by J. L. Newton
* * *
I opened the front door, and stepped into a cloud of white. The entire street had disappeared in a blanket of tule fog. It was early for the fog—it usually came in November—and my heart tumbled in my chest. I always got lost in it, even on familiar streets, and Palomino Fields was not familiar. Shaken by the imbroglio at Lorna’s house, I climbed into my car, turned on the low beams, and tried to remember how I’d come. Ten minutes later, I found myself driving on the freeway, which I hadn’t meant to do. The fog had blinded me and instead of going straight, I’d ended up on the highway, heading east. Oh hell, I thought. How did I do this? My night vision was poor as it was, and in this shrouding whiteness what little intuition for direction I possessed had been thrown entirely off.
When the fog thinned for an instant, revealing an exit sign, I got off and found the entrance for going west, but ten minutes later the cloud of fog grew dense and suddenly the road felt different beneath my tires. With a heart like desert rock, I sensed I was no longer on the freeway. I’d drifted onto an exit lane without knowing it and was driving on one of the country roads that divided large stretches of open field. Even by day these roads looked all the same and the tiny signs that marked them were hard to read. I had driven them only twice when the sun was shining, and now, in the milky mist, I felt at sea.
What if I couldn’t find my way back? What would I do? In the snowy vapor I couldn’t see if there were any houses on this road. I tried to calm myself by thinking that I could always pull over, lock all the doors, and stay in my car until the fog lifted, although the idea of sleeping in a car all night on a lonely country road did not appeal. I drove to the shoulder of the road to think, and then in the rearview mirror I saw a pair of headlights. Perhaps I can signal this driver and ask directions. I rolled down the window halfway and was poised to honk when a blue van drove slowly by in the white air. My throat closed up, and with a screech of tires I turned my car back onto the road and headed back in the direction from which I’d just come.
A vein throbbed in my neck as I drove into the ghostly bank ahead. I felt lost the way I’d felt as a child with absent parents. Despite my years of therapy, that lost little girl had a habit of reappearing in times of stress, and she was here now as I drove blindly down an unknown road. I really was lost, not just on this road but in my struggle to save the programs and in my efforts to separate myself and my colleagues from the poisoning. I thought of crying, but what good would crying do? It would only make me feel less powerful. Instead, I barreled on and on into the vaporous sea until, out of nowhere, a dimly lit green sign appeared barely visible in the mist—Arborville, 3 miles.
Relief drenched me. I had gotten back on the freeway as mysteriously as I had gotten off. Was it a matter of bad, and then good, luck? Was it a metaphor for how random one’s life really was, for how small one was in the midst of massive forces? Or was finding my way again a sign of greater clarity to come? My attempts so far to unravel the mystery of Peter’s poisoning had gotten nowhere and now I was falling apart every time I saw a blue van. The poisoning had hijacked my life. I needed answers soon. Maybe my colleagues, with whom I was dining the following evening, might have some new ideas. I desperately hoped the phone would not disturb my rest again that night.
But at 3:00 a.m., its ringing jolted me from sleep with the force of a skidding car. I decided not to answer it but lay there for an hour while the throbbing of my heart slowly subsided.
* * *
La Salvia Bianca, which meant white sage in Italian, was a low, white stucco building with a red tile roof and a portico in front sustained by a series of brown posts. A large courtyard across from the entrance held tables and umbrellas, and in summer it was further shaded by large trees. Two terracotta fountains bubbled in the middle of the courtyard, and long strings of lights outlined and crisscrossed the square. The place was magical on a warm summer’s evening. I remembered how I’d dined with my Women’s Studies colleagues last June, before I’d become a suspect in a case of attempted murder, before I’d gotten calls in the middle of the night. I’d been carefree then. Now I was full of troubles, and October had given a bite to the evening air. I looked forward to seeing the faces of my friends.
Every now and then, I and some of my Women’s Studies colleagues went out to dinner for the pure pleasure of being together—away from the university and from the program’s struggles to maintain itself during the repeated cuts. It restored us, and we were lucky that we enjoyed each other’s company. Not all women’s studies programs were so fortunate, and even our own had a new hire who was troubling the waters. Fortunately, she was good at getting grants and was away for the entire quarter.
Tonight a group of us had decided to treat ourselves by going to our favorite restaurant, one of the few places in town that still had tablecloths and candles. It was quiet and there was a table that seated six. The inside of the restaurant had a nineteenth-century European feel. In the candlelight one could just see that the walls were painted red. Red, hand-embroidered drapes framed the windows, and on every table a slender vase held a single flower, this night a spiky white chrysanthemum. I seated myself in the middle of the long table, with my back comfortably to the wall, and awaited my colleagues. La Salvia Bianca was expensive, but its soothing warmth and richness were just what I needed after the disastrous evening at Lorna’s the night before and then my hour of driving, lost and frightened, in the fog. La Salvia Bianca reminded me of a restaurant Miriam and I had once visited.
Ursula Romanoff, my most candid colleague, arrived first.
“Em-i-ly!” Ursula had slid over from the Russian department several years ago.
A woman with beautifully coifed blonde hair, she dressed herself like a piece of modern art—black tights, a long red sweater, yellow earrings and a matching clunky necklace. How does she do that? I wondered. I often felt barely pulled together. Helena and Grace came next along with Callie Jones, my newest colleague, a young woman with a face as fresh and as open as that of a brown gerbera daisy. We took turns hugging hello. They were like family and I could feel myself unwinding.
“What are you having?” Ursula inquired.
“The usual.”
“Me too.” We both ordered the lamb shank with garlic roasted potatoes and a house salad that came encased in an edible parmesan bowl. Ursula ordered a bottle of pinot noir for the table, and we settled in.
“I have a question for you,” I said. “You’ve all heard about my corn bread being involved in the attempted murder.”
“Who hasn’t?” Ursula said.
It was true that news of my unfortunate baking project was now known all over campus.
“The first time the police came to me, I think they knew I was the one who made the corn bread? How would they have known that?”
“Would Frank have told them?” Grace asked.
“He didn’t know who made the corn bread. I don’t think anyone at the reception really noticed what anyone brought. We just put our dishes on a table.”
Callie wrinkled her forehead, half closing her large, fawn-like eyes. Helena moved her knife closer to the spoon as if rearranging the silverware might realign her thoughts.
“I don’t think that’s a question we can answer,” Ursula replied. “What else have you got?”
“The police came to question me for a second time and to tell me that the ingredients the lab found in the piece of corn bread were the same ingredients I’d use in my special recipe. The one with caramelized onion and goat cheese.”
“Gee,” said Callie, “I make that corn bread too. Remember, you gave me the recipe last spring.” Callie and I shared an interest in food.
“I’d forgotten that.” I paused to consider. “So this recipe is in greater circulation than I thought. Okay, then there’s even more of a puzzle.” I pushed my limp hair behind my ears in an effort to somehow clarify the situation. Callie was lucky. She could wear her hair cut close to her scalp and it only made her eyes look more dr
amatic.
The server delivered warm bread and parsley oil for dipping.
“There are some other things,” I continued. “Everyone who’s been questioned was at the panel on GMOs and three of us were also at the reception. And the suspects are either feminist women or men of color.”
“The usual suspects,” Ursula said. She dipped a piece of bread in the fragrant oil. “My God this oil is great!”
Several others began tearing and dipping their bread as well.
“But I don’t think these police take that attitude. The officers who questioned me were a black woman and a Latina.”
“Let’s think this through,” Helena said. She took out a small pad of paper from her purse. “Okay, four people we know of were questioned: Frank Walker, Juan Carlos Vega, Tess Ryan, and you. Three of you were at both the panel and the reception, and Tess was on the panel. Three on the panel publically disagreed with Peter about corporate patents. And those three were questioned. Who would have told the police about the panel?”
“Anyone who was there of course or anyone close to Peter, like his wife, someone he would confide in,” Callie said. Callie always had some insight about relationships. Although she and I were many years apart in age, we’d become girlfriends, talking with and e-mailing each other about our experiences with men. We’d both been looking for a partner.
“Look,” Ursula sopped up more of the green-flecked oil, “someone close to Peter may have suggested names to the police, but what does that prove? It doesn’t mean the person gave him poisoned corn bread.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Maybe there’s no point in trying to figure out what logic the police are pursuing. Let’s try to figure out who had a motive.”
The server delivered salads.
“I wonder if the police have cleared Peter’s wife,” I said. “She’d have a motive from everything I understand about Peter, and what if she had someone working with her?” I thought about Juan Carlos’s blush. I didn’t want to suspect Juan Carlos, a man from my own hometown, a man who belonged to the network of my Native American and Chicana/o Studies colleagues, a man whose philosophy of life would appear to rule out harming another being, but still I didn’t want to be naïve.
“A lover might have had a motive,” Helena said. Grace and I exchanged glances. I knew better than to mention Mei Lee.
“There’s a graduate student, Jenny Archer,” I said. “He might have been involved with her. She might have known about the panel. She might have attended the panel too, although I didn’t know her then and don’t remember.”
“Look her up.” Ursula shrugged her shoulders. “What’ve you got to lose?”
“There’s also Save the Fields,” Helena added. “They’ve been active. Someone followed Tess home two weeks ago, and today there was a bomb threat directed at a lab.”
“Tess told me they drove a dark blue van. I’ve been running into that van or into vans that look a lot like it. It’s really putting me on edge.”
“Emily, this is a family town. There are lots and lots of vans, many of them dark blue,” Ursula reminded me.
“That’s true too.” Ursula’s common sense grounded me. The server had arrived with our dishes. Ursula cut into her lamb with a decisive motion, and I pulled at mine with a fork. The lamb was tender and falling off the bone. For a while, the only sounds were those of eating and drinking. The tender lamb, and garlicky potatoes, the mellow pinot noir—this was California after all—and the reassuring sounds of my colleagues eating their cioppino and seafood lasagna soothed me, softening the memories of Lorna’s maneuvering, my farce with the flower vase, and then my helplessness in the fog.
During dinner we discussed Lorna’s resistance to the proposed union of the five programs.
“Being united would mean so much to us as a community,” Grace said. “It’s not just a matter of being strong. We’d draw closer to each other. It would enrich our lives.” Grace was always alert to ways of caring for others. It was a way of being she carried on in other parts of her existence. When I had first visited her small home on the greenbelt, I had observed five cats, two perched on counters, three curled up on a sofa. Over time, the number of cats had increased exponentially, as Grace became more deeply involved in a network of women who rescued cats and kittens from bad owners and painful circumstances. Grace frequently offered her most special cats to me, but Sadie, who’d had a bad experience with a calico while only a puppy, would never have stood for sharing quarters with a feline.
It was only after we’d finished our entrees and were contemplating dessert, that I described my encounter with Ned Goldman, the butterfly man. “I actually thought he might have been the one the police were searching for, and maybe he was. Maybe the police and I both assumed that Ned was a member of Save the Fields, though now that I think about it, I’m sure vandals don’t look so obvious.”
“No,” Grace said. “There’s an old saying, ‘the sea can’t be measured with a bucket.’”
“Ned Goldman,” Helena said, “is not likely to have poisoned anyone, though did you know that Furadan, the poison the police now say they found, is suspected of interrupting the life cycle of monarch butterflies? Ned’s an expert on monarchs.”
There were still way too many threads, but having dinner with my colleagues had given me energy and new direction. I would investigate Collin Morehead, but I would also find out more about the women in Peter’s life.
Blue Corn Blini with Smoked Salmon
Makes 4 servings.
Blini
3 tablespoons milk, lightly heated
1 package active dried yeast
2 teaspoons sugar
¼ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
¼ cup blue cornmeal
1 egg yolk
6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter
2 egg whites
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
Sauce
¾ cup sour cream
¼ cup mild goat cheese, room temperature, crumbled
1 jalapeño chile, finely minced
¼ teaspoon ground white pepper
1½ teaspoons lime juice
Accompaniments
1 red bell pepper, roasted, peeled, seeded, and cut into a ¼-inch dice
1 yellow bell pepper, roasted, peeled, seeded, and cut into a ¼-inch dice
¼ cup red onion, finely diced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
2 tablespoons fresh chives, sliced
½ pound thinly sliced smoked salmon
For the blini:
In a medium bowl, combine the milk, yeast, and sugar. Stir the mixture well and allow it to develop at room temperature until foamy, about 10 to 15 minutes.
Whisk in the flour and blue cornmeal, mixing until no lumps remain. Set aside.
Whip the egg yolk and 2 tablespoons of the butter together with an electric beater until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the yeast mixture and continue to beat until the batter does not cling to the beaters, about 10 minutes.
In another bowl, whip the egg whites with an electric beater until foamy. Add the cream of tartar and then beat on high speed until the egg whites are stiff.
Fold 1/3 of the egg whites gently into the blue corn batter to lighten and then gently fold in the rest. Set the batter aside, keeping it at room temperature.
For the sauce:
In a small bowl, mix the sour cream, goat cheese, jalapeño chile, lime juice, and white pepper. Refrigerate the sauce until ready to serve.
Frying the blini:
Melt one tablespoon of butter in a small nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. When the butter foam begins to subside, add ¼ of the batter and fry the blini until golden, about 2 minutes.
Turn and cook for an additional 2 minutes. Transfer the blini to a plate with a spatula and keep warm in a 150°F oven while making the remaining blini.
To serve:
Place one blini in the center of a plate. Sprinkle with ¼ of the red and
yellow peppers, onion, cilantro, and chives.
Form the smoked salmon into a rose-shaped cup in the center of the blini by rolling it into a spiral (it doesn’t have to be perfect). Fill the rose with ¼ of the sour cream and quickly repeat with the remaining ingredients. Serve immediately.
Adapted by permission of Taralee Lathrop at My Kitchen Ink http://www.mykitchenink.com/recipes/auth_1/recipe/75/.
Chapter 11
I studied the campus map, wondering how I could meet up with Peter’s graduate student Jenny Archer. Graduate students weren’t that easy to track down. For one thing, students in Plant Biology spent long hours in the lab, and I felt reluctant to intrude in someone’s work space, even if this was a case of attempted murder. But graduate students had to eat lunch like everybody else. I hoped that Jenny wasn’t the type to bring a brown bag lunch and consume it in an office. The Plant Biology labs, according to the map, weren’t far from the Granary, a building that housed a collection of fast-food vendors, a coffee café, and a mini mart with the usual university fare. Perhaps I could take my article on shrimp and grits and work at one of the outdoor tables that were pleasingly shaded by surrounding trees.
I wouldn’t be wasting my time but putting it to double purpose, revising the essay and looking out for Jenny. Walking from my usual parking lot to the Granary would also count as part of my exercise that day. More than ever, I realized, I was multitasking. Trying to solve a mystery on top of reading, preparing classes, teaching, writing, publishing, directing the program, writing documents, serving on committees, attending campus meetings, and tending to Polly, not to mention pursuing a new relationship with Wilmer Crane—all of this required ever more skills in time management. I thought again about the woman with eight arms on the cover of Ms. Magazine. At least I wasn’t pregnant.