Miss Ferrell nodded and turned on her heels and click-clacked back to the Stanford rep. Greer Dawson had made her appearance from the back end of the kitchen. As Audrey had predicted, the teenager was 'wearing a red and white striped shirt. The skirt matched. Her golden hair curled angelically around her diminutive heart- shaped face. I was reminded of the Breck girl. Daintily, Greer reached for a utensil and spooned a mouthful of the raspberry jam into the rep's reluctantly open mouth. Apparently, Greer didn't want me to preempt the rep in the tasting. With startling suddenness the rep's face took on the look of a two-week-old kiwi fruit.
He said in a high, uncertain voice over the expectant hush in the room, "What? No sweetener?"
Everyone immediately began bustling around, trying to make up for this faux pas. Everyone, that is, except Audrey, who leaned in to my ear and jeered, "Nanny-nanny-nana."
"Ah, well." Hank Dawson hustled forward. "This jam is still in development, I mean, this is a new batch, and Greer's just a rookie chef, after all, you can hardly judge - "
"We'll let Goldy decide," Caroline Dawson announced imperiously. "After all, she's the one Greer's been studying with."
Oh, blame it on the caterer! Well, excuse me, but the only thing Greer had studied while she was with me was whether you served pie with a spoon or a fork. Up until now, the girl had never shown even the slightest inkling of interest in rood preparation. Of course, I knew what this setup was all about. If I pretended to love the jam, I'd get a Linzertorte job in addition to the plum cake assignment, and I'd show up Miss Ferrell and poor Audrey. Not to mention the Stanford guy. If I screwed up my face in disgust, I could forget about a Stanford tailgate picnic, and I could go elsewhere to peddle my plum cake. I also had the discomforting premonition that Schulz might walk in at any moment on this ridiculous scenario. The things a caterer has to do for business.
I stalled. "Fresh spoon?"
"In there." Audrey motioned to a wooden drawer. I pulled the drawer open. It held one of those plastic four-part silverware trays. Each section bulged with utensils. I reached toward the spoon section, desperately attempting to imagine sweet jam.
"I'll get a big one," I said loudly.
But I wasn't going to taste jam that day. I should have looked more closely at the small object in the spoon section, the shiny black round form, the red hourglass on the bottom of its dark belly. But by the time I had the sense to draw back my hand, I had already been bitten by the black widow.
10
"Omigod!" I screeched.
The Dawsons, the Marenskys, Miss Ferrell, Audrey, all pressed forward with urgent queries: What happened? Are you all right? A spIder? Are you sure? Where?
I backed up, my left hand clutching my right wrist. The stinging crept up my finger and into my palm. Furiously, I thought, Why did it have to be my right hand? I backed hard into Stan Marensky. When I whirled around, he appeared stunned. Involuntary tears filled my eyes.
Hank Dawson ran to the phone, Caroline Dawson began comforting a screaming Greer, the Marenskys demanded of one another and of a gaping Brad what the hell was going on, Miss Ferrell splashed cold water over a paper towel. Audrey was on her knees, looking for the spider, which she was convinced I had shaken out onto the floor. The poor Stanford guy was standing stock-still, his mouth gaping. You could see his mind working: This place is weird.
"Uh-uh," I said to the familiar person lumbering fast into the kitchen: Tom Schulz.
"What's going on?" he demanded. He reached out for my forearm and examined the spot I was pointing to on my right index finger. It was swelling up and reddening. And it burned. I mean, my hand was on fire.
From the floor, Audrey hollered up at him: "Do something, take her to the hospital, she's been bitten by a poisonous spider, do something..."
Tom Schulz gripped my shoulders. "Goldy," he said, demanding my gaze. "Was it small and brown?"
Isaid,"Uh...uh..."
"Would you know a brown recluse?"
"It wasn't... that wasn't..."
He seemed relieved, then raised his eyebrows. He said, "Black widow?" and I nodded. To each of his questions - " Are you allergic? Do you know?" - I shook my head and gave a helpless gesture. I hadn't the slightest idea if I was allergic. How often does one get bitten by a poisonous arachnid?
Hank Dawson trundled rapidly back into the kitchen. His voice cracked when he announced, "Oh, God, all the ambulances in the entire mountain area are tied up! Is she going to be all right? Should one of us take her to a hospital? Is she gonna die? What?"
Schulz hustled me out of there. Amid the siren, lights, squeal of tires, and Schulz's inability to get his cellular phone to work, we hightailed it out of Aspen Meadow North and got onto Interstate 70. As the dun-brown hills whizzed by, I held my hand by the wrist like a tourniquet. I tried to think of the spider venom as a toxic black ink that I was willing to stay in my palm and not travel through my veins into the bloodstream.
Once we were on I-70, Schulz's cellular phone kicked in and he announced to Dispatch where he was going. Then he called the poison center. Through the crackle of interference they directed us to Denver General Hospital. It had the closest source of antivenin, they told Schulz. My hand burned.
Cursing the welling tears and my shaking voice, I asked, "Isn't this supposed to go away or something? It's not really poisonous, is it?"
He kept his eyes on the road as we whipped past a truck. "Depends. Brown recluse would've been worse."
I cleared my throat. "I have to be able to take care of Arch...." I was beginning to perspire heavily. Each time I took a breath, the bite throbbed. It was like being in labor.
Schulz said, "Feel nauseated?" I told him no. After a minute he said, "You're not going to die. I don't know why you go into that damn cafe, though. Last summer somebody pushed you into a glass case there. I'm telling you, Goldy, that place and you don't mix."
"No kidding." Perspiration trickled down my scalp. I stared at my swollen finger, now overcome with a dull, numbing pain. Strangely, I also felt a hardening pain developing between my shoulders. I took a breath. Agony. "I'm beginning to hurt allover. How'm I going to cook? Why did it have to be my right hand?"
He flicked me a look. "Why did it have to be you at all?"
Headache squeezed my temples mercilessly. I whispered, "Good thing you came along when you did."
"The posse," he said impassively. In the emergency room a bleached-blond nurse asked in a clipped voice about allergies and insurance. A dark-complected doctor asked about how long ago this had happened and what I had been doing to make the spider bite me. Some people. While the doctor examined the bite, I closed my eyes and did Lamaze breathing. The childbirth experience, like the divorce experience, can give you a reservoir of behaviors to deal with crises for the rest of your life.
The doctor finally decreed that invenomation had not been severe. I did not, he said, need to be hospitalized. He checked my vital signs, then told me to take hot baths this afternoon and tonight, to relieve the muscular pain in my back. When I asked about working, he said I might be cooking again by tomorrow, that I should see how I felt. Before he breezed out he said tonight was for rest.
"Oh, gosh," I exclaimed, suddenly remembering, "the red and white cookies for the school! I don't know if Audrey remembered them!"
"Goldy, please," said Schulz, "why not let somebody else - "
"I can't, I worked all morning on those things," I said stubbornly, and scooted off the examination table. Dizziness rocked me as soon as my feet hit the ground. Shaking his head, Schulz held my arm as we walked down the hall to a pay phone. He punched in the number of the cafe and tried to cut through the barrage of frantic queries from Hank Dawson. Finally, sighing, Schulz handed me the phone.
Hank's inquiries about whether I was okay were immediately followed by a volley of questions designed to ascertain whether I was going to sue him. No, I wouldn't contemplate legal action, I promised, if he would retrieve the platters of cookies from my van and get them over to the prep school. Hank said Audrey had left in her "usual high-strung state" and had forgotten them, but that he would make sure they were delivered. Somewhat ruefully, he added that the Stanford rep had worried aloud about hygiene conditions at the cafe. To add insult to injury, Hank informed me, the rep hadn't even stayed for a free lunch. Greer's future at Stanford didn't look so hot.
After what seemed like an interminable wait - I couldn't decide if the doctor was waiting for me to die, get better, or just disappear - the blond nurse reappeared and announced that I could go. Schulz drove me home. I felt embarrassed to have taken so much of his time, and said so.
He chuckled. "Are you kidding? Most exciting lunch I've had all week."
Audrey Coopersmith's white pickup truck sat in front of my house. Audrey got out, and with her shoulders rolled inward, marched with her long duck-walk stride up to my front porch: the first official greeter. Bless her, she had brought a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of carnations. As Schulz and I came slowly up the walk, she stood, feet apart, hands clasping the flowers behind her back. Her face seemed frozen in anxiety. Schulz still held me gently by the right elbow, but he lifted his chin and squinted his eyes, appraising Audrey.
Under his breath he said, "Have you introduced me to this Mouseketeer?"
"Don't."
When we got to the front door, Audrey wordlessly thrust the flowers at me. Then, seeing my bandaged hand, she awkwardly drew the bouquet back and blushed deeply. I mumbled a thanks and reluctantly asked her to come in. It took me a minute to remember my security code. Put it down to spider toxin fuzzing the brain. After some fumbling we all stood in my kitchen.
Audrey's eyes widened at the vases and baskets of roses, daisies, freesias, astromeria. The kitchen smelled like a flower show.
"Gosh. Guess you didn't need carnations after all."
"Of course I did, now, meet my friend," I said, and introduced her to Schulz, who was already ferreting through the freezer to dig out ice cubes for my finger. Schulz wiped his hands and courteously addressed her. I added that Audrey was a temporary helper for the catering business along with her work at the Tattered Cover. Schulz cocked his head and said he remembered that Audrey was one of the people who had helped me out the night of the Keith Andrews fatality.
She pressed her lips together. Her nostrils flared. "Well, Alfred Perkins has decided to move the location of the college advisory evenings."
"Yes," said Schulz with his Santa Claus grin, "going down to the bookstore, right? Terrific place. Will you be helping Goldy on Friday too?" Mr. Charm.
Audrey visibly relaxed and said yes to both questions. The edges of her mouth may have been starting to turn up in one of her rare grins. Then again, maybe it was my imagination. We were saved from more banter by the telephone. Schulz gestured toward it and raised his eyebrows at me, as in, Should I get it? I nodded. It was my mother, calling from New Jersey because she had just heard that there had been a big snowstorm in Colorado. I try to tell my parents, This time of year, there is always lots of snow falling somewhere in the Rockies. Why this meteorological condition is so profoundly newsworthy for the national networks is beyond me. We take the precipitation in stride; the dire announcements just worry Coloradans' relatives who live elsewhere. I wedged the phone under my chin so I could keep the ice cubes on my right hand.
"Goldy! Is that the policeman you've been seeing? Why is he at your house in the middle of the day?" So much for the snow crisis. But if I told my mother what had just happened, there would be another flood of worried questions. I had never even told her Schulz was a homicide investigator. If she learned that, all hell would break loose.
"He's just helping me out;" I told her. "I've, uh, had a bit of sickness."
My mother's high voice grew panicked. "Not morning sickness..."
"Mother. Please. It's past lunch here, thus well after morning. Not only that, but we've had only a tiny amount of snow, and Arch is due home any second - "
"Tell me again," she pressed, "is Tom Schulz somebody you knew from C.U.?" This query was designed to ascertain if Schulz was a college graduate. If she couldn't have a doctor for a son-in-law, Mom would at least go for well educated.
I said, "No, not from C.U." I wanted to say, Last night I had my emotional life changed by this guy... to- day he drove me down to the hospital and back in a life- threatening situation, you're not going to believe this, Mother, I've finally found somebody who really cares about me.... The phone slipped out of my left hand and bounced off the floor.
Her more distant voice persisted. "But he's not just... somebody you met, is he? This isn't going to be someone you just... picked up at a policeman's picnic or - ?"
I picked up the phone. "Mother. No. This is someone" - I looked at Schulz and smiled - "very special, very smart. He is unique. He knows all about china and antiques and still was able to get a job with an equal-opportunity employer."
