Crunch Time (19 page)

“But your leftovers!” Yolanda protested.

“Not enough to amount to anything. Take the blanket, put it over your head.”

We jumped out of my vehicle and moved up the hill to where I judged the sidewalk to be. Since the snow was so deep, our progress was reduced to a shuffle. A drapery of white was still streaming down, and the streetlights were enclosed in gossamer. The neighborhood was hushed. Flakes stung my cheeks, eyes, and unprotected neck. My feet, which were still in caterer’s walking shoes, became numb as I pushed through the drifts the wind had sculpted between the street and people’s front fences.

When we finally arrived at our driveway, I noticed our garage door was open. I wondered idly if Tom was home, if he’d gotten out the snowblower and for some reason it hadn’t worked, so he was working on it inside. Arch’s Passat, with a veil of snow blown over the trunk, stood in the garage next to the lawn mower, hedge clippers, and gardening tools, none of which we would need for at least six months. I prayed the Vikarioses had excellent tires and chains and would get Arch home safely.

“There you are!” Ferdinanda cried when we came through the door. The wonderful aroma of a home-cooked meal filled the house. I hadn’t realized I was hungry until that moment, and I almost fell to my knees in thanks. “I got some dinner going.” She looked us over. “You two need hot showers right now, else you gonna catch your death of colds.”

Yolanda gave me a worried look. “Is there enough hot water for the two of us?”

I said, “Sure. You go first.”

Ferdinanda eyed me up and down. She wore a sheriff’s department sweatshirt and pants. Whether they were gifts from Tom or Boyd, I knew not. “Goldy, you need to go put on dry clothes at least. Don’t want you gettin’ sick so you can’t work.”

“Yes, I do have to be able to work, doggone it. What’s the delicious scent?”

“Sense?”

“What’s the wonderful smell?” I asked, a bit louder. I’d forgotten Ferdinanda complaining to us about having trouble hearing.

Ferdinanda put on one of her sly looks. “Nothing around here but ham, bread, eggs, and cheese, plus a can of chiles and a jar of picante. So I threw them together and put it in your refrigerator. Yolanda said you’d be home between one and two hours, so I waited an hour, then put it in the oven. It took you an hour and a half to get back,” she said, concluding triumphantly, “so it should be about done.”

I moved to embrace her, but she drew away. “Oh, you Americans with your hugs! Just go, put on some warm clothes. And hurry up about it.” But she was grinning.

“Is Tom here?” I asked. “Working with the snowblower?”

“What is it Americans say? Nobody here but us chicken?”

“But . . . do you know why the garage door is open?”

“Nope.”

“All right, let me go close it.” I zipped myself into a hooded jacket and traipsed outside, where the snow was still coming down fast. At the side of the detached garage, I pressed four-one-five into the panel. The door obediently closed. I realized with a pang that I had forgotten to buy more batteries for the accursed remote.

Back inside, I asked Ferdinanda, “Have you heard from Arch?” The niggle of worry about my son was spreading.

“No. But I haven’t been answering the phone since Marla. I was afraid Kris might call, and I didn’t want to give us away.”

I wasn’t up to telling her that thanks to Penny Woolworth,
that
ship had sailed, too. Instead I took the puppies outside. They didn’t want to stay long, and they seemed to have figured out that if they did their business, they could come in and be cleaned up and fed. I did both, then went to look for dry clothes.

While rummaging around, I remembered that I hadn’t ratted on Penny to Marla, although I’d meant to. I thought I’d save that threat for when I really needed it. Still, I had to do
something
about Penny’s treachery.

I nabbed my cell phone and called her house. She sounded tired when she answered. When I identified myself, she said, “Uh-oh.”

I said, “When are you cleaning Kris’s house this Thursday?”

“Early afternoon,” she said meekly. “But he won’t be there, so you can’t—”

“I don’t want to see him. I just want to look around.”

She cursed, but agreed.

“Another payment for your betrayal of Yolanda,” I said blithely, “will be your tidying whatever house we use for a get-together to commemorate Ernest’s life. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you.”

She cursed again, but said she’d do it. When I thanked her, she hung up on me.

I disrobed, scrubbed myself with a wet washcloth, and shrugged into a turtleneck and sweatpants. Then I hopped back down the stairs.

Ferdinanda was rolling herself around the kitchen, snagging bananas, apples, and Italian plums to slice for a fruit salad. Without a cooking duty, I pressed the phone’s playback.

The first two messages were from Rorry Breckenridge, who was very apologetic to be calling just after eight in the morning, but she desperately needed to talk to me about the dinner the next night. In the second message, she said she would try Marla. The third was from Trudy, our next-door neighbor, who’d also called this morning. Trudy said she’d just had a “strange” visit from a real estate agent and an older couple, who said they were buying Jack’s house. They’d heard the famous caterer lived across the street, and they wanted to meet me. Now here, according to Trudy, was the strange part: She’d asked for their card so good old Goldy the caterer could call them, and they’d said no, they would just come back later. I shook my head.

Also on the voice mail was an afternoon call from Tom, saying he would be late, and that he’d given a sweat suit to Ferdinanda, and for me not to worry, as he had plenty. He also told me not to be anxious because of the snow. He could be home as late as ten, and that someone with four-wheel-drive would bring him.

There was nothing from Arch. I put in another call to his cell, which went unanswered.

“Ferdinanda?” I asked. “About the garage door. During the day, did you see anyone fooling around out there, trying to get in?”

“I told you. No.” She was slicing bananas with one of my ultrasharp Japanese stainless steel knives, and did not lift her eyes from her task. “Why?”

“Somebody got in there and left the big door facing the street open. Tom doesn’t usually do that.” I did not mention that actually, Tom
never
did that. That was why we’d had the flap about the remote with no batteries, and the code for the panel. There was a false wall at the far end of the garage, beside his power tools. In the wall, Tom’s gun was in a compartment that acted like a medicine cabinet: The hinges were hidden, and you had to know just where to press on the uninsulated part of the wall to get it open.

There was also a side door that faced our backyard. We kept a key to that door under a nearby rock, in case we just wanted a rake or hoe in summer, or the snow shovel or blower in winter, and didn’t have the remote, batteries, or memory of the numbers on the side panel for the big door.

“Probably Boyd left it open,” Ferdinanda said, moving on to the plums. “He was in a hurry to get out of here.”

This was equally unlikely, but the last person I wanted to argue with about anything was Ferdinanda. Instead I put another call in to Arch.

“Yeah, Mom, what is it?” he said with a note of impatience, as if we’d just been speaking ten minutes earlier and I’d called to remind him of something.

“Hon, I’m so worried about you! Where are you?”

“I’m at the Vikarioses’, I told you.” He lowered his voice. “Peter came, too. We’re having pizza.”

“Are you still coming home tonight?”

He groaned. “Yes. School hasn’t been canceled yet, and I’m out of clean clothes. Gus’s grandmother offered to wash what I have on, but I feel bad asking her to do that. And anyway, Peter lives on the other side of Cottonwood Creek, and he has to get his medication tonight. So I don’t want him to feel as if he’s the only one who has to go home.” Someone called to Arch, and he about broke my eardrum when he yelled, “Yeah, I’ll be right there!”

“Okay, go have fun with your pals. Please tell the Vikarioses our road hasn’t been plowed. They might want just to leave you off on Main Street.”

“Oh, great, and me with plain old shoes.” Someone nearby spoke in the background. “Never mind,” Arch said. “Gus just came into the living room to find me, and he’s going to loan me a pair of snow boots. Gotta run, Mom.”

And with that he was gone. I looked out our front window and checked the street. It was still snowing. I glanced over at Jack’s dark house. An older couple, with young kids about to start school? Well, a lot of folks didn’t start having children until later these days. I would have to ask Trudy more the next day.

Ferdinanda’s ham and cheese casserole was delicious. I’d give her this: She could do wonders with egg-soaked bread. That morning she’d served us a bread pudding with rum sauce. The dinner featured layers of cheddar melting over ham and buttered sourdough, over which she’d poured a mixture of eggs, cream, and spices, and on top of which she’d sprinkled green chiles and picante. She’d garnished the dish with fresh chopped cilantro, which gave it a snazzy gourmet appearance. The fruit was a perfect complement, and it looked lovely on the plate. For the first time, I realized that it was probably Ferdinanda who’d given Yolanda her passion for food preparation.

I opened one of Marla’s extra bottles of red wine to go with our dinner. Beer would have worked better with the Mexican food, but we didn’t have any. Anyway, with all the snow outside, it was more of a red wine kind of night.

Neither Yolanda nor I mentioned the incident with Father Pete at the ethnic grocery store, which was probably just as well. Instead, Yolanda talked about how nice the kids were at Christian Brothers High School, and how much they’d appreciated the food. Ferdinanda beamed; she knew CBHS was a Catholic school.

It was then that I ventured to ask her about our trio of visitors. Ferdinanda’s face darkened. “They had a bad aura,” she said. “They were bad people.”

“Is that your professional opinion?” I asked, pouring us all more wine.

Ferdinanda set her chin. “I know about these things.”

I didn’t ask her if she’d been able to read Raul and Fidel Castro’s auras, too, and what they had told her. We were having a relaxing evening after a long day, and I wasn’t going to wreck it. Arch was coming home soon, and Tom would be along.

Ferdinanda again insisted on doing the dishes. “I’ve been doing nothing all day—”

“No,” I said, interrupting, “you haven’t been doing anything except making a wonderful dinner and—”

“Whatever you say, Goldy,” she said, interrupting me right back, wagging that crooked index finger of hers at me, “I am more stubborn than you and will last longer—”

“You’ve been up since half past four!”

“I had a nap!” she retorted as she piled plates in her lap and wheeled toward the sink. “Now go make phone calls or something! Yolanda, you look terrible. I know you didn’t sleep well. I heard you thrashing around. Go to bed.” Once I handed Ferdinand the throat of our faucet, which was placed at the end of an expandable hose, she was able to squirt water on dishes and then expertly pivot to put them in the dishwasher.

Yolanda yawned. “It’s only eight o’clock.”

Ferdinanda said, “So?” I had the distinct impression she won every one of these discussions.

While Ferdinanda banged about in the kitchen, I took the phone and my wineglass out to the living room. Was it too late in the evening to build a fire? I knew that after getting up early, cooking, catering, running hither and yon, and then slogging home in the snow, if I now sat down on the couch with a second glass of wine, it would be about ten minutes before I was fast asleep. So I fancied myself actually exercising as I moved around the living room, piling up logs and kindling, crumpling newspaper, and finally setting a match to my creation.

It was for Tom, I told myself, and Arch. The fire would welcome them home from the blizzard. I said this to myself as I settled on the couch in front of the blaze and took a sip of my wine. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes before I was in Slumberland.

I awoke to a horrific scream. It was not the shriek of a woman, either. I listened carefully and heard another prolonged “Aargh!” It was as if someone were being tortured, and nearby, too. It was a grown man’s voice, and now he was yelling, “Stop it! Hey!” This was followed by yelling and . . . banging. Where were these noises coming from?

A loud thud crashed against the side of the house and rattled the windows.

Yolanda and Ferdinanda both were screeching. Groggy, I looked at the clock. It was twenty to ten. Arch wasn’t home, and neither was Tom. Or at least I hadn’t heard them. With Yolanda and Ferdinanda yelling, I raced into the dining room first. Blinking madly, I thought I should have picked up the phone en route.

“What is it?” I cried. It was still dark in there, so I turned on the light, a used chandelier I’d bought at a garage sale and Tom had rewired. “What’s wrong?” I persisted. “Why are you screaming?”

They both pointed at the dining room window. This was my house, damn it. Undaunted, I walked across the room and looked outside.

The light spilling from the window illuminated Arch’s face. He was wearing a woolen hat. My son stood facing me, knee-deep in snow, openmouthed. He blinked. In one of his hands he was holding Tom’s long, sharp-pointed weeder. It was covered with blood, and the blood was dripping into the snow.

11

“C
ome inside,” I called. “Arch!” I motioned to him. “Quickly!”

When Arch turned, he clung to Tom’s weeder, as if to protect himself. I raced outside, heedless of the snow, and embraced him, avoiding the weeder.

“Is that your blood?” I yelled. “Arch? Are you all right? Did someone hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” he said weakly. “I want to go inside.”

I put my arm around him. He was still clinging to the weeder as we plodded as fast as possible to the front. Yolanda pulled the door open as we traipsed in.

“Did you call the cops?” Arch asked me. He tossed the weeder on the floor, where it clattered against the wall. I tried not to look at the blood, but couldn’t help myself.

“I did,” said Yolanda as she closed the door. Barefoot and shivering, she hugged her sides. “They’re sending a couple of cars and notifying your husband of a Peeping Tom or possible intruder.”

To Arch, I said, “What happened?” Arch’s teeth were chattering, and his hands were shaking. I said, “Wait. Come out to the kitchen and warm up.”

He unzipped a borrowed white parka, which he dropped on the other side of the hall from the weeder. “I’m freezing.” He paused in the hallway and hugged his sides. “I just stabbed somebody.”

I said quickly, “Somebody was trying to break in?”

Arch’s brown eyes were huge as he looked at me. “Yeah. At least, I think so.”

“Oh my God, Arch,” I said, embracing him again. He pulled away from me awkwardly. “I wish you wouldn’t have—” I wished he wouldn’t have what, exactly? Tried to protect us?

Arch pulled off the borrowed hat. He was bald.

“What the
hell—
”

“Oh, Mom, don’t. We really did decide we were all going to shave our heads, in sympathy with Peter.” He used his heels to push off the borrowed snow boots and clomped out to the kitchen.

Ferdinanda and Yolanda’s mouths dropped open when they saw Arch’s hairless head, but to their eternal credit, they said nothing.

Ferdinanda, who was busily making my son cocoa, said, “You are a good boy.” She slapped down the whisk and, despite what she’d said about Americans and hugs, leaned out of her wheelchair and pulled Arch’s waist toward the metal frame. “I know your mother is proud of you. We are all proud of you.”

“You are a
very
good boy,” echoed Yolanda.

As Ferdinanda continued to hold him, and without Yolanda and Ferdinanda able to see him, Arch gave me a helpless look. I shrugged.

“Did you see who was outside?” Yolanda asked Arch, once we were all gathered around the kitchen table. “Was it someone trying to break in?”

“I think so,” said Arch. “I was coming up our road, once the Vikarioses left me off on Main Street—”

He was prevented from continuing by the crashing sound of our front door opening.

“Goldy?” Tom called.

“That was quick,” said Ferdinanda.

And then, before I could even get to the door, Tom was through it. “What happened?” he demanded. He was standing in the hall, shaking and staring at the bloody weeder. “I was on my way home when the call came through.”

“We’re just hearing about it from Arch,” I replied. “In the kitchen. So far, all we know is that Arch stabbed the guy, with your weeder there.” I pointed at the dripping garden tool. Tom shook his head, glanced at the weeder, then stormed down the hall. I followed. Boyd had come through the front door; he brought up the rear.

“Have somebody bag that thing for evidence,” Tom ordered Boyd, who relayed the message to an officer behind him. “And have somebody else bring the dining chairs that are in the living room into the kitchen, would you please?”

“He was outside the dining room window,” Arch was saying to Ferdinanda and Yolanda, “and then I—”

“Arch, are you all right?” Tom asked, taken aback by my son’s bald-egg head.

“I’m fine. Well, sort of.” He sipped cocoa. “You want me to start over?”

“Yes, please,” said Tom. In that command-taking way Tom had, he motioned for Yolanda and me to sit at the table flanking Arch. My son must have seemed like a pretty cool customer for someone who’d just attacked a would-be intruder with a garden implement. Boyd brought in extra chairs and put them down carefully. Tom placed a recorder on the table and pulled out his notebook. Then he and Boyd sat, while Ferdinanda rolled her wheelchair over to be beside Yolanda.

“What happened to your hair?” Tom asked Arch.

“One of the guys on the fencing team has leukemia, and the chemo has made all his hair fall out. So the other team members and I shaved our scalps. You know, in sympathy.”

Tom nodded. “Okay. Begin about an hour ago, and tell me what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”

“An hour ago,” Arch said, “let’s see.” His hand trembled as he put the cup back on its saucer, and liquid spilled across the table. Maybe he wasn’t quite as cool as I’d thought.

“I’ll get it, you talk,” said Ferdinanda, already on her way to the sink for a sponge.

Arch inhaled. “An hour ago is about when Gus’s grandparents left off our sick friend, Peter, at his house on the other side of Cottonwood Creek. The Vikarioses couldn’t get up our hill, so I told them I could walk. I was coming up our street, and I”—here he swallowed—“I saw someone peeking in our dining room window. So I cut through the neighbor’s backyard, then slipped into our garage—”

“How’d you get in there?” asked Tom.

“Someone, the guy probably, had broken open the side door. The snow was making everything quiet. The guy was still looking into our dining room, so I tried to figure out what I could use against him. I don’t know how to shoot, but I do know fencing. I figured I’d have the most luck with your weeder, Tom. So I took it off its hook and came up behind the guy. He was pushing the numbers on a cell phone, maybe to call someone, maybe to text. He didn’t hear me, so I lunged at him, the way I’d learned in épée. Got him in the back. He
squealed
. He whirled around and tried to get the weeder away from me. But I did a parry and riposte and stabbed the front of his shoulder. He howled again and fell against the house wall. I was about to gouge him again when he gave up and started running toward Main Street. He was yelling his head off.”

“Schulz,” said a patrolman from the door. “We’ve got a blood trail from outside your house to Main Street, where we lose it. Looks like the perp had a car parked down there. No outside surveillance cameras on any stores, either. He might have dropped this, though.” The patrolman held up a black watch cap.

“Yeah, yeah, he was wearing that!” Arch interjected as Ferdinanda expertly wiped up the spilled liquid, placed the cup back on the saucer, and patted Arch’s arm.

“Thanks,” said Tom. “Check for boot prints or anything he might have dropped, all right?”
Like a cell phone,
I thought, but dared not hope. To Arch, Tom said, “I need you to remember everything you can about this guy. How tall he was, hair color if you saw any hair, like his eyebrows, say. I need to know whether he was fat or thin, how old you think he might have been, what he was wearing. No detail is too small.”

Arch drained the last of his cocoa. “He was taller than me, but not as tall as you. Maybe just under six feet? He was stocky, but I couldn’t have said how old he was. Not a kid, though. A man. I don’t remember his eyebrows, because I was concentrating on attacking him. He was dressed all in black. I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re trying to break into somebody’s house in a blizzard! Why not wear white?’ ”

“Dressed in a black coat? Or a jacket? Black jeans?”

Arch closed his eyes as he tried to remember. “I don’t know what kind of pants they were. He had on a bomber-type jacket, only it wasn’t leather, or the weeder wouldn’t have gone through.” Worry suddenly creased Arch’s face. “You don’t think I really hurt him, do you, Tom? I mean, you don’t think I
killed
him, do you?”

“If you’d killed him,” Tom said matter-of-factly, “we’d have a body. You probably just grazed him.” Tom stood, as did Boyd. Tom put his big hand on Arch’s shoulder. “You did a good job.”

“Thanks.”

Tom said he was going outside to work with his colleagues.

“Wait,” I said, then took Tom into the hall. “The main garage door was open when I got home.”

Tom cocked his head. “Any idea who opened it? Or how?”

“Ferdinanda thought Boyd might have left it open. She’s not sure. Anyway, I closed it. Sorry I didn’t see the side door broken into.”

“That piece-of-crap flimsy hollow door,” Tom said, fuming. “I should have replaced that thing months ago—” Arch poked his head into the hallway. He wanted to get online with his pals to tell them what had happened. Was that okay? Tom asked him to hold off. “Anything else I need to know, Miss G.?”

“Trudy said there were three people sniffing around here today—”

Boyd appeared in the hallway. “Tom,” he said, his tone ominous. “You’d better come look at this.”

Tom shook his head and followed Boyd. Curious, I threw on a coat and trailed behind them to the side door to the garage, which was now blindingly illuminated with sheriff’s department lights.

I shivered when I saw what they were all looking at. The medicine-type cabinet where Tom had installed the hidden compartment was open. His forty-five was gone.

T
he investigative team split up. Half worked the garage scene, the other half the area outside the dining room window. The snow continued to fall.

A buzzing began in my brain.
One more thing,
it said over and over. It would take hours, I knew, for Tom to fill out reports regarding our watch-cap fellow’s attempted burglary—if that’s what it was—and the actual one, of a firearm being stolen. Because if the guy had had a gun, why wouldn’t he have used it on Arch? I shivered and felt suddenly nauseous.

Yolanda and Ferdinanda went to bed; whether they would sleep was anybody’s guess. Tom insisted that we keep the security system armed at all times. I returned to the kitchen, too nerve-racked to sleep. The Breckenridges’ party loomed. I decided to mix extra bread dough for the double batch of focaccia. It would taste better if it rose overnight in the refrigerator, anyway. I mixed yeast, spring water, flour, sea salt, and fresh rosemary, and placed the savory-smelling concoction into a buttered plastic container, which I covered and put in the walk-in.

The police were still outside, and Tom and Boyd with them. I decided,
What the hell, I’ll go ahead and make the two flourless chocolate cakes
. Initially I was going to make only one, but with the addition of six people, Sean’s two, plus Humberto and Tony and the women accompanying them, there was no way one would work for everybody.

I preheated the oven, prepared the pans, then melted unsalted butter and bittersweet chocolate in the top of my double boiler. I sifted cocoa and sugar onto waxed paper and set them aside. Unfortunately, that same terrifying thought invaded my brain:
What if the man who’d stolen Tom’s gun had used it on Arch?
I felt dizzy and began breaking eggs.
Why oh why had Arch felt he had to attack someone?
I gritted my teeth and folded the ingredients together, then poured them into the prepared pan and placed the pan in the oven.

As I sat at one of our kitchen chairs waiting for the cakes, waiting for Tom, waiting for clarity, I felt so much nausea and vertigo I had to put my head between my knees. I probably had some medication to treat this condition somewhere. I also probably had batteries somewhere. But when you’re nauseated and dizzy, the last thing you can remember is where you put important stuff.

I would have to talk to Arch, who looked especially vulnerable with his shaved head. Then again, he knew what I’d gone through with the Jerk, and he worried when I got into scrapes with bad guys. Like Brad Mikulski, Arch worried about his mother. Now that he was older and knew fencing, it was no wonder he’d thought he could take on a would-be intruder. I shook my head.

When the puffed cakes emerged, they looked and smelled heavenly. I placed them on racks. I cleaned up after myself and finally felt tired enough to think sleep might be possible. I left a note for Tom. When he came in, could he please cover the cakes? Thanks.

As I was heading upstairs, Boyd walked quietly through our front door. He said if it was all right with me, he wanted to stay at our house until all this blew over.
Like a storm,
I thought. When I hesitated, Boyd said he’d already asked Tom, and he’d said it was fine, as long as it was okay with me.

“Yes, yes, of course,” I said. Arch’s room had two beds, I told him, and he was welcome to one of them, as long as Arch didn’t mind. But Boyd replied that if we had a sleeping bag, he would prefer to bunk on the living room couch. It was a lumpy sofa, I warned him, but he said he’d slept on a lot worse when he was in the army. I found one of our sleeping bags and handed it to him.

In the bedroom, I closed our curtains, changed into pajamas, and lay on our bed to wait for Tom, and for the sleep that my body had promised. But my heart started thumping again, and my skin suffered wave after wave of gooseflesh.

The Breckenridges’ dinner was scheduled for the next evening, and my jumpy mind said all those extra guests would be a challenge. But Yolanda would be there to help, and Ferdinanda had proved her mettle in the kitchen. Plus, we would have Boyd. He didn’t enjoy cooking or serving. Still, when Tom had sent him to watch over me when I was doing an event, and Boyd had been involved in culinary duties, he’d been stoic. Now his only work would be to keep us safe.

Around midnight, Tom came into our room.

“Are you awake?” he whispered. When I told him I was, he said he’d covered the cakes and stored them. He was going to have a quick shower and then come to bed.

“Size-eight boot,” he said without preamble when he slipped between the sheets ten minutes later. “Same as what we found in the mud over at Ernest’s. Our guys are trying to get good photographs of the print. And we’re sending the weeder to the lab to have the blood analyzed, see if we get some kind of hit. The watch cap’s going, too. It didn’t look to us as if there were any hairs in it. But it’s dark out, so maybe the techs will find something we couldn’t see.”