said at the same time. Sadie wondered why Pete hadn’t told her that before now. But she wasn’t about to ask in front of Gayle.

“Maybe you should remind them about the wired microphone?” Sadie heard herself say to Gayle.

“Me?” Gayle said in surprise, dropping her flirtatious smile for a moment. Pete was one of the few men over the age of fifty that Gayle hadn’t dated in this town, and Sadie wanted to keep it that way.

“I think they’ve forgotten about the back-up microphone,” Sadie said, giving her friend a pointed look. She’d like a few minutes with Pete to catch up on the day. Surely Gayle could understand that.

Gayle was silent, but put down her fork; correctly interpreting Sadie’s look. “Well, I guess I could,” she said. Sadie smiled in thanks. Gayle stood up and put her napkin on her chair before heading toward the front of the room. At the same moment, a server set down both a dinner and a dessert plate in front of Pete. By the time Sadie looked up again, Gayle had disappeared behind the curtain to the right of the stage. Sadie owed her one. Michele stood and excused herself to use the ladies’ room.

“It’s worth the hundred and fifty dollars,” Sadie said, nodding toward Pete’s dinner now that she had him to herself—for the moment anyway. “I promise.” She only wished she could say she’d made it herself. Feeding the people she cared about was one of her favorite things to do.

Pete smiled and winked at her before using his knife to cut off a piece of prime rib. Sadie looked up at the stage in time to see Gayle roll the podium out from the curtains on the right and Thom walk off stage left; he looked frustrated. The hotel worker helped Gayle plug a wire from the floor into a port on the side of the wooden podium. Sadie took another bite of cake in hopes of distracting herself from the guilt of asking Gayle to go up there. Gayle wasn’t even on the board this year; Sadie was the one who should be up there.

Suddenly the stage area cleared except for the manager and the podium. An expectant hush fell over the crowd as everyone realized in the same moment that the presentation was about to start. The manager looked out at the crowd as if just remembering they were there. After straightening his suit coat, he made his way to the podium, which was so tall the microphone pointed over his head. He reached up both hands to adjust the snakelike microphone holder so that he could speak into it. However, when his mouth moved, the microphone failed to pick up the sound. Was there a problem with the entire sound system? Sadie wondered. After all the committee’s work to pull off this dinner, she would be really, really mad if it fell apart now.

Mr. Ogreski continued to wrestle with the microphone, which seemed to be stuck. It was free from the holder now, but the wire, which fed through the hole in the podium, didn’t have much give, and he couldn’t seem to pull the microphone close enough to his mouth. After a few more seconds, Mr. Ogreski clenched his jaw together, adjusted his grip on the microphone, and yanked it toward him, presumably to free the cord that seemed to be tangled within the wooden podium. It didn’t budge. He took a breath and planted his feet, poised to pull again. Sadie let her eyes drift closed—giving herself up to the chocolate ecstasy in her mouth and unable to focus on what was happening onstage for the moment.

In the next instant, a shotgun blast echoed off the walls of the ballroom and all the people in the room screamed in horror while Sadie choked on her cake.

Have you seen Thom yet?” Sadie asked, craning her neck to see into the corners of the temporary stage set up at the front of the ballroom. Thom Mortinson was supposed to have arrived by 6:30, but had called to say he was running late. Sadie was trying not to show her annoyance at men who had no concept of time. Detective Pete Cunningham—Sadie’s date for tonight—was late too. She glanced at her watch: 7:05. Thom was supposed to have begun his presentation at 7:00 sharp.

“Not yet,” Gayle answered from where she sat at Sadie’s left.

“So, did you two read his book, then?” an increasingly familiar voice said.

Sadie looked past Gayle to the young woman seated next to her—the date of Frank Argula. She was thirty years Frank’s junior, with thick brown hair piled on top of her delicate little head. Sadie feared a sneeze might snap her neck completely. Her hair had to weigh twenty-five pounds. Sadie didn’t know the girl’s name—Trixie or Bambi or something like that, she was sure.

“Sure,” Gayle answered, shooting Sadie a look brimming with annoyance. It was the fourth time Trixie had cut into their conversation. Frank was currently involved in an animated discussion with a city councilman.

“It must be really good,” the girl said with a floating kind of smile as she looked around the room, “for all these people to want to listen to him talk about it.”

“It’s good,” Gayle said dryly.

Sadie scraped together her last bite of mashed potatoes from her plate. Truth be told, she hadn’t loved Devilish Details. Thom had published the book a few years after moving away from Garrison and while she was very proud of his accomplishment, the writing just wasn’t her style.

Gayle turned back to Sadie. “I still can’t believe he agreed to come.”

“Why wouldn’t he come?” Trixie cut in.

Rather than being annoyed at yet another interruption, Gayle’s eyes lit up at the girl’s innocence and Sadie took a sip of her drink to hide her smile. Gayle turned back to the girl with a very different expression. Here we go, Sadie thought. It wasn’t that Gayle was a gossip, per se, but she, well, liked . . . being informed and sharing that information. Of course, any time Sadie pointed that out, Gayle turned the tables and recalled all the times Sadie had been the one to spill a story. A server leaned in to take away their plates.

“Didn’t Frank tell you about Thom?” Gayle asked sweetly, once the server moved away.

The girl shook her head.

“Well,” Gayle said, wriggling in her seat a little bit and leaning closer, “before Thom wrote Devilish Details, he lived here in Garrison with his son—that is until his son killed himself and his girlfriend after their junior prom.”

Trixie gasped and put a hand to her mouth. Sadie felt her stomach tighten just a little bit. Hearing the details laid out so bluntly was a bit of a shock. Even from Gayle. “You’re kidding,” the girl said, lowering her hand. “A murder-suicide? Here?”

Up until last October, when Sadie’s neighbor had been murdered, the Mortinson tragedy had been the most recent homicide in Garrison, Colorado. Damon, Thom’s son, had only been a couple years older than Sadie’s own daughter and so the tragedy had hit close to home. The school district brought in grief counselors, parents forbade their daughters from dating the bad boys, and Thom Mortinson moved to California. No one blamed him for what happened, of course—Damon had been in and out of trouble since he turned twelve—but no one could fault Thom for wanting to make a fresh start, either. Lost in her thoughts, Sadie didn’t realize Gayle was still telling the story.

“So, you can imagine our surprise when a couple years later Thom’s name showed up on the cover of a New York Times bestseller. Of course we all knew he’d been a bit of a closet writer before Damon’s death, but no one expected this kind of success, especially after what had happened.”

“Wow,” Trixie said. She pulled at the top of her strapless gown and looked toward the stage again. “Has he written any other books?”

“No,” Gayle said, shrugging her shoulders. “Just that one book, though he’s been saying for years that he has another one in the works.”

“Maybe he’ll be like Harper Lee,” the girl said. “In literary circles the common theory is that she never wrote another book because she’d written the perfect novel right out of the gate. How do you compete with your own greatness?”

Sadie and Gayle both looked at Trixie in surprise. They hadn’t expected her to recite scholarly supposition. “Maybe,” Gayle said slowly, obviously caught off guard.

“I wonder what it’s like for him to come back here,” the girl added, unusually serious. “I imagine it’s hard.”

Sadie was reminded of her own surprise when she’d heard he’d accepted the invitation. What was there to come back to Garrison for but to face old ghosts?

Her thoughts were interrupted as a server placed a white dessert plate in front of Sadie. Every thought of Thom or Trixie disappeared. In the middle of the plate was a most beautiful sight—a thick, gooey piece of devil’s food cake. Sadie grabbed her fork and dug in without hesitation.

“I thought you were on a diet,” Gayle said.

Sadie looked up, fork poised inches from her open mouth and did her best to scowl at her best friend. Gayle didn’t take back the question she’d asked; in fact, she continued to look pointedly at the rich chocolate goodness on Sadie’s fork. The rich chocolate goodness that was going straight to Sadie’s already ample hips. Trixie turned to converse with Frank, and the clinking of silverware and mingling murmurs of a hundred conversations filled the room. Sadie paid no heed to any of it. Instead, she looked at Gayle and with exaggerated movements put the bite of cake in her mouth and closed her lips around the fork. Sadie closed her eyes and tried not to groan out loud as the decadent chocolate melted on her tongue.

Gayle snickered and Sadie feared she’d failed at her attempts to silently appreciate the deliciousness filling her mouth. It was just wrong that such an amazing culinary creation should have any calories at all.

“You should really attempt a little more self-restraint,” Gayle said when Sadie recovered from her chocolate-induced swoon and opened her eyes. No one but Gayle, and maybe Sadie’s children, could get away with talking to Sadie like that. However, after twenty years of friendship, there wasn’t much they could do to offend each other. “Everyone knows you made the cake, so your reaction comes across as rather arrogant.”

Sadie used the edge of her fork to cut off another bite. “I have no problem with appearing arrogant when I’ve done something this magnificent.”

In truth, it was a little embarrassing to lose control like this—especially in public. Sadie prided herself on her humility, and yet she had no control when it came to good food. She’d returned from England almost six weeks ago and had been existing on salads, fruit smoothies, and baked chicken ever since in hopes of losing not the seven pounds she’d thought she’d gained, but the twelve pounds the scale said she’d brought home with her. Twelve pounds in two weeks—Sadie didn’t know that was even possible.

Unfortunately, the diet hadn’t been as effective as she’d hoped—possibly due to the fact that despite her strict meal regimen of protein and leafy greens, she’d been baking scones and crumpets a few times a week; she didn’t count that as breaking her diet because perfecting the recipes was actually research. Gayle, of course, knew this.

And then Sadie had been asked to supply the dessert of her choice for the library fundraiser. Before she’d even hung up the phone she’d known what she wanted to make—devil’s food cake. Since it was commonly understood that diets were left at the door of events like this, she knew it was a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: she’d make a fabulous contribution to the dinner, and she’d get a piece of otherwise forbidden cake.

“I swear this is the best cake I have ever made in my life,” Sadie said reverently after taking her second bite.