Fatally Flaky (27 page)

“Nope,” said Boyd resolutely. “I’m going with you.”

I sighed hugely, but it made no difference.

Isabelle was on the phone ordering supplies for the following week. When she saw me, she quickly finished her business, then handed the phone over to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” she replied. “Just…if Victor fires me at some point, would you think about hiring me?”

“Of course. Thing is, I don’t really have regular staff. But if he does let you go, I’ll see if I can find someone who needs a staff person with your particular gifts.”

“You mean, like breaking and entering?”

“Well,” I said, “we didn’t do any breaking. We just entered.”

Isabelle giggled and took off. I sat down and dialed Aspen Meadow Jewelers. To my surprise, Hans Bogen answered the phone himself. He said Hanna was on her way out to the spa, to give me what he had found inside the clock.

“Inside the workings?”

“No, Goldy. I didn’t need to take it apart, after all. When there was nothing wrong with the mechanism, I began to take apart the clock case. I think I’ve found what you might have been looking for underneath the fabric of the case. It is a thin piece of paper, along with a small key.”

My shoulders slumped. More keys. Terrific. I thanked Hans, and said I would pay him for his efforts.

The first bell for dinner rang, so Boyd and I hustled back to the spa kitchen, where Julian had filled all the hot tables with boiling water. Despite the fact that we’d departed from the spa’s recipes a bit—well, a lot—we had to pile each client’s plate to identical measurements. As every caterer worth her hand-harvested sea salt knew, a buffet was an invitation to disastrous overeating. The two extra kitchen helpers were in charge of keeping a cold buffet filled with nonfattening salad ingredients, so they bustled around doing that. I sliced the filled, sautéed, and roasted pork. Boyd, bless his heart, was bending seriously over the bubbling pots that he was using as a base for steaming the broccoli.

Victor Lane came into the kitchen while we were hustling back and forth with trays of loaded plates. He said nothing, but cast a judgmental eye around everywhere. I didn’t know whether he suspected the big cardboard box on the kitchen island was filled with chocolate cookies and vanilla frosting, and I determinedly ignored both the box and Victor. On one of my return trips to the kitchen, he had left, but Hanna Bogen was waiting at the back door.

“Here you are, Goldy.” She handed me a small key, much smaller than the ones that had been on Jack’s key ring. “I must get back. There was a small, thin piece of paper in there, too.” She put the paper in my hand. “It looks like a note.” She paused as I stared at the two items in the palm of my hand. “Are you all right?”

“No, but please thank Hans for me.”

I opened the note first. It was in Jack’s handwriting.

Gertie Girl,

If you’re reading this, then I’m gone. Finn left me this key, he said, as an insurance policy, in case something happened to him. But I don’t know what it goes to, and I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe you can. I’ve had a good run, and you were a big part of it. Wherever God sends me, I want you to know that I’ll be thinking of you.

Love,

Jack

Hanna was still standing at the back door. “Goldy?”

At first I couldn’t speak. Finally, I said, “I don’t know what this is a key to.”

Hanna shook her head. “It didn’t have anything to do with the clock, Hans said.”

No kidding. I thanked Hanna, and she left. I slipped Jack’s note and the key into my pocket.

Somehow, we got through dinner and the many complaints that canned plums were not enough for dessert. While the servers were clearing the tables, a small line of women appeared at the back door.

“We heard you were bringing sweets,” the first one, a brunette, said.

“Where’s Victor?” I asked.

“On the phone in his office,” the second one, who had long, auburn hair and a protruding jaw, replied. “Hurry! How much are you charging?”

“I’m not,” I said. I asked Julian to help me form an assembly line. First he slathered the flat side of one cookie with the creamy vanilla frosting, then I topped the frosting with another cookie. I placed the cookie sandwiches on paper towels and began handing them, one per client, to the women. “Just enjoy them quickly, don’t tell Victor where you got them, and don’t blame me if you don’t lose weight.”

When all the sandwiches were gone, I began to wonder how well Yolanda was able to supplement the meager salary she got from Victor. At five dollars a pop, I could have made over a hundred bucks to night. Not bad.

But how many of those women were addicted to Valium, and who knew what other drugs, that Victor was giving them? Really, it was a miracle that “all” they had shown was signs of withdrawal…someone could have died. If Valium was in the smoothies, what else was Victor using? No wonder this place cost so much. But people always returned, because the addiction monster was eating them alive. What a sorry state of affairs.

While we washed and dried dishes, I thought fiercely that when the time came, I certainly hoped that the sheriff’s department closed this place down…and sent arrogant, scheming Victor Lane away for a very long time.

When we were done, I felt bone tired, and sat down on one of the two chairs in the kitchen. I missed Tom. I missed Arch. And, like a deep ache, I missed Jack.

“You want to go home?” Boyd asked. “It looks as if we’re done here for the night.”

“Not yet,” I replied. I was thinking that Jack had probably tried that little key in every locked drawer of the Smoothie Cabin…to no avail. But he’d seemed to have been convinced that the key went to something out here. And I’d be damned if I was going to leave this place until I’d figured out what lock the little key opened.

“Goldy,” said Boyd. “What’s the matter?”

I cleared my throat. “Just miss Jack, that’s all.”

He nodded. Like Tom, Boyd had spent enough time with the relatives of victims of crime that he knew their despair could be unfathomable. Wordlessly, he moved to the big walk-in and retrieved a…jar?

“This is from Tom,” Boyd said. “It’s your Summertime Special, kept chilled in my cooler. He figured you’d need caffeine after we finished to night, and that you’d be tired enough that you would sleep anyway, when you got home.”

“Thanks.” I unscrewed the jar and took a small sip. Wonderful. While Boyd fixed himself a large ice water, then sat patiently on the other side of the kitchen, I slipped my free hand into my apron pocket. I felt the note from Jack and Finn’s small key that Jack had hidden inside the clock.

Oh, Jack, I thought, what did you get yourself into?

He’d been on to something, he and Doc Finn. It involved the spa, and it involved a number of people with medical conditions, none of whom I could reach. Jack had given me a bunch of keys that had helped me get into his house, where I’d seen a bag of golf clubs he never used, and an inoperative travel clock hiding a key and a note.

I took another swallow of the coffee and thought back to when Jack had first arrived here from New Jersey, how he’d been so happy to reveal he’d bought the dilapidated place across the street from us. I’d been equally delighted to have him there, and our time together had been joyful.

When Jack had brought us some trout one night, he’d regaled us with the faux pas he’d made concerning the cultural and governmental differences between New Jersey and Colorado. He’d made us laugh over his every mistake.

A waiter had given Jack a blank look when he’d ordered a salad with “Roquefort” dressing. He’d learned to ask for “blue cheese.” Jack had piled up a month’s worth of trash waiting for municipal trash collection, until I told him waste services were privately contracted. Most of all, he’d been stymied by our postal service. Everyone in Aspen Meadow was on a rural route, we’d finally informed him. Either you maintained one of a row of boxes near your residence, or, if you were very lucky, the mailman put your correspondence in a single box near your house. Otherwise, you were stuck with renting a receptacle at the post office. Jack’s days of waiting for the mail to be delivered through a slot in his front door were over. Jack had just shaken his head and installed a box at the end of his driveway, like the rest of us on our street.

And then Jack had become friends with dear, kind Doc Finn, whose sharp intellect and compassionate heart, as well as his affinity for fishing and drinking, made him the perfect companion for my godfather.

But something had gone very wrong. Doc Finn had saved little Lissa O’Neal, that much I’d learned from her grandfather Norman, who I sincerely hoped was in rehab at this very moment. Perhaps the Druckmans had told Finn about Todd’s rotator cuff. And then…had some patients suffering from withdrawal come to Finn, too?

At that point, Doc Finn had gone digging. Was this a big assumption, or not? Had Doc Finn known he was in danger? He must have, or he wouldn’t have given Jack the piece of paper with the list of names, the one I’d found in the golf club locker. But the last part of the puzzle, this damnable small key, was something Jack had not been able to figure out. So he’d left it for me.

I drank some more of my coffee and ran everything I knew about the case through my mind once more. And then I had an idea. It was crazy. Or was it? Jack hadn’t known what the key went to because he wasn’t used to having this kind of service.

But I did.

What I had in my apron pocket was the key to a mailbox. And not one at Aspen Meadow’s main post office, because I knew what those looked like. But where? Doc Finn had given Jack the key, or maybe Doc Finn had left the key where Jack could find it…

And then I knew.

“I need to drive somewhere,” I announced suddenly to Boyd. “I’ll be back in less than fifteen minutes.”

“I’m coming with you,” he protested. But before he could insist further, an absolutely horrible sound came through the screen door to the kitchen. It was the sound of people vomiting.

Vomiting and screaming and puking some more.

“What the hell…?” asked Julian as he raced in from the dining room, where he’d been setting up for breakfast. He ran out the door ahead of Boyd and me.

The women I had given cookie sandwiches to were holding on to their stomachs and throwing up. The remains of some of the food were on the grass. There wasn’t a person out there who had not received a dessert from me. I thought I was going to be sick.

“What have you done?” Victor Lane, who had suddenly appeared, shouted in my face. “Why are these women sick?”

“I don’t know!” I said.

“Leave her alone,” Boyd said, interposing himself between Lane and me.

“This isn’t anything from our menu!” Victor cried, looking at the remains on the grass.

“Somebody call for help,” I commanded Julian.

But Boyd said, “It’ll be faster if it comes from me. Stay with her,” he said to Julian, and then he rushed in the direction of the trees, where, up high, he had said, he could get a cell phone signal.

With Boyd gone, Victor Lane could walk right up to me again, too close. His skeletal face loomed next to mine. “You are fired from here forever and ever, do you understand?” And then he smiled at me, and turned away.

Julian and I tried to help the women on the lawn, who were quite ill. What ever had happened to them? And had Victor gone to call for help?

“Goldy?” said Isabelle from beside me. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Could you help me get these women some ginger ale? Do you have any? I think that would help them. Do you keep any antinausea medication around here?”

“No,” said Isabelle, “but we have diet ginger ale. I’ll get it for them.”

I looked at the women holding their stomachs, at Julian talking to several of them, trying to determine what had made them sick, and at Isabelle, who’d just banged into the kitchen to pour glasses of ginger ale. I knew I was not being paranoid when I reached the painful conclusion they’d been given something to make them sick. And I hadn’t done it. But I now had a pretty good idea who had.

“Let me help you,” I said to one of the women as I knelt beside her.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “What did you put in those cookies? Why did you try to poison us?”

“I didn’t!”

“Go away,” she said fiercely. “Leave us alone until a doctor can help us.” Then she rolled away from me.

All right, what ever you want, I thought. Julian was talking to a woman who was lying on the grass. Boyd had disappeared into the trees.

So I walked quickly back into the kitchen, grabbed my keys, revved up my van, and accelerated out of there.

T
he
OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE
sign in front of the old Spruce Medical Group building was creaking as it swung in the mild breeze. I ignored both the wind and the sign, and hopped up to the entrance, which, as I recalled, had a row of locked mailboxes out front. Jack hadn’t thought to look here when Doc Finn had given him the small key, because Jack didn’t connect the key with rural mail delivery. But I had that knowledge, and I prayed it was going to help me.

I certainly hoped I wasn’t chasing a wild hare. But I had to know.

Only two of the mailboxes seemed to be in use: Front Range Drains and a lawyer’s office. Still, there was an old, battered sign over the boxes that read,
THIEVES WANT YOUR MAIL! REMOVE EVERYTHING EVERY NIGHT
! Well, I certainly hoped a killer—I still had only an inkling of who it could be—would not have thought to come out here to try to steal mail…or what ever.

It suddenly occurred to me that in my haste, I had not checked to see if I had been followed. I peered into the parking lot, but saw only my van and the ones belonging to Front Range Drains.

I took the key out of my apron pocket and gingerly began trying it in the locked boxes. There were a dozen of them, most of which were unmarked. The little key went into the first seven just fine, it just didn’t
move.
And then on the eighth, success.

A pile of wet circulars fell at my feet when the door creaked open, proving that retirement, and even death, couldn’t keep the junk mail away. Who was still paying rent for this box, a year after Doc Finn had retired from Spruce Medical? Maybe Doc Finn had been paying it.

I went through every ad for roof repair, every credit card offer, every discount card for oil changes. Nothing. I sighed.

But something had made Finn give Jack this key, as a kind of insurance policy, in case something happened to him. What? I felt inside the mailbox: the top, the bottom, and then the sides…wait.

There was something small and rectangular taped on one side of the mailbox. With infinite care, I peeled the sticky stuff away, and then stared, with only dawning comprehension, at a…flash drive? Doc Finn, Tech Boy? I groaned.

I was twenty-five minutes away from home, and I had a load of women getting sick from food I had given them—but had not put anything bad into—back at Gold Gulch Spa. I’d left Julian wrestling with the problem, and Boyd in the woods, trying to get a cell signal. Once the cops and ambulances arrived, I was going to be at the spa all night, answering questions and allowing food to be packed up and taken for analysis. I couldn’t abandon Julian and Boyd; I had to go back.

After all, I told myself, Yolanda kept a computer in the spa kitchen, and I could plug the flash drive in there. Plenty of people were milling around, like rubberneckers trying to get a look at an accident. And then the cops would be here again.

And so I went back. The scene had not changed much. Victor Lane was yelling at Julian, who was ignoring him as he passed out glasses of ginger ale. When Julian saw me, he stood up and handed the tray of glasses to Isabelle. Victor was still hollering at Julian, who walked away.

“What do you think made them sick?” Julian asked me, once he was close to the kitchen doors.

Of course, I had been thinking about this ever since I’d driven out of the spa. “My guess?” I said. “Ipecac. Stirred into the frosting while we were busy serving dinner.”

Julian screwed his face into incomprehension. “But who would do that?”

“My money’s on Victor,” I said. “He wanted an excuse to get me out of the spa, and maybe to discredit me with the police. But it could have been someone else.”

“One of the women here brought antinausea medication,” Julian said. “She has to take it when she gets a migraine, and when she heard about the crisis, she came racing out here with her bottle. She and Isabelle and Marla are giving it to the sick women.” Julian shook his head. “I don’t think there’s anything more we can do to help them until the ambulance arrives.”

Boyd wasn’t back from the woods yet, so Julian told me he was going to wash up, then pour out some more ginger ale. He sternly warned me not to leave the kitchen, and I agreed that I would stay put.

As soon as he was gone, I booted up Yolanda’s computer, on the far side of the sink. While the machine was humming and dinging, I added some more ice cubes to my Summertime Special. It was going to be a long night, and I figured I’d need extra caffeine.

After a few moments of tapping my foot, slugging down the creamy coffee, and cursing technology, I was able to bring up the contents of the flash drive. I sat down on one of the stools Yolanda’s people used when they weren’t rushing around, and tried to figure out what Doc Finn had left on his flash drive.

There were five files.

The first was text. It said “Medical University of Trinidad—top student. He died in a climbing accident—Peru, where he’d gone with Tim Anderson, a close friend who had flunked out of MUT. Residency—Grady Memorial, Atlanta. Terminated, stealing drugs. Record sealed.”

But who was this person? The file gave no clue. Next came the second file, also text.

“Victor Landheugel, became Lane—former pharmacy tech. Terminated, fraudulent billing to Medicare. Prosecutor: woman, whom he’d vowed to get back at. She later had fatal car accident.”

I took another swig of coffee. Huh, Victor Lane. It had been my experience that if a person acted like a jerk, he had stuff to hide. And sure enough, Victor Lane had all kinds of stuff to hide.

T
HE THIRD, FOURTH,
and fifth files were photographs. The first photograph I did not recognize. The caption said, “Craig Miller, Medical University of Trinidad.” He was much younger then. But as I stared at the photo, I thought,
No.
This guy, this Craig Miller in the photograph, had a chubby, unattractive face; freckles; and okay, dark, wavy hair. The Craig Miller I knew had a full mop of dark curls, and was much better looking than the homely fellow in the photograph.

The second photo’s caption also read “Craig Miller.” It had the subtitle “Atlanta.” Here was the handsome, easygoing doctor who had just married Billie Attenborough.

The fifth and final file was a photograph with the caption, “Tim Anderson, Medical University of Trinidad.” And although he’d been much younger then, this was the person I knew as Craig Miller.

So. Right here—this was that final point, the one that would make a straight line.

The Craig Miller I knew was not Craig Miller; he was Tim Anderson. The real Craig Miller had died—or been pushed?—off a mountain in Peru.

Passing himself off as the deceased doctor—the real Craig Miller who’d actually gotten a degree—Tim Anderson had been able to secure a residency in Atlanta. But he hadn’t proven himself to be very competent, had been involved with drugs and gotten fired. He’d come to Aspen Meadow, probably disguising his background once again, and taken a position at Spruce Medical Group, where his track record with patients had attracted Doc Finn’s attention. He’d found a partner in crime in Victor Lane, and, it was my new theory, they’d conspired to use the spa to get clients hooked on drugs. It never ceased to amaze me how bad people tended to find each other. Tim Anderson/Craig Miller had also been able to parlay his looks and his fake doctorhood into a handsome payout from Charlotte Attenborough, who was desperate to get her daughter married off, and if the husband-to-be was a doctor, so much the better. Charlotte had even paid off Dodie O’Neal, so that Craig could avoid a lawsuit.

I got up so quickly my head swam. I had to find Boyd. I had to tell him what I had found out. Then I needed to get Julian, Marla, and myself out of here.

I blinked and tried to get my bearings. I walked out the kitchen’s back door, awkwardly skirted the omnipresent laundry cart, and headed for the various trails where Boyd had gone.

As I rounded the main building, I could see that the poisoned women were still on the ground, but at least they weren’t moaning anymore. Julian and Isabelle continued to move rapidly from person to person, making sure the women were as comfortable as possible.

I looked up into the trees, trying to make out exactly where Boyd had gone. I felt a sudden wave of confusion. Had he scuttled up the path toward the hot springs pool, or had he headed straight up the mountain? I decided on the path to the hot springs pool.

I gave the sick women and all the onlookers a wide berth, then began to stumble up the path to the hot springs pool. I blinked. Was it getting dark really quickly, or was I just moving slowly? Or both?

Once I was partway up the path, I stopped, confused. Which way had I thought Boyd had gone?

Why wasn’t my mind working? I looked down. Where had the path gone?

My shoulder was tapped from behind, and I turned, thinking someone was there to help me. But it was Craig Miller, or the person I thought was Craig Miller, pushing one of the spa’s ubiquitous laundry carts.

“How’s that drug working for you?” he asked with such coolness that my skin prickled with gooseflesh. “That’s the problem with Valium, you know? Especially in large quantities, stirred into your iced coffee. You never know how it’s going to affect the patient.”

“You,” I said, “you—” But now my mouth wasn’t working, either. I also didn’t seem to have much control over my limbs, so when Craig/Tim pushed me into the cart, I fell into it with a painful awkwardness. “Don’t,” was all I managed to say before he threw a pile of dirty towels on top of me and began to push the cart up the hill.

“Just in case you’re wondering,” he said, “I took that flash drive that Doc Finn left.” His voice sounded muffled. “Oh, yes, here we go, up to death,” he said merrily as the cart rattled and bumped over the trail.

I tried to say, “Stop,” tried to struggle, but an overwhelming lethargy was making that impossible. I clawed at the sides of the cart, and managed only to knock the towels off my face. I was being pushed…somewhere. And no one was noticing.

“Want to talk?” Tim/Craig asked merrily. “Oh, wait, you can’t talk. Or not much.”

I groaned. I had enough presence of mind, though, to know that I had to try to make myself puke, to get rid of as much of the heavy-duty dose of tranquilizer as I possibly could. The person pushing the cart had killed both Doc Finn and Jack, and since I’d become an obstacle, I was sure to be next.

When the cart went over a bump, I allowed myself to fall on my side. Even that was an effort, as was the attempt to put fingers down my throat.

“You’ll be my fourth victim,” said Craig. “I did too much partying in Trinidad, too many drugs, didn’t get my medical degree. But old Craig Miller, the real Craig Miller, he didn’t care. That nerd was so happy to have a cool, popular friend! So when we were in Peru, it was easy enough to push him off a cliff. By the time I’d hiked out, then returned with help, Craig’s body was swollen, darkened, unrecognizable. I said it was my dear friend, Tim Anderson. All I had to do was fix his ID to look more like me, steal his diploma, and I was on my way.”

I stuck my fingers down my throat and pushed. Nothing. At least I made a retching sound, which fake Craig found funny.

“Everything was going just fine until Doc Finn came sniffing around,” he continued jovially. “He just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Couldn’t stay in retirement. Couldn’t keep his trap shut. Yeah, that was the worst part. He told my dear fiancée that she shouldn’t marry me. Lucky for me, he didn’t give her a reason.”

The argument out at the spa. Isabelle had been partially right. Doc Finn and Billie had been fighting not about the wedding, but about the marriage, period.

“But Billie,” fake Craig went on, “felt duty bound to tell me all about it. Billie likes having someone take care of her; someone who isn’t her mother. And I liked the idea of having all of Charlotte’s money sooner rather than later. So I stole a pair of Charlotte’s shoes to plant in Finn’s car to attract the police’s attention. Charlotte hated Doc Finn, too, because he was always taking Jack away on expeditions that didn’t include her. I put the shoes in Finn’s car once I ran him off the road, after I managed to get Finn called down to Southwest Hospital. And by the way! That was your first mistake. You had Yolanda lie to that greedy bastard, Victor Lane, and say she was in Southwest Hospital with appendicitis. Guess how hard it was for me to check that she wasn’t there at all? Not hard in the slightest.”

I groaned as he pushed the cart over a large rock.

“Your second mistake, Miss Caterer, was not doing research on what brings people back to a place that serves food! I bet you think you knew all about that. Well, see, in China there was a restaurant that was really popular. Really,
really
popular, with lines of customers stretching down the street. Everyone said the food made them feel so good. No wonder, either. The food was laced with opium, and that’s what gave Victor Lane the idea to make a killing here, if you’ll pardon the expression, doing the same thing, but with different drugs.”

A rotten-egg scent reached my nostrils. We were close to the hot springs pool, the same one that had been closed since Sunday, when I’d dropped the load holding Craig and Billie’s dishes and glasses. Finally, finally, the sulfurous odor, plus my own attempts made me throw up.

“All out!” fake Craig said joyfully. He bumped the laundry cart to a stop, and once again I retched. “Girl, what are you doing?” he cried. “Don’t tell me I’m making you sick! A doctor’s not supposed to make folks sick!” He dumped the cart on its side, and I rolled out. “You know,” he said, “I’ve never drowned anyone before. Push, bump, poison. This is a first. All right, in you go.”

Just having a chance to breathe outside of the cart made me feel a tad better. Plus—was it wishful thinking or reality?—I was feeling stronger since I’d managed to clear out my gut a bit.

But I didn’t act strong. I remained limp while the man I’d known as Craig Miller grunted and groaned as he dragged me to the edge of the pool. But I would
not
allow him to hold my head underwater until I drowned.