The Grilling Season (14 page)

Tom pursed his lips and flipped the fish. “The Babsie ladies chased our boys to the end of the old pier, where unfortunately Macguire lost his balance and fell into the water. A woman in a shell rowed over and held on to him until someone from the LakeCenter could throw out a life preserver.” Tom
carefully scooped the golden-brown fish pieces into a buttered pan and eased the whole thing into the oven.

I rubbed my aching skull. “I … know that doll collecting is a bona fide hobby. Sort of like being a hockey fan. But I just don’t understand why these
pastimes
become
manias.”

“I asked the same question. I might as well have asked the ladies’ Bible study to describe the Rapture. One woman told me very seriously that doll collecting was like the best sex you ever had, times ten.

I let that pass. While the fish was baking, I moved—slowly, painfully—up the stairs to check on Macguire and Arch, who both immediately demanded to know why I looked so
awful.
I stalled and took Macguire’s temperature. It was one hundred degrees even, not enough to call his doctor, he maintained. Then I told the boys I’d gotten hit by a hockey fan. The fan had been wearing blades, I explained, and I had not.

“Dude
, Mrs. Schulz,” said Macguire admiringly. “You’re brave.”

“No, just dumb enough to be in his way.”

Apparently being with Macguire had worked the kind of effect on Arch Marla had predicted it would. My son did not seem preoccupied with his father and the events of the morning. He didn’t even appear to be angry with me. At least not at the moment.

He pointed to the magazine in his lap. “Check this out, Mom.”

I bent to look at the page. After a second I moved in closer. I wanted to make sure my eyes
weren’t deceiving me. A Never-Removed-From-Box Duchess Bride Babsie was selling for twelve hundred dollars. Another one that
had
been taken out of the box sold for six hundred dollars. The dolls had sold for less than twenty dollars originally, and I remembered my little childhood friend in New Jersey who had taken such delight in playing with her Babsies. In the catalog, I saw one that looked familiar from my friend’s collection. It was an MIB—Mint-In-Box—Number One Blond Ponytail Babsie. The doll had just gone at auction for six thousand dollars. I felt faint.

“Mom, are you all right?” Arch asked anxiously.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “I’ve already seen a nurse, and she gave me a homeopathic remedy.”

“Homeopathic?” Macguire grumbled. “What is
that?”

“It means natural,” I explained. “Please don’t stay up too late. I don’t need
both
of you to get sick.”

Arch gave me an exasperated look and I closed the door before I could offend him further. Ten minutes later I was scrubbed, robed, and more ravenous than ever. In honor of my service to hockey fans, Tom had named his creation Power Play Potatoes and Fish. He served them with a fine julienne of carrot, steamed baby peas, a small green salad, and southern spoon bread topped with pats of butter. I took a greedy bite of the fish: Tom’s pairing of a crunchy potato crust with the delicate texture and rich taste of Chilean seabass was divine, and I told him so. He smiled and told me the recipe was now taped to my computer screen. Then he frowned.

“What was the name of the guy you said hit you?”

“Dr. Ralph Shelton,” I mumbled, mouth full of succulent fish. “Remember? I told you about him earlier today. He’s an old friend of ours. Used to be with ACHMO, but according to town gossip he was fired by Suz Craig.”

“Right. And I was going to check on him, which I did. Which I actually told Donny Saunders to do, more accurately. By the way, did the gossip say
why
this Dr. Shelton was fired?”

I indicated a negative and took a bite of the carrots and peas, celestially fresh, sweet vegetables. The spoon bread was as rich and tender as anything Scarlett O’Hara had ever put into her mouth. I made “mm-mm” noises and Tom nodded in acknowledgment.

“Brandon Yuille, you know him?” he asked, his mind still on work.

“He’s the head of Human Resources for ACHMO. He’s also the son of a baker in town. He was at Suz’s house when I catered over there. I saw him today, but briefly. Why? Have you talked to him?”

“Yeah, a whole team went out to talk to the ACHMO department heads, but most of them are in San Diego at a conference. Medical Management, Member Services, Health Services, Quality Management—four of the six people who had to deal with Suz Craig on a daily basis are gone for the week, although they’re coming back early. The only department heads left in town were Human Resources and Provider Relations.” He took a breath. “John Richard Korman is absolutely insistent he’s innocent.
The cops who’re questioning him? They’re getting real tired of hearing about Suz Craig doing
this
to make enemies, Suz Craig doing
that.”

“I hope they’re ignoring him. John Richard Korman is probably the worst enemy Suz Craig ever made. The most dangerous, certainly.”

Tom shrugged. “He’s the prime suspect, so the department is concentrating on him. But Donny Saunders has asked me to help him out. I agreed.”

“So where does Brandon Yuille come in?”

“Korman insists that Yuille and Suz Craig were having some kind of feud. Yuille claims he was with his father at his bakery from midnight to five last night, so he couldn’t have killed Ms. Craig.”

“You called Brandon?”

“Caught him unawares. He’ll probably never talk to me again without a lawyer present. And he’s not the most talkative man in the county,” Tom observed. “Anyway, he was awfully vague when I wanted to know why Ralph Shelton left ACHMO.”

“You asked him that? Brandon was vague or he didn’t know?”

Tom’s face was unreadable. “Your ex-husband maintains that Ralph Shelton hated Suz, too. I’m wondering if his firing had anything to do with Patricia McCracken’s lawsuit against ACHMO.”

“What are you
talking
about? I mean, I know Ralph is an obstetrician, but …” I felt muddled. It had been too long a day.

Tom stood and picked up my whisker-clean plate. He ran water into the sink, then said, “What I did get out of Brandon Yuille was this: Ralph Shelton used to be associated with an ob-gyn practice down in Denver. Shelton was on call at St. Philip’s Hospital
when Clark McCracken brought his wife, Patricia, in the night she lost their baby. There she is, losing blood and disoriented and Shelton tells her he’s with ACHMO. Even though they’re old friends, our Patricia McCracken hauls off and slaps the guy across the face. He fell, and it knocked the wind out of him. That woman’s unbelievably strong, even when she’s sick.”

“But,” I protested, “we all used to be close. Besides, Ralph Shelton wasn’t the problem. John Richard and ACHMO were.”

“That night Patricia McCracken sure
saw
Ralph Shelton as the problem. Then the chain of events goes like this. She files one suit against Korman; she files another against ACHMO. Ralph leaves his practice under a cloud. Our investigation is very preliminary at this point, but it looks as if after that Shelton took an administrative job with another HMO. One named MeritMed.”

I said reflectively, “But Ralph and the McCrackens seem to have buried the hatchet. I mean, he was invited to their hockey party tonight.”

Tom grinned. “Yeah, after their little tussle in the hospital Patricia apologized all over the place to Shelton. Maybe she’s trying to be sweet to him these days, so that he’ll tell her some inside stuff on ACHMO that she can use against them in her suit. I mean, now that he’s persona non grata there.”

“Ralph seems to stick together with another persona non grata,” I commented as I poured two dessert sherries. I told Tom about being tended to by Amy Bartholomew, nurse lately of ACHMO. “She’s involved with natural remedies now.” That reminded me. I sought out my last four arnica tablets
and washed them down with the glass of cream sherry. It may not have been what the homeopaths would have recommended, but I thought it was wonderful.

Tom pulled me into his lap. “Tell me we’re going to have a break from talking about this case tomorrow, Miss G. This guy gets arrested first thing in the morning, and it ends up ruining our entire weekend.”

It could ruin a lot more than our weekend, I thought glumly, but didn’t say so. “You’re always telling me how if a case isn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours, it’s unlikely it’ll be solved at all.”

“Wait. One more thing. Suz Craig
did
deny Korman his bonus. Late last week.”

I sighed. “That’s what Marla was afraid of.”

“You still don’t think this case is solved?”

“I think this case is far from over. But we won’t mention a word of it tomorrow. Besides,” I teased, “I want to talk some more about the joys of doll collecting. I’m not sure I believe their claims. I mean,
best sex times ten?”

“You do have to wonder,” he replied, deadpan, then led me upstairs.

Y
ou’d think after all I’d been through, I would have slept without a break for twelve hours. Not me. I slept for two.

I awoke at midnight damp with sweat, wrenched from sleep by a nightmare starring John Richard. I’d been jolted awake believing I was Suz Craig, and I was being beaten to death. Perhaps my muscles had cramped after my collision with Ralph Shelton. Whatever the reason, sleep was impossible.

I tiptoed to the kitchen, where I made myself a hot chocolate and topped it with a fat dollop of marshmallow cream. Nothing like chocolate and marshmallow to soothe the nerves. When I was eleven and had failed a social studies test, I’d headed straight to the drugstore and ordered chocolate ice cream slathered with spoonfuls of creamed marshmallow. Did they even make that kind of sundae anymore? I wondered.

I sipped the chocolate, booted up my computer, and started a new file:
JRK ARREST.
I remembered Arch’s words:
He
really
needs you.
Well, I didn’t care about what John Richard Korman
needed. But I was interested in the truth. And I needed Arch to believe I cared about
him.

It had been a tempestuous day. I had promised Tom we wouldn’t talk about the case on Sunday. Still, the information about the crime now bubbling up reminded me of the schools of minnows that can occasionally be seen at Aspen Meadow Lake. If you don’t get out your net right away, you’re going to lose them.

I began by listing everything I knew about the people involved. Suz Craig had run the Denver office of the AstuteCare Health Maintenance Organization. John Richard Korman, one of the ACHMO providers, had been dating Suz for the past seven months. On the home front, Suz had bought a luxurious house in Aspen Meadow, where she’d been doing an expensive landscape project. On the business front, she had reportedly fired employees without remorse, and refused those she didn’t fire their bonuses. And she had presumably enforced the rules of the HMO, which could have had some implications for Patricia McCracken’s case. Patricia sure thought so. Maybe I had to find out the details of her case, after all.

QUESTION
, I typed.
Why exactly is Patricia suing both JRK and ACHMO?

QUESTION: Did Suz Craig fire Dr. Ralph Shelton? If so, why?

QUESTION: Was gambling really enough of a reason for Suz to fire Amy Bartholomew, R.N.?

QUESTION: What did JRK and Suz Craig argue about at the country club?

I sighed. How would I get the answers to these questions? And why should I? I saved my file, shut
down the computer, and sipped the steamy hot chocolate. The marshmallow had melted into a creamy layer on the chocolate surface. I licked it off carefully, the way a child would. Outside my kitchen window, elk bleated. I did not feel the remotest bit tired. I needed to get some sleep. How on earth could I face church in a state of exhaustion? Then inspiration struck.

Cook! That’ll relax you. Put all these people and all these questions out of your head for a while and whip something up.
I fingered the containers of Dutch-processed cocoa and the jar of marshmallow cream I’d left on the counter. Why couldn’t you put these together in a cookie? Surely there could be nothing like chocolate and marshmallow in a
cookie
to soothe the nerves?

I put some hazelnuts in the oven to toast, then melted a jagged brick of unsweetened chocolate in the top of our double boiler. I combined sun-dried cranberries and oversize morsels of semisweet chocolate in a bowl, then scattered the hazelnuts to cool on a plate. I began to feel better. By the time I was beating unsalted butter with sugar and cream cheese, I was humming, and this was a mistake. Jake came bounding into the room on his long bloodhound legs, followed closely by a sleepy-eyed Arch clad in rumpled pajamas. Arch fumbled with his glasses and stared in puzzlement at the bowls, the butter wrappers, and the whirling beater.

“Gosh, Mom! What are you doing? Did you forget something? Do you have to take cookies to church?”

“Sorry, honey, I just couldn’t sleep. How about some hot chocolate with marshmallow? That’s what
I used to have when I was your age and flunked a test. Or when I was your age and couldn’t sleep. It always worked, despite what they now say about the caffeine in chocolate.”

“Well, I
could
have slept if you hadn’t awakened Jake,” my son grumbled crossly. He shuffled to the back door and opened it, but the elk had stopped bugling and Jake wasn’t the least bit interested in a midnight run. Resigned, Arch closed the door and flopped into a chair. “Sure, I’ll have some cocoa, thanks.” Immediately he was up, offering Jake one of Tom’s homemade dog biscuits. “Yeah, boy, there you go! Don’t worry, I’m not going to have a treat unless you do!” The large, tawny dog wagged his tail, licked Arch’s face, and whined with canine contentment.

I heated more milk and stirred it into a smooth, thick paste of cocoa, sugar, and cream. In his corner, Jake crunched appreciatively. His dark eyes favored my son and me with loving glances. Arch gave him two more dog biscuits, then watched while I generously glopped marshmallow cream on top of his drink. When I put the steaming mug in front of him, I expected him to pounce on the rich treat as expectantly as I had. Instead, he blew tentatively on the foamy top, then sipped.

“Mom. There’s something I need to talk to you about.” He put his mug down. “It’s about Dad.” When my face fell, he quickly said, “Go ahead, make your cookies, it’s not important.” He added earnestly, “I really mean it, Mom. I don’t want to disturb you. Cook, if it’ll help you go back to sleep. I just have a couple of questions….”

He had questions, I had questions, everybody had all kinds of questions. My headache returned with a vengeance. I beat the egg and milk into the batter, then added the melted chocolate and vanilla. Once the oven was preheated and the cookie sheets buttered, I measured out what I thought would be a judicious balance of dry ingredients and began to mix them into the batter. These cookies promised to be terrific. But apprehension had drained the joy from cooking experimentation.

Arch said, “So. When was the last time there was an execution in Colorado?”

“Arch!”

“No, really, just tell me. And … was it by lethal injection?”

I sighed and scooped the batter onto the cookie sheets. “No, the last execution used the electric chair. And it was over thirty years ago, I think. Law enforcement in Colorado has switched over to lethal injection. But they’ve never used it.”

“The death penalty”—his voice cracked—“is for first-degree murder, right?”

I slid the cookie sheets into the oven and turned. “Arch—”

“Just tell me.”

“Yes, for first-degree murder. But—”

“Are you going to help Dad?” he demanded.

His question stung. I set the timer and tried to think of what to say. Finally I asked, “What would you like me to do?”

“Oh, you know,” he replied earnestly, “that stuff you do sometimes, go around asking questions, like that. Try to help with the investigation the way you do with Tom.”

“Tom’s off this case, and I’m a witness. Which
is supposed to mean that I don’t go around talking to people connected with the case.”

“You did when you found that guy’s body out at Elk Park Prep and when that lady was killed in the parking garage.”

“Those were different. I didn’t see any suspects, and I certainly didn’t witness an arrest for homicide. And besides, those things happened when I was pretty ignorant about law enforcement.”

His thin body sagged. “So that means no.” His tone turned morose. “If Dad does get out of jail on Monday the way he thinks he will, I think I should go live with him. Until the trial. I mean, it might be the last time I would see him.”

I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, in the middle of the night, in the warm security of our home, here in our warm kitchen. In the extremely unlikely event that John Richard got out of jail anytime before his preliminary hearing, I couldn’t imagine that he would
want
Arch to live with him. Whatever punishment I had envisioned for the Jerk during all these years, it hadn’t looked like this. It hadn’t looked like losing my son.

“Arch,” I said quietly, “are you threatening me with moving out? ‘Cause that’s what it sounds like.”

“Mom! Of course not! I’m just trying to do what’s right here. He
is
my father.”

I struggled for clear thoughts and the right words. “Okay, look. If I can talk to some people … and those conversations would help lead to justice …
Justice
, I’m talking, Arch, not ‘getting somebody off.’ There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, yeah, truth, justice, and the American way. Courtesy of Super-Mom.”

“Arch!”

“Okay, okay.”

“If I could talk to some people but not jeopardize my position as a witness, would you stay here at home? Your dad’s really not … set up to take care of you. And I would worry about you.”

He nodded, whispered “Okay,” and drank his cocoa in silence. Then he sniffed, mumbled, “Be right back,” and left the room. Jake, ever faithful, scrambled after him. I took the cookies out of the oven and set them on racks to cool.

When Arch returned, he clutched a wadded-up tissue. I couldn’t tell if he’d been crying. “I was just thinking, Mom.” He’d changed his tone, a clear indication that he wanted to discuss a new topic. “You said you were having a cup of hot chocolate to drink right now, because you couldn’t sleep? But when you can’t sleep, you should go out for a drive. Don’t you remember? That’s what you used to do when I was little. When I couldn’t sleep, you took me out for a drive, and you said it made you sleepy, too.”

“Oh, hon—”

“You probably don’t remember, but you
used
to say that driving me around was like having hot chocolate when you were little. The rhythm of the car put me to sleep the way the hot chocolate did you. Even if it was the middle of the night, if I was fussy, you would take me. I don’t remember the drives, I just remember you telling me we used to go.”

I nodded and checked the cookies; they were almost cool. I remembered the drives, all right. And I hadn’t taken them just because Arch was fussy. Time and again, I’d gripped that steering wheel the way fear had clutched me. Rocking over bumpy
mountain roads, I’d been desperately trying to figure out a way to escape from my life, from John Richard Korman’s abuse, and a marriage I just couldn’t hold together anymore. I had been lost in the worst way, and it had taken years to get my
life
on the right road.

Now I packed up the cookies, stacked all the dirty dishes in the sink, and threw away the ingredient debris.

“A drive sounds like a great idea,” I told my son. “But what do you say we get some sleep first?”

Arch agreed. For once, he wasn’t in the mood to taste my new cookies, and neither was I.