Dying for Chocolate gs-2

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “You could always give them a bad check,” I offered as I placed the last cantaloupe down with a flourish.

  She said, “Not a bad idea,” and then regarded me with big blue eyes that reminded me of her brother’s. “Have you heard from Philip?”

  I told her that I had and he would be late. I said, “Anything I can help with?”

  She said, “No,” without conviction.

  “Everything okay?”

  She nodded. “Just fine.”

  Now Elizabeth was pretending to center a cantaloupe. She said, “Did you have to cook a lot for this meal?”

  “I made a multitude of goodies. Have the strata. It features high-performance cheddar.”

  Silence.

  I had a lot of work to do and could not visit when the guests’ arrival was imminent. Whatever it was Elizabeth wanted, I wished she’d get to it.

  “Goldy—” she began. She tilted her pixie face, then pressed her lips together.

  Something told me she was not here to talk about the school, or the food, or even to complain about the headmaster. I said, “Why don’t we sit down?”

  “Oh, no,” she said as she bent down close to inspect one of the cantaloupe baskets. From the kitchen came the inviting smells of bacon and coffee. I knew I had to get in there and so did she. She said, “It’s just—”

  “Just. . .”

  “Oh,” she said with a grin, “I’m worried about Philip. I think he’s getting in over his head with some of his clients. I mean, are you all close enough to talk about this stuff? You know.”

  People always say, You know, when you don’t have a clue. You know . . . fill in the blank. You know. . . make this easier for me by not having to say it.

  The space of the dining room was intimidating. I leaned toward her in a confidential manner. “You mean,” I said, “does he tell me about his clients? Or are we sleeping together? Because the answer is no to both.”

  She shrugged and said, “Oh no, that’s not what I was asking. You know.”

  I still didn’t. I said, “You mean, like are we close enough to be thinking of getting married?”

  She was relieved. She closed her eyes and gave a little shrug, as in, You brought it up.

  I said, “We aren’t. Satisfied?”

  “Well, you see . . .” she said with more hesitation, then stopped.

  I thought, Spit it out, Elizabeth.

  She went on, “I just need to talk to you, to him I mean . . . and I didn’t know what his plans were.”

  I said, “I don’t know what Philip’s plans are beyond coming here for brunch. If you want to talk about health food with him, he’ll be here. If you want to talk about health food with me, I’ll be in your store later to shop for this dinner I’m doing tomorrow night. Now be a good vegetarian and come into the kitchen with me to see if the bacon’s done.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Bacon! I can’t even stand the smell—”

  But she was interrupted by the first gaggle of aging preppies laughing with forced hilarity as they pushed through the carved doors of the dining room. It was the kind of laugh that said, We’re not too old to have fun. Suddenly it was too late to check the bacon or anything else. I lifted the first bottle of champagne from the ice chest and began to open it.

  I whispered to Elizabeth, “Do me a favor. Pop into the kitchen and get one of the staff; I’m going to need help here. Then sashay over to your buddies and act sociable so they don’t start on the fruit. I’ll be around with the champagne.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, distracted again. She shook her head; the earrings swung like Christmas ornaments. “Just. . . please let me talk to Philip myself.”

  “Elizabeth,” I said, “he’s your brother. Whatever’s bothering you, I think you should talk to him about it yourself. You know?”

  3.

  “And when we have brought the water line in here,” the headmaster was saying with a practiced flick of his pointer at the illuminated screen, “then we will enter into Implementation Stage Two. . . .”

  At the headmaster’s table, Adele Farquhar touched the undercurl of her severe, dark pageboy. Busy as I had been, I had not seen the general deliver her in his Range Rover. It was almost eleven o’clock. The alums stirred in their seats, checked their Rolexes. Any dummy knew that Implementation Stage Two meant More Money. The alums were exchanging looks—How much longer could he go on about this? A perplexed buzz rose from the tables. Forever.

  My legs ached from standing. The buffet table looked defaced. The food was almost gone, except for what I had saved for Philip. But he had not arrived. If he didn’t come soon, he’d be out of luck.

  And then he strolled in, acting like he owned the place. His black blazer, white pants, and shock of blond hair gave him the look of a male model. He scanned the room from behind Ray Bans. A hum of admiration rose from the women. I took a deep breath, let it out. The only time I heard a female gurgle of approval was for congealed salad.

  “How’s my favorite cook?” Philip said in a low voice once he arrived at the serving table. When he leaned his slender body over the table he was so close I could read the engraved words on his gold lapel pin—PROTECT OUR MOUNTAINS! The politically correct shrink gave me an inviting openmouthed smile.

  I shook my head and stared at the sunglasses, then spoke to Philip’s aristocratic nose. “Fine. How’s my favorite psychologist? Hungry?”

  “Ravenous.” He took a manila envelope out of his briefcase. “Fund-raising, I swear,” he said under his breath. “They ran out of decals and I had to bring in more.” He signaled to the headmaster with the envelope, then asked, “Is this thing almost over? Can we still get together afterwards?”

  I nodded to both questions. Philip strode up to the head table and handed the envelope to the headmaster, who betrayed great relief.

  Elizabeth caught my eye and waved as if she had a wand in her hand. As Philip wound back through the tables, his sister kept her eyes on him.

  The headmaster started to talk about money by trying to make it sound as if he wasn’t. He had abandoned the pointer and was droning on about the Phase I Drive for Investments. This year’s desperately needed improvement, it appeared, was an Olympic-size heated outdoor pool. For the past month, alumni, parents of students, and friends of the school had been hitting on (okay, he said, “going around to”) local businesses, giving them the Pool for the Preps pitch. If they gave, the business got a GET INTO THE SWIM! decal. Parents then patronized the SWIM!-decaled businesses. The headmaster reached into the envelope and proffered one of the decals.

  This sounded vaguely illegal, I reflected as Philip turned to me and grinned conspiratorially. I handed him his plate, then quietly emptied pitchers and scraped platters. Philip moved toward the wall to get a better view of the headmaster. I watched as he lifted his plate and then held it close under his chin as he ate.

  I put down the platter I had been holding. In that moment, I saw nothing but Philip. I saw him as he had been more than a dozen years before, when we had ditched a sophomore mixer. I had just transferred to the university from an eastern women’s college and knew no one. This blond, handsome fellow had come up to me and said, Do you want to get out of here? And I had said, Sure. We had walked through cool evening air redolent with the smell of smoke from wood-burning fires. Philip pointed to birds flitting between the trees: Oregon juncos, he said, returning to their winter nests. He bought us gyro sandwiches. We dripped sandwich juice and minted yogurt on paper napkins as we strolled by Boulder Creek. I remembered Philip holding his napkin carefully under his chin, looking less like a cool sophomore than a well-trained four-year-old.

  He had kissed me briefly, a taste of mint. But our dating was haphazard and short-lived. I didn’t even remember telling Philip I was leaving school to get married. I just let him go, like a balloon.

  Timing, I kept telling myself. That was the wrong time. Here was Philip, holding the plate beneath his chin, wanting to be together again. But I had fee
lings for Schulz, not to mention ambivalence about relationships in general. I wasn’t sure this was the right time either.

  Elizabeth was squeezing through occupied chairs to get to the back of the room. When she arrived at the serving table, she whispered, “The food’s great and most of my friends are here.” She smiled to dismiss her earlier complaint.

  I felt like telling her to phone the Mountain Journal with a review, but I did not want to interrupt the world’s most boring headmaster. I noticed Philip eyeing his sister. I said, “Your brother’s here.”

  She said, “And?”

  I smiled.

  “No news to report yet,” I said. “Can’t rush these things. You know,” I added.

  “I’m depending on you to keep an eye on him,” she said in a low voice.

  Philip sauntered back. He said, “Want to get out of here?”

  I said, “Absolutely.”

  Elizabeth offered him a bite of sausage cake. “It’s not good for you,” she said with a sly smile, “but Goldy made it, so it’ll taste super. You have time to visit now?”

  He chewed, winked at me, then shook his head to her question.

  He said, “Call you?” When she nodded, he grinned and gave me a time-to-go look. “If we don’t leave, we’re going to get caught in the crush.”

  I glanced at my watch: 11:30. Rain still streaked across the tall windows of the dining room. With some effort, we could load the platters and boxes into the Thunderbird in one trip. The school staff had promised to do the dishes. The headmaster was winding down: he had gone from the fund-raising pitch to a discussion of Elk Park’s policies on drugs (they were against them), parties with alcoholic beverages (ditto), and casual sex (ditto ditto). The alums’ interest seemed to pick up with this last topic. Philip and I placed the last of the pitchers in a crate and together we carried my supplies through the mud and rain to the Thunderbird’s trunk.

  Philip gave a short wave before he started his car, a BMW 325 I-X the color of vanilla pudding. For at least the hundredth time, I thought I should have become a shrink instead of a caterer.

  Cold spring rain pelted and washed and blew over our cars as we bumped over muddy ruts on our way out of the staff parking lot. We passed the buses and cars that had brought the students for orientation, then came up on the pool construction site. A six-foot-high chain-link fence surrounded the excavated area. The headmaster had just informed us that the plumbing was in and that the concrete would be shot in under pressure in the next few days. The school’s board of trustees was forging ahead to build the pool before they actually had the money. Not a luxury, they’d said, but a necessity. Ah, rich folks.

  When we drove past the construction-site fence, I waved and flashed my lights at Philip. He did not respond, but signaled to turn onto Highway 203.

  As we started down the narrow two-lane, the raindrops turned to white flakes. I sighed; I’d known it was coming. Snow in Colorado on the third of June is not the dry type that powders the ski slopes in winter. Instead, fat wet spring flakes plopped on the car like bits of mashed potatoes. The T-bird’s windshield wipers strained against the weight. At our altitude this was—my New Jersey relatives were always appalled to hear— seasonal weather. As we headed downhill I wondered if the Thunderbird had on snow tires.

  The BMW belched a cloud of black smoke. I accelerated gently; the five-hundred-foot curved descent to Aspen Meadow would be much more treacherous if the snow began to stick. Behind us the school’s red tile roof was already frosted with white. The T-bird’s windshield wipers hummed as they swept off thin blankets of snow. I turned on the defroster and for a moment lost sight of Philip whizzing around a curve.

  “Machismo,” I said with a groan, and pushed Adele’s car up to thirty.

  Beside the road a red fox, usually a nocturnal animal, darted out from a stand of bushes. I was startled and swung wide. No need: at the sight of the car, the animal scurried back to his lair. Even wildlife knew better than to be out in this mess.

  Once around the curve I caught sight of the BMW a quarter mile ahead. My right foot pushed the accelerator.

  We had been driving a few minutes when Philip abruptly careened to the right. His tires spewed a wave of mud from the shoulder. The paved part of the road was beginning to ice. I wondered if he had slid or had seen an animal, too.

  The snow fell steadily. I accelerated very gently. Philip slowed for a moment and then swerved over the center line to the left. Then he straightened out to straddle the dotted line.

  I honked. Was something wrong with his car? Was the snow bothering him? Maybe his windshield wipers weren’t working. I honked again, but there was no answer. Surely Philip knew the hazards of this drive. If he was having a steering problem, now was the time to pull over.

  Instead, he sped up. We passed a rock wall on the road’s left side, then a steep drop-off where a rollover had taken away most of the guardrail. Yellow police ribbons still marked the scene of a fatal accident. Again the BMW swerved to the left. A wave of fear left my hands damp. At the next curve I had to pay close attention. For a moment all that was visible in front of the car was air. My stomach dropped.

  After negotiating the turn, I sped up the boatlike Ford to get behind the BMW’s square taillights, which shone in the enveloping grayness. My hand groped for the headlights and I flashed them.

  No response.

  We headed east on the roller-coaster approach to Highway 24, the north-south biway that runs between Interstate 70 and Aspen Meadow. After we rounded another bend, my eyes picked out a trickle of cars heading north out of Aspen Meadow toward 1-70.

  Cottony clumps of snowflakes clung to the windshield. I strained my eyes and thought I could see Philip shaking his head. My heart beat in time with the windshield wipers. I pressed the accelerator and decided to overtake him. Force him to pull over. But when I pulled up on his left, he sped up. On the right a thin shoulder of ground and a barbed-wire fence were the only things between our lane and a forty-foot drop to whitened meadow. I pressed a button to bring my window down slightly. From Highway 24 the occasional honk and swish of hydroplaning tires punctuated the sifting sound of snow.

  Twenty minutes ago Philip had been fine. Now either he was having a heart attack or he was going to give me one.

  The last part of eastbound 203 went straight down. Philip again drove between the two lanes. Ahead I could see a tractor-trailer and a grocery-supply truck beginning to chug north on Highway 24, headed back to the interstate.

  Near the end of 203, Philip honked wildly. His brake lights flashed as the pale yellow car skidded right. I tried to gauge whether I could pass him again, but he was going too fast.

  Through the snowfall, a digital clock’s amber squares glowed twelve-oh-oh in the mist. We were only moments from Philip’s office, which was near the interstate. Soon this agony would be over. I flicked on the left turn signal as we approached the stop sign at the intersection of the two roads.

  “No!” I yelled as the BMW zoomed through the stop sign and screeched to turn right on 24 instead of left toward Philip’s office.

  I stopped, glanced left, floored the accelerator, and wrenched the steering wheel to the right. The snow was coming down like oatmeal. Philip barreled down the left lane straight into the path of the oncoming trucks. At the last moment he careened out of the lane when the tractor-trailer blasted him with his horn. The big trucks lumbered past. Philip put on his auxiliary lights and appeared to slow down.

  I gunned the T-bird forward and pulled up on the BMW’s right, on the dirt shoulder of Highway 24. I honked. Through his tinted window glass it was impossible to make out his face. He acted as if he neither saw nor heard me. Again he sped up, as if to get away.

  The Thunderbird stalled in the snowy mud.

  I leaned on the horn and lowered my window all the way. Cold feathers of snow pricked my face.

  “Philip!” I screamed. “Come back!”

  Speeding up again, the BMW bumped and rocked southb
ound down 24. In the right lane I could see a black Porsche passing a silver bus. I took a deep breath and turned the key in the ignition. If I could hit Philip from behind, maybe he would stop.

  A Ford is not a BMW. The Thunderbird started with a jolt. I gunned it forward and hit a utility pole with the right front headlight. With all the snow, I hadn’t even seen it. A dull pain shot up my spine. When I looked back at the road, Philip was speeding down the left lane on a collision course with the bus. Leaving bells and whistles whining, I unstrapped my seat belt and jumped from the car.

  “Stop!” I yelled through the curtains of snow. “Stop!”

  But he did not. The Porsche and the bus honked. The Porsche driver careened onto the shoulder. A wall of snow sprayed upward. The Porsche’s brakes screamed. Still the BMW raced forward. The bus driver leaned on the horn. Philip heard the honk and braked, then hit the gravel on the left shoulder. The BMW went into a wild skid.

  The bus slammed into the BMW on the driver’s side. Glass shattered. Tires shrieked. I could hear the bus passengers screaming. The Porsche driver scrambled out. There’s no way, I thought as I ran, there’s just no way.

  My feet slid through the snow. Ahead the bus and Philip’s car stood motionless, smoking. My body whacked the BMW hood. The left front of the car was irreparably smashed. I looked through the broken glass, desperately hoping to see some movement.

  The top half of Philip’s body was at a skewed angle; he had been thrown back by the impact. His face and chest were splattered with blood and glass. The sunglasses were gone and his eyes were wide, red, empty. The bottom half of his body had disappeared below the BMW’s crumpled metal.