Crunch Time (12 page)

7

M
onday morning, I awakened well before the alarm went off. Tom was still asleep, and I didn’t want to disturb him. But a thought had niggled my brain to full consciousness. I glanced at the clock: It was half past four. Problem was, I wasn’t quite sure of the nature of the question, if that was even what it was. I looked outside and frowned. A hard frost had iced the trees. Thick fog enveloped the streetlight near our bedroom window. I closed my eyes. What was that idea that was just out of reach? The more I tried to grab for it, the more it eluded me.

I eased out of bed and tried to relax my way into whatever the bothersome notion had been.

Before Arch became a teenager, and thus too cool for such pursuits, I used to take him fishing in the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. My job was to hold the net and collect the squirming trout, so I could take my son’s picture, with him proudly holding his catch aloft. All this would have to be done quickly, because Arch always threw back his haul. Now, it seemed, I was thrusting wildly with the net, but whatever I was trying to snag remained maddeningly out of reach.

There was only one thing to do in this kind of situation, I thought as I put on jeans, a sweatshirt, and walking shoes.
Cook.
I’d been told that working with your hands to prepare food engages your left brain. So, the reasoning went, your right brain was free to wander around and capture intuitions. It had happened to me enough that I trusted the process.

I crept down to the kitchen. I didn’t expect the household to start moving for at least a couple of hours. I looked forward to savoring the quiet, the time to think and—

Someone was crashing around in our pantry. I simultaneously pulled the pantry door open and screamed bloody murder.

“
Dios mío!
” cried Ferdinanda, her hand clutched to her heart. “What are you yelling about?” Instead of answering her, I stared at the pantry shelves, which were all jumbled. She had cleared off one whole area and now had a dozen cans in her lap.

Tom, wearing his undies, appeared at the door to the pantry. He was holding his .45 in both hands. When he saw us, he lowered it and said, “Uh, ladies?”

Yolanda, her face full of fear, stood shivering in the doorway to the dining room. “What happened? Did someone try to break in?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I apologize, everybody. Please go back to bed. I heard someone and hollered. It was just . . . Ferdinanda.” Yolanda disappeared back into the dining room. Tom, his gun lowered, shuffled across to the desk and pulled out the remote control to the garage, which was where he stored the .45, in a hidden compartment. But he had not gone outside to get it. He just happened to have it upstairs? I knew better than to ask him about his weapon while others were around. Tom, for his part, shook his head, put the remote back down, and left the kitchen. A moment later, I heard him clomping upstairs.

“Goldy,” Ferdinanda scolded, “what are you doing up so early? Weren’t you tired from last night?”

“Ferdinanda, what were you
looking
for? Why are
you
up at this hour?”

She wheeled herself out of the pantry. “Guava marmalade. And I’m awake now because I always am. During Batista’s time? I worked in a café in the mornings. I had to show up at four o’clock and make the bread. I’ve got our breakfast almost ready. I just needed some good jam to go with it.”

“Is this what you were doing last night?” I asked. The kitchen was empty, clean, and cleared of cooking utensils, except for a mixing bowl and a beater turned upside down to dry on the counter.

“Yes. When Tom came down to see what the noise was.” Ferdinanda rolled herself to the kitchen table, where she deposited the cans. Then she took off for the walk-in. She said over her shoulder, “I’m glad you’re here, you can help me.”

My shoulders slumped. I was so looking forward to having this time to myself. “What do you—”

I was interrupted by Tom, who’d pulled on sweats and now reappeared in the kitchen with his gun. He picked up the garage remote and disappeared, then came back a moment later. “Goldy? How long has this remote been dead?”

“Uh,” I said, trying to remember something, anything, about our supply of batteries. While Ferdinanda continued to crash around in the walk-in, I searched my brain. I had no idea where the batteries were or even if we had any. “Why did you even have the forty-five in the house, anyway?”

“Target practice yesterday,” said Tom. After a fruitless rummage through the desk drawer, Tom whispered, “All right, didn’t you just change the code for the panel?” Our detached garage was a remnant of the time when our brown shingle house had been built, in the twenties. There were two entries to it: the main one facing the street, and another on the side, a regular door which we kept locked with a key. The main door could be opened by either a remote—one that worked—or a numbered panel on the side.

“The panel code is Arch’s birthday,” I replied.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Tom. “Tax day.” He tossed the dead remote back into the desk and shuffled off. A moment later, the garage door rumbled open.

“Here we go!” cried Ferdinanda, triumphant. She emerged from the walk-in with a plastic-covered glass pan in her lap. “This is a bread pudding that sits overnight. I’ll make a rum sauce later. That’s as good as marmalade.”

“This is all very sweet of you,” I forced myself to say as I peered around her into the walk-in’s dark interior. Make a rum sauce out of what?

“Just leave the pudding on the table for a while,” Ferdinanda said as she piled large cans of beans and broth back in her lap. Outside, the garage door thundered closed. I certainly hoped we hadn’t awakened any of the neighbors with all the screaming and clanking. Ferdinanda gave me an expectant look. “Can you push me into the dining room? I need to do my exercises.”

“Sure,” I said. Tom reentered the house, reset the house alarm, and walked upstairs. I felt a shudder of guilt for getting him up so early.

“Goldy?” asked Ferdinanda.

“Right.” I pushed the wheelchair through the swinging door to the dining room, which Ferdinanda could have easily opened herself, and clearly already had when she came out there. As Ferdinanda placed most of the cans on her cot, I looked around our guests’ temporary bedroom. Years ago, when I’d done the minimal amount of decorating required for a house, I’d only put up sheer curtains over the long mullioned windows. But the sun was not up yet, thank goodness, and the room remained dark. Yolanda, inert on her cot, had pulled the sheet up over her ears.

With a sigh, though, I realized that I had also awakened the puppies. This was becoming the opposite of a quiet morning of relaxation.

I crept back to the pet-containment area. Scout the cat was nowhere to be seen. Jake was asleep with four of the puppies leaning up against him. I picked up the two whining puppies and carefully snuggled one against each shoulder. Then I rocked them until they went back to sleep. With as much care as I would have used handling newborns, I placed them next to Jake’s warm back. He did not open his eyes, but his tail thumped twice in acknowledgment.

Finally I retreated to the kitchen, where I washed my hands and put on a clean apron. I hadn’t remembered whatever it was that had awakened me, and with all the commotion and no caffeine, I sure couldn’t bring up the thought to net it.

What kind of cooking would aid my thought process? And could I work in the kitchen so quietly that Tom, Yolanda, and all the dogs would be able to sleep?

I fired up the espresso machine, ground freshly roasted beans in my new burr grinder, and cast my mind over things we’d eaten lately that we’d enjoyed. There was the toffee Tom had bought. I decided to make another cookie for the high school buffet: a conglomeration of sweet, tangy, and crunchy ingredients that I would call Crunch Time Cookies. In the walk-in, I nabbed unsalted butter and a couple of eggs. I thought the cookie should not be
too
sweet, so I picked up some cream cheese to add tang. I gathered oats and other dry ingredients, plus our favorite Mexican vanilla, from where Ferdinanda had moved them in the pantry. I looked around at the mess in there. When was I going to get this all cleaned up?

While the cookies are baking,
my mind supplied.
And after you have some coffee.

I made myself a quadruple-shot cappuccino, then sipped it as I measured brown and regular sugar and sifted together flour and leavening agents. I was making toffee cookies, so I thought I could use semisweet chocolate chips as well as toffee bits. Pecans have always been my favorite nut, so I thought,
To heck with almonds and tradition, I’m going to add the crunch of toasted pecans
.

The nuts tapped against the side of the sauté pan as I heated them oh-so-quietly and took tiny mouthfuls of my luscious coffee.
Think,
I ordered myself.

Tom had said that someone had set Ernest up, by arranging, or, to be more precise, rescheduling, a dental appointment that he wasn’t due to have for two weeks. The dentist, in Hawaii, didn’t know anything about it. But he wouldn’t have been the one to attend to the calendar; his
secretary
would have. But Drew Parker, DDS, didn’t have a full-time secretary anymore, and he claimed Zelda, his temporary secretary, was a ditz. Had anyone else done his office work? Dr. Parker himself said he used a service, the name of which he could not remember. And it was
that
aspect—the service—that had awoken me that morning, full of curiosity concerning an idea that was just out of reach of my mental net.

After ten minutes of stirring the pecans, I turned them out onto paper towels to cool. I softened the butter and cream cheese a bit in the microwave, then emptied them into the mixer bowl and let the beaters rip. Next I combined the sugars and slowly added them to the mixing bowl, continuing to beat until the mixture was ultra-creamy and very soft. Next came the eggs, then the vanilla. While that mixture melded, I sifted the dry ingredients; combined the oats, chocolate chips, and toffee bits in a bowl; and roughly chopped the pecans.

Okay . . . I’d repeatedly heard about people like Dr. Parker, who’d let secretaries and other assistants go. Sometimes they said all the business could afford was a temp. My cynical view was that usually the business was trying to rid itself of the cost of providing benefits to a full-time employee. But never mind that;
what had I been thinking
?

The sheriff’s department, going into Parker’s office that day, ought to be able to locate the name of the temp service he used in his Rolodex or in his files.
The temp service.
What temp service?

I stared down at the chopped pecans. They smelled so good, I couldn’t resist popping a still-warm nut into my mouth. It was crunchy and sweet.

Finally, something about a temp service swam toward me. I could see a face; I could recall a vaguely unpleasant personality.

I stopped the mixer and stirred in the flour and leavening agents, plus the pecans, chocolate chips, and toffee bits. I figured the cream cheese would ripen the flavor of the batter if I let the batter chill for a while. It would have been better if I could have let it sit overnight, but I didn’t have overnight. I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the walk-in.

Then it was time for a little CPR on the old memory bank. I pulled out the phone book and searched through the yellow pages until I came to “Secretarial Services.” Some in Denver, Lakewood, and Littleton had advertised there, but . . . there was only one in Aspen Meadow. It was called Do It! and their slogan was “Secretaries Do It Behind the Desk.” Right. I looked closely at the proprietor’s name. Finally, I snagged the thought that had awakened me at half past four.

The owner of Do It! was Charlene Newgate. And I knew her. For crying out loud, of
course
I knew her. I fixed myself another cappuccino and sat down at the kitchen table.

I’d met Charlene, who I thought must now be in her fifties, when I was doing outreach work at St. Luke’s. At that time, our parish had had the only food pantry in the mountain area. Back in the dark old days before the government had more resources to track down deadbeat dads, Charlene’s husband abandoned her and her daughter. Habitat for Humanity built Charlene and her daughter a house, but Charlene also had a series of live-in boyfriends. They, too, packed up and shipped out. All this left Charlene with only the barest welfare income. She came into the church from time to time for tuna, peanut butter, canned ravioli, and breakfast cereal. Unfortunately, Saint Luke’s hadn’t offered free counseling sessions to people coming for food, or I would have suggested them to Charlene.

As a teen, Charlene’s daughter got pregnant. She gave birth to a son, but shortly thereafter went to prison for dealing drugs. One time when Charlene had come in and asked if we had SpaghettiOs, she’d shared with me that she was determined to raise her grandson, little Otto, by herself. Otto, who loved SpaghettiOs, was a year younger than Arch. In elementary school, Otto had been even more uncoordinated than Arch, and my heart had bled for them both.

When the Jerk had finally popped for tuition money for Arch to go to Elk Park Preparatory School—a disaster of monumental proportions—Charlene had complained bitterly to me that she was unable to afford such opportunities for Otto. I’d wanted to say,
You want your son to be ostracized for not having money, not belonging to a country club, not being athletic, and not going to Europe for the summer?
Be my guest.
But I’d said nothing. After one year of hell, I’d quietly taken Arch out of Elk Park Prep and put him into the Christian Brothers High School, which cost half as much as Elk Park Prep and had none of the aggravation. Charlene somehow found out where Arch was and told me that she wished she were rich—!—so that she could send Otto to a Catholic school like the one where Arch was.

I finished my coffee and cleaned up the mess of eggshells, butter wrappers, beaters, and measuring cups. Then I thought,
Oh, why not make a batch of those cookies right now?
They would probably be better if I baked them later, but I wanted to see what I’d invented. Delayed gratification had never been my thing, and anyway, the cookies had oats in them, so they were sort of breakfasty. I preheated the oven, slapped a silicone pad on a cookie sheet, and tried to remember more about Charlene Newgate. I needed to figure this out, doggone it, because I was willing to bet several pounds of unsalted butter that either she had been the secretary for Drew Parker or she’d sent one of her temps to work there.