The Last Resort (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (7 page)

“He just laughed. One of those strange laughs. Fran was the one who got mad. She told Suzanne she could leave Spa Santé if she felt that way. But then Bradley pulled Fran away and calmed her down. And I persuaded Suzanne to leave it alone, at least for the moment. So it all blew over.”

“Was this last night?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. His eyes were wide now. “But, Kate, you don’t kill over an insult.”

“I don’t. Maybe you don’t. But I won’t speak for anyone else,” I said. “Why did Suzanne call him a loony anyway?”

“Oh, he was into one of his philosophical raps—his way of coming on to her, I think—and Suzanne wasn’t interested.”

“A man spurned,” I said.

“Maybe,” he agreed reluctantly.

“What else?” I asked. “Tell me more about Bradley.”

“Well, he really is bright. Fran says he’s a brilliant writer. And he’s a great cook. Curried vegetable-nut loaf. Brazilian greens and beans. And he makes a tofu-tahini spread that—”

I cut him off. “I don’t mean more about his cooking skills.” The talk of food had stirred my gastric juices. My last “meal” of vegetable juice and nuts was too long past. My stomach began growling, then pleading.

Craig heard the sound. “I didn’t even think to ask if you’d eaten,” he said. He looked at me with concern. “You need some food, don’t you? Don’t worry. Fran will fix you up a snack.”

I opened my mouth to object and then thought better of it. Fran. How far would she go to protect the man she loved? It might be interesting to talk to her.

“I’d love a snack,” I said.

Once more we walked to the main building that housed the dining hall. We had reached the gravel parking lot when Craig stopped in his tracks. I could feel him go stiff with tension without even touching him. I followed his eyes to the porch.

The man who stood there looked like Santa Claus in disguise. He was white-haired, big-bellied and rosy-cheeked, but he didn’t wear a beard. And, instead of the familiar red suit, he wore a short-sleeved dress shirt tucked tightly beneath his belly into sagging, navy blue pants. His small blue eyes glinted with jollity under tufted white eyebrows. Or was it suspicion? I couldn’t tell. Whichever it was, he was certainly watching us attentively.

I turned to Craig. His skin tone had gone beyond white into grey. “Chief Orlandi, Delores Police Department,” he whispered.

I looked back at the man on the porch. Santa Orlandi, the police chief. He walked down the stairs to meet us.

“I’ll just bet you’re Mrs. Jasper,” Orlandi said sociably. I nodded my confirmation. I wasn’t up to correcting him. “The great detective of the north country, I hear,’ he added in a friendly tone, which didn’t quite rob his words of their sarcasm.

Damn. I threw a glare in Craig’s direction. But it was no use aiming my wrath at him. He was too frightened to notice anyone but the police chief. He stared at Orlandi, mesmerized and unmoving, except for a stray muscle twitching in his cheek.

“Well, ma’am,” continued Chief Orlandi, his blue eyes absorbing both Craig and myself. “I could most likely benefit from your vast experience, but I’m a little too busy today.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Somehow, I didn’t want to talk to this man. My relief was premature. “There’s always tomorrow, though,” he said. “We’ll have a nice little talk then. Just the two of us.”

“Nice meeting you, ma’am,” he finished, and extended a plump hand for shaking. His grip was surprisingly gentle, and brief. He dropped my hand after one squeeze, and smiled. “I look forward to our talk tomorrow,” he added.

Then Orlandi turned to walk away. After he had taken a few steps I heard the tension come whooshing out of Craig’s body in one long sigh. Chief Orlandi turned back to us. “And I’ll be talking to you again, too,
Mr
. Jasper,” he said to Craig. “Soon.” Then he walked away, his steps unhurried.

Craig waited until Chief Orlandi had driven out the gates before speaking. Then he let fly.

“I told you he thinks I did it!” he wailed. “He’ll keep questioning me and questioning me. He’ll never believe me—”

I interrupted him abruptly. “You need some rest.” I couldn’t take another bout of hysteria.

“What?” he asked, blinking, cheated of the momentum of his tirade.

“Rest,” I said, in the tone that one tells a dog to “sit.”

“Rest,” he repeated. “You’re right. I need rest.” He spoke slowly and carefully. “Thank you. I’ll go lie down now.”

As I watched Craig move down the dirt path like a sleepwalker, I found myself longing for Wayne’s soothing presence. Would Wayne know how to handle all this? Would it even be appropriate to ask my current lover to support me in supporting my ex-husband? My ex-husband who probably didn’t even know his “ex” status? I shook my head and walked up the stairs and across the porch. It was too complicated to even consider.

Ruth Ziegler was the only one left in the dining hall. She sat at one of the tables near the windows, her frizzy grey head bent over a yellow notepad. I could hear her muttering as she wrote, deep in thought. I watched her and wondered. Should I ask her about Bradley? She was a psychologist. Or ask her about Craig, for that matter?

I walked to her table. She looked up at me with an unfocused smile on her wise gypsy face.

“Fran’s in the kitchen,” she said. “How do you like
Letting Grief Go
?”

“You mean, as a philosophy of life?” I ventured.

“No, no.” She laughed a vibrant, uninhibited laugh. “As a title. All this talk of death and loss has given me the idea for my next book. But I like to start with a title. It’s important. My first book was
The Things We Do For Love
. My second,
Being Your Own Fairy Godmother
.”

“I think I’ve seen that one,” I said. “Next to
Women Who Love Too Much
.”

“You see,” she bubbled, her black button-eyes gleaming. “You remembered the title.”

I nodded, glad to have made her happy. The simplicity of her enjoyment was catching.

“Now I want to write something about the importance of letting go. Of grief, death, the loss of love.” She looked down at her yellow pad. “Terry thinks politics will feed the hungry. And maybe they will. But will they heal the broken heart?”

“That’s almost a good title,” I said.

“
Who Will Heal the Broken Heart
?” She pondered. “Close, very close.” She bent her head over her yellow pad and began to write again.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said quietly.

She nodded, her eyes glued to her notepad, and reached out her left hand blindly to squeeze mine. “Thank you, my dear,” she murmured.

I tiptoed across the hall to the three-quarter swinging kitchen doors, keeping quiet for the sake of Ruth’s concentration. Then I peeked over the top of the doors. Fran was there alone, chopping carrots rhythmically at a large butcher-block worktable in the center of the kitchen. Such a soft woman, I thought. But she wielded her knife with strength enough. Chop, chop, chop. She scooped up the pile and threw it into a giant, simmering stewpot. The spicy aromas that came from the pot made my mouth water. She grabbed a bunch of spinach and went to the sink to wash it.

“May I come in?” I asked.

Fran jumped, spraying water from the wet spinach onto the tiled floor as she did. I watched her eyes go round with fright as she raised her arm defensively in front of her face. Then she recognized me.

“Oh, Kate,” she said, her eyes returning to their natural delicate shape once more. “What a start you gave me!” She dropped her arm and took a breath. Whom had she been expecting?

“Sorry,” I said. “Shouldn’t have snuck up on you that way.”

“No,” she replied. “It’s all my fault. I get so wrapped up in my thoughts, I forget the outside world.” She giggled nervously. “Silly of me.” She looked up at me expectantly, too polite to ask me directly what the hell I wanted.

“Craig said maybe you could fix me a snack,” I explained.

“A snack?” she asked brightly, as if she had forgotten the meaning of the word.

Then, suddenly, she came to life. “Oh, a snack! Of course, I can. Let’s see, we’ve got carrot sticks, celery, cucumber, jicama.” She pulled a platter of raw vegetables out of the refrigerator. “And tofu-tahini spread. Orange-mustard dip.” She went into the refrigerator again. “How about some sliced melon? Peaches? I don’t have any fresh bread, but if you don’t mind yesterday’s.” A brown loaf emerged. “With all this fuss, I didn’t bake any this morning, but Avery went into town for some—”

“That’s fine,” I assured her, before the whole contents of the kitchen ended up on her worktable.

In a matter of a minute she had arranged all of the goodies on a plate for me and gone back to her work. I pulled up a chair, dipped a carrot stick into the orange-mustard dip and crunched.

“Craig tells me Bradley is a master vegetarian chef,” I mumbled through a mouthful of sweet and sour carrot.

She looked up from trimming the spinach and beamed a smile at me. “Oh, he is,” she said in a breathless tone. “I’ll bet he could get a job as a chef anywhere now. And his recipes are really healthful. I’m so glad Craig appreciates them. Not everyone does, you know.” She shook her knife to emphasize her displeasure. “Bradley says most American palates are numb from salt and sugar and grease.”

I nodded my agreement and spread tofu-tahini on the bread. A bite told me it was great. Maybe Bradley deserved his master chef reputation.

“Of course, he’s really a writer.” Fran said the word
writer
with the kind of reverence most people reserve for God. “He’s working on a novel. A really important one. One that will integrate the great moral philosophies of East and West.” She looked up at me, her eyes requesting a response.

“Sounds interesting,” I garbled dutifully through my bread.

“Oh, it is. Though some of it’s a little beyond me. Writers are different, you know. Some people just can’t understand that.” Did she mean people like Suzanne? I wondered. “Writers are on a different plane than the rest of us.” I nodded before taking a bite of jicama. Bradley was definitely on another plane.

“Bradley’s a twin as well as a writer,” Fran said, tossing chopped spinach into the simmering pot. “I think being a twin makes you more sensitive.” She paused and wiped her hands on a towel. “And his twin died. Ursula was her name. I never met her.” Pulling a bag of mushrooms out of the refrigerator, she added, “She committed suicide, when they were eighteen.”

“Ursula?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. Bradley says it was like half of him died. Can you imagine? I can’t. But I was an only child. My dad was a G.I. Married my mom after the war was over. My mom was Hawaiian, Japanese really, but born in Hawaii, you know.” What a faucet Fran was. Turn her on and she just kept talking. Like a lot of people I’ve met on buses. I bit into the peach and sat back to listen.

“My dad died when I was little. Mom bought this cute motel, the Hawaii Star, and ran it. I helped out there until I left home. So, I know a lot about the hotel business.” I watched her chopping the mushrooms. I’ll bet she did. If nothing else, she was incredibly efficient.

“When I saw this spa, I knew it was perfect. Mom died last year. Left me enough money to buy Spa Santé and fix it up. And, the best part is, Bradley doesn’t have to work a regular job anymore. His bosses never appreciated him anyway. But here, he can cook and help with other chores, and write when he feels like it. And Avery Haskell is a big help. I don’t know what we’d do without him.”

“How’d you find Haskell?” I asked.

“Oh, that was really neat. We didn’t even need to put an ad in the paper. He just showed up a couple of weeks after we bought the spa. Said it looked like we could use a hand.” She threw the chopped mushrooms in the pot, then giggled. “Boy, did we ever! This place was a wreck. It was originally built in the twenties, by this German businessman, Otto Keller. He had had arthritis and swore the natural springs here had cured it. So he built the spa.”

She pulled another huge pot out of the refrigerator. How could she lift it? It was as big as she was. I moved to help her but she wrestled it onto the stove before I could. Maybe she used her own exercise equipment.

“So, anyway,” she continued, not even out of breath, “Otto Keller owned the spa until he died in 1939. It was
the
place to vacation. Lots of celebrities came here. Charlie Chaplin visited. Keller even built a small theater here. We still use it for videos, but its not like it used to be. After Otto died, his relatives weren’t interested in running the spa anymore. They didn’t need to. They had plenty of money from his other businesses. So it sat here, run-down and neglected, until The Inner Light Foundation bought it.”

“The paisley people?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she answered. She aimed a guilty look at me. “I hope you don’t mind the wallpaper.”

“No, it’s fine.” I lied automatically and just as automatically regretted it. It wouldn’t be the first time my knee-jerk manners had undone me. I was trying to think of a way to retract the lie, when the swinging doors creaked open behind me.

Avery Haskell strode in silently, carrying two grocery bags. He noted my presence with a curt nod.

“Did you get the bread?” Fran asked him.

“Eight sprouted wheat. Two rye,” he answered briefly. He began unloading the bags.