As Gouda as Dead

by Avery Aames

  The deputy and I bypassed the hostess’s station and headed toward the antique bar. The leader of the band announced that the upcoming song would be their last for a while, and then the band launched into a rousing rendition of “The Irish Rover.”

  Deputy O’Shea strode to a red-haired waitress at the far end of the bar. Like all the waitresses, she was fit and bright-eyed. Tim insisted that his waitresses be able to handle any person, drunk or sober. Rowdies, he called them.

  O’Shea said, “Where’s my uncle?”

  “No need to shout, Devon, my darlin’. I can hear just fine, music and all.” The waitress planted a hand on her hip. “Last I saw him, he was shuffling toward the kitchen.” She gestured with a thumb toward the kitchen door.

  “When was that?”

  “An hour ago. Maybe more. Why?”

  “You’re not concerned that he’s gone?”

  “Why would I be? He often leaves and comes back at close of business. He takes walks. It’s good for his heart, he says.” She thumped hers. “I figure he stayed out for some fresh air. I wouldn’t blame him. It’s hot in here.” She loosened the red bandanna around her neck and mopped her forehead with a white bar towel. “I hate when we crank up the heat because it’s cold outside. People dress warmly. There’s no—”

  “Hush.” O’Shea held up a hand.

  The waitress grimaced. “What’s eating you?”

  “Tim called me.”

  “That’s because you’re his favorite nephew. He always has a soft spot—”

  “Stop talking. Listen to me. I’m not kidding. I think something might be wrong.”

  The waitress, realizing O’Shea was earnest, tried to apologize, but O’Shea didn’t respond. He marched ahead. I trailed him through the kitchen to the rear of the restaurant.

  “Has anyone seen Tim in the last hour?” O’Shea said to the kitchen staff. He pushed through the back door. I peeked over his shoulder. The alley was empty. No sign of Tim. O’Shea made a U-turn. “Anybody?”

  “He went outside a while ago,” said a female sous-chef who was in her mid-thirties, about the same age I was. She continued to stuff potato skins with whipped potatoes. “I don’t remember seeing him return. He likes to—”

  “Stroll,” a whip-thin waitress said while filling a basket with Parmesan breadsticks.

  “Did somebody drop a tray of glassware in the last hour?” O’Shea asked.

  A timid dishwasher in a dirty white apron raised a hand. “Me.”

  “That means you were outside when my uncle was calling me on his cell phone.”

  “No.”

  “I heard the glasses shatter.”

  The guy blanched. “I mean, yes, I dropped the glasses, but I didn’t see Tim. I wasn’t outside. I was just inside the door.”

  “Where was Tim?”

  “I don’t know. We had the door wedged open. We just needed some air. I . . .” He shrugged. “I was clumsy. I think I heard him crank up his truck, though. It’s got that sputter sound. Like it needs a good tune-up.”

  Tim had owned his truck since high school. He loved working on the engine. That didn’t mean he was any good at fixing the darned thing.

  “Did you see him drive off?” O’Shea asked.

  “No. I just heard—”

  O’Shea didn’t wait for the rest of the guy’s explanation. He strode back into the pub and stood with his hands on his hips while scanning the place. Picking a target, he stomped off to talk to a pair of regulars.

  Believing that the more news we gleaned the better—especially before anyone left the bar—I chose another twosome to question. Violet Walden, the woman who ran the upscale Violet’s Victoriana Inn, was sitting with Paige Alpaugh, a pert, forty-something single mom who reminded me of a show pony with her big jaw, big teeth, and plume of caramel-colored hair.

  With no introduction, I slid onto one of the chairs at the women’s table and said, “Hey, Violet, I’ve got that Fromager d’Affinois you like in stock.” The cheese was a delicious French double-cream, similar to Brie in taste, and in my personal opinion, creamier.

  “Mmm.” Violet, also mid-thirties, who had a classically pretty face but dyed her shoulder-length hair a ridiculous marshmallow-blonde color, hummed without looking up. She was rummaging in her purse. Out came a lozenge, a folded piece of blue paper, a receipt, and a pack of cigarettes. The latter must have been what she was after. She jammed everything but the pack of cigarettes back inside and began tap-tapping the pack on the tabletop. “I’m off of cheese for a while.”

  “Why?” I assessed her. Had she lost weight? Despite the fact that her B&B offered spa cuisine, Violet usually appeared thick. Perhaps it was because she wore clothes that were one size too small. Tonight, however, she looked downright trim in her chic sweater and jeans. “Has Paige ordered you to change your eating habits?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Paige said, holding her hand up like a Girl Scout ready to take the pledge. “I adore cheese.” A divorcee and mother of two, Paige made her living as a farmer. She was also a foodie blogger who wrote passionately and tirelessly about a well-balanced diet. I couldn’t get over the amount of hours she put into her blog. She posted recipes daily and showed every step of preparation. Each post had a chatty story and sometimes a moral or warning to go along with it. “Dairy in the diet is a good thing,” she said. “It’s the sugar you have to watch out for. Candy, sodas, pastries.”

  “Amen.” Violet gestured with a V sign.

  “And the cigarettes.”

  Violet threw Paige a nasty look.

  “Eat right and you’ll make pretty babies,” Paige went on with authority. I was sure she believed what she professed, but, honestly, genetics had a lot to do with beautiful offspring. Paige’s eldest daughter had turned out as attractive as Paige; the younger girl had her father’s features.

  I turned to Violet. “Are you pregnant?”

  “No. I’m single. I would never—” She huffed. “I hope to have kids one day. Soon. Paige is just being . . . Paige. In other words, annoying.”

  Paige hiccupped a laugh.

  “What’s up with the deputy?” Violet eyed O’Shea. “He looks like he’s on the warpath.”

  “His uncle Tim called him.”

  “So?” Violet, who was a head taller than I was, shimmied in her chair until she was sitting straight and, I was pretty sure, could look down on me. I wouldn’t necessarily call her controlling, simply in need of the upper hand.

  “He left a message, which sounded urgent,” I said. “But the reception cut in and out, so the deputy didn’t catch all of Tim’s message. Now he can’t reach him.”

  “Typical around here,” Paige said. “All the rolling hills. What we need is a good cell tower.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Violet gave her the evil eye. “Talk Councilwoman Bell into that. Can you spell eyesore on her precious landscape?”

  Not only did the councilwoman dislike noise in our fair town; she disliked any change whatsoever. She owned Memory Lane Collectibles, which was wedged in between the pastry shop and the Revue Movie Theater. Her shop reflected who she was: a woman who wanted things in her life and town to remain quaint and unchanged.

  “If she had her way,” Violet went on, “we would return to pioneer days, as long as the showers and plumbing worked.”

  Paige let out with a high-pitched whinny of a laugh.

  “Have either of you seen Tim?” I asked.

  “The last I saw, he was pouring a pitcher of beer for that table over there.” Paige pointed to a group of four. I recognized them. They were California tourists who had come into The Cheese Shop earlier and had bought out my entire assortment of New England cheeses.

  “When was that?”

  “Over an hour ago.” She snorted again. “We’ve been here awhile.” She ran a finger along the rim of her glass of
beer. “I’m nursing my one and only. A girl’s got to party, just not too hearty, don’t you think?”

  “How about you, Violet?” I noticed the pack of cigarettes she was toying with. A cigarette was missing. Perhaps holding the pack helped her over the hurdle of needing to smoke another. I knew a man who would suck on an unlit cigar all day. Years ago, I’d suggested trying a lollipop, but he wouldn’t go for it. I said, “Did you happen to see Tim when you went outside for a smoke?”

  “Aha!” Paige tsked. “That’s why you snuck out.” The disappointment in her tone was heavy-handed.

  “No. I mean, yes. I had one. Only one.” Violet tucked the cigarettes into her purse, and then leaned toward me. “I’m trying to quit.”

  I said, “The kitchen staff said Tim went out back, by the garbage.”

  “I wasn’t out there. I was in the parking lot.”

  “So you didn’t see Tim.”

  “No.” Violet tapped her manicured fingertips on the table.

  “One of the staff thought Tim might have driven off in his truck.”

  Violet’s eyes brightened. “You know, now that you mention it, I did see Tim. In his truck. Driving away. And I noticed someone else. Jawbone.”

  “Jones?”

  “How many Jawbones can there be?” she quipped.

  The first time I’d met Jawbone Jones, who was the owner of a gun shop, I felt scared down to my toes. His appearance wasn’t the typical look people sported in Providence. He shaved his head, he wore a goatee, and he had the word king tattooed on his neck. However, over the past year, I had grown to enjoy him. He was a true aficionado of hard cheeses. I remembered how he would wax rhapsodic about Vermont Shepherd Invierno cheese, a sublime mixture of cow and sheep’s milk with a mushroomy taste. He would also purchase a huge portion of Jordan’s Pace Hill Farm Double-cream Gouda whenever he came in; he said it was his mother’s favorite.

  “Why did you notice him?” I asked.

  “Because he peeled rubber and sped off in his truck, too. Maybe he was chasing Tim.”

  “Which way did Jawbone go?”

  “He made a right turn.”

  That would mean he had headed north.

  “Did Tim drive the same direction?”

  “I think so.” Violet linked a finger into the hair at the nape of her neck and twirled. “You know, Ray Pfeiffer might have seen him, too.” Ray was the latest owner of The Ice Castle, the rink where I’d learned to skate ages ago. “He was outside fetching something from his car.” She gazed toward the ceiling, as if picturing something in her mind. “Jawbone was definitely in a hurry.”

  I scanned the pub. “Is Ray still here?” Maybe he had seen more than Violet had.

  “No, he and Dottie left a while ago. You know how it is with Dottie. She’s got to hit the hay so she can get up early to make all those pastries of hers.”

  “Those sugar-loaded fattening pastries,” Paige said under her breath.

  Those delicious pastries, I thought, but kept my opinion to myself. Dottie was the owner of the Providence Pâtisserie, from which our shop purchased many of the breads we used to make sandwiches.

  I hurried to O’Shea and tapped him on the shoulder. He whipped around.

  I apologized to the pub regulars for interrupting. “Violet saw Jawbone Jones tear off in his truck. He headed north. She wasn’t sure, but he might have been chasing your uncle. You said Tim wanted to talk to Urso. Maybe he drove to Pace Hill Farm. That’s where Urso is. At Jordan’s bachelor party.”

  CHAPTER

  O’Shea raced out of the pub and nearly flew to the precinct parking lot. I made it into the passenger seat of his SUV seconds before he tore off. As he zoomed toward the farmland in the north part of the county, I pulled my cell phone from my purse. Following the first wild turn, I was forced to grab the bar above the passenger side window. So much for being able to dial Urso. Where had the deputy learned to drive that way? Had he trained with NASCAR racers, or had the academy taught him the skill? His teeth looked cemented together.

  “Deputy, please slow down.”

  “Roads are dry.”

  “We can barely see the pavement.” The sky was pitch-black. There was no moon. The pastoral areas beyond the town’s main roads weren’t lined with street lamps. “All it takes is a patch of ice kicked up by one of the sleighs to make us spin out.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Easy for him to say. My fingers were tingling from gripping the bar. I didn’t dare let go.

  We rounded the bend by Windmill Crest. The ancient windmill at the top was doing its level best to fight off a blustery wind. A Camaro whizzed past us. I couldn’t see the driver’s face, but I recognized the car. Its owner was a young man who worked at Providence Pâtisserie and often delivered the bread we purchased. Right after he zoomed past, we came upon a sleigh moving along the side of the road, just beyond the buildup of old snow.

  “Do you see the sleigh, Devon?” Saying his name made me think of the bachelorette party and the way the girls had hooted after uttering his name. How long ago that seemed.

  “I’m not blind.”

  He slowed ever so slightly as he passed the sleigh and then resumed speed. I glanced back. The couple, draped in blankets and lit by the glow of hurricane candles mounted on either side of the driver, looked happy and totally oblivious to our plight. If only I was riding in a sleigh with Jordan and not a partner on this wild adventure.

  “There’s the Bozzuto Winery,” I said. Torchlights lit the winding road that led to the winery. It looked so inviting. All week long, expressly for the Lovers Trail festivities, the winery was having a wine tasting, twice daily and once nightly. “Pace Hill is beyond.”

  “I know,” he grumbled.

  Don’t shoot the messenger, I thought.

  Pace Hill Farm is an artisanal farm that raises its own cows and turns out about eighty thousand pounds of cheese a year. Seasonally, tourists are encouraged to walk the hiking trails and visit the cheese-making facility. On a typical day in spring, the drive to Pace Hill Farm would have taken us through brilliant green swales and knolls dotted with oak. We would have smelled the sweet aroma of grass wafting through the open windows of the SUV, but today, following a week of snow and temperatures hovering in the teens, all we smelled was the car’s interior, and all we saw were white hills and dales framed by the dark of night.

  The deputy hit the brakes and made a sharp turn onto the road leading to the farm.

  “What if your uncle didn’t come here?” I asked. “What if he thought better about whatever he was setting out to do and went home? We should have gone there first.”

  “But we didn’t. We’re here.”

  “I’ll try to call him.”

  “His cell phone glitched out. Don’t you remember?” Venom filled the deputy’s tone.

  I refused to buckle. “What’s his home number?”

  O’Shea rattled it off. I dared to release my hold on the overhead bar and dialed Tim’s number, but it didn’t ring through. I glanced at the readout; my cell phone had lost its signal. I reflected on the conversation with Violet and Paige back at the pub. We really could use another cell tower in the area. What if we decorated it with those fake trees to mask it? Would Councilwoman Bell get on board then?

  My cell phone trilled. Heartened, hoping it was Tim—maybe he’d glimpsed that I had called him at home, and he was returning the call; crisis averted—I answered.

  “Charlotte,” Rebecca said. She sounded out of breath. “Where are— Where’s Dev—” Her words kept cutting off. A wheeze of what sounded like air but had to be electric static echoed in the background. “I’m at the pub with Delil— We came looking for— We got worr— What’s going on?”

  My insides felt cinched tight. “We’re on our way to Jordan’s place. Urso’s there.”

  “Why do yo
u—” More dead air. “Urso?”

  “I can barely hear you, and I can’t talk now. Tim’s missing. I’m hanging up. I’ll call you when we learn something. It’s probably nothing.” Another icier-than-all-get-out chill coursed through me. I chalked it up to me channeling the deputy’s worry. Nothing was wrong. Nothing.

  At the top of the drive, O’Shea swerved around the many cars and trucks parked in front of Jordan’s ranch-style house and screeched to a halt. We bounded from the SUV at the same time.

  “Look!” He pointed. “That’s my uncle’s truck.”

  At the far left of the driveway, a blue 1995 Chevy Silverado stood at an angle. I remembered when Tim bought it. I was still in high school, but my grandparents took me into the pub for a burger. Tim was behind the bar bragging about the truck and how he was going to rebuild the engine and upgrade the radiator from a single-core to a three-core because the lesser wasn’t good for towing. Like he towed anything, his conversation mate had teased. Now I recalled a more recent boast by Tim; the Silverado had over two hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. He claimed it was the most reliable buddy a guy could ever have. My grandfather said Tim would make a great spokesman for Chevrolet.

  O’Shea darted to the truck and peeked through the driver window. “He’s not inside. Follow me.”

  Not one to argue with the law—okay, sometimes I did, but I wasn’t about to tonight—I obeyed.

  O’Shea sprinted to the main house and up the triplet of steps to the porch. He lifted the lion’s-head-shaped doorknocker and rammed it against the wood. From inside, I heard men laughing.

  When Delilah and Meredith had kidnapped me, they hadn’t let me grab my gloves. I rubbed my fingers to warm them. Not good enough. I cupped them and blew into them. “Deputy . . . Devon . . .” Were my teeth chattering? “I think we might be overreacting. I’ll bet your uncle came here to join the party. He and Jordan are friends. Maybe he was trying to tell you he saw an invitation. He forgot to RSVP. He was going to call Urso to tell him he was on his way. Maybe this party was a surprise like mine was. Maybe—”