The Cereal Murders

by Diane Mott Davidson

  I rubbed my forehead, trying to think what to do. The Dawsons, the Marenskys, and Macguire Perkins stood together near the signing table. The mothers—short, crimson-suited Caroline and thinly elegant, fur-coated Rhoda—were eyeing each other like two wild animals in a life-and-death standoff. The fathers—lanky Stan and squat, beefy Hank—stood stiffly, bristling. All were glaring, and the air around them crackled with hostility. Macguire, as usual, had his eyes half closed and was observing the verbal brickbats fly back and forth as if the conversation were some kind of sporting event.

  “You just don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hank Dawson spat out. He clenched his fists at his sides; I was afraid he would raise them at any moment. “It’s on U.S. News & World Report’s list of the top twenty-five liberal arts colleges. Greer is extraordinarily gifted, in the top ten percent of her class. That’s more than you can say for Brad. What does he do, anyway? Besides play soccer, I mean.”

  To my horror, Hank turned and winked at me, as if I somehow shared this assessment. I recoiled and looked around for Brad Marensky, whom I had not seen since our encounter in church. But when I caught the teenager’s eye, he turned away.

  “You know, Stan,” Hank went on, rocking back and forth on his heels and looking up into Stan’s lean face with a smug grin, “you could always give the director of admissions at Stanford a mink coat, but I think it’s too hot out there.”

  “I’m getting so tired of this from you! We used to be friends! And really, you don’t know the first thing about colleges.” Stan was white with anger. “Jam for the Stanford rep! What a laugh!”

  “Oh, yeah?” shrilled Hank. His face flushed the color of a cherry tomato. “Greer’s sixth-grade teacher said she tested out at the highest intelligence level they’d ever found.”

  “Brad has been in gifted and talented programs since he was eight. And he’s an athlete, named all-state in soccer and basketball. Not just girls’ volleyball,” rasped Stan, his nostrils flaring. “You think you can improve Greer’s chances with this stupid campaign of yours? Does the world know that Hank Dawson flunked out of the University of Michigan? You don’t have a credential to your name.”

  “Oh, shit,” muttered Macguire Perkins. “Oh, man,” he said, looking around for Brad, who had sunk into a nearby chair rather than witness the intensifying conflict.

  “Honey, stop,” protested Caroline Dawson. But both men stood their ground. At any moment, someone was going to get punched in the nose. I tentatively offered my tray of biscotti to the little group. All ignored me.

  Stan Marensky smiled largely. His tall body loomed over Hank Dawson’s. “You’re just jealous because you know Brad’s gotten better grades than Greer—”

  “Man, who cares?” interrupted Macguire Perkins.

  “Shut up!” both fathers cried simultaneously to the headmaster’s son.

  Macguire raised his palms. “Whoa! I’m outta here.” He slunk off. Brad Marensky slumped miserably and put his head in his hands.

  Hank squinted up at Stan Marensky. He was breathing hard. Instead of addressing the jealousy question, he used Stan’s own mocking tone to respond. “Six generations of Dawsons have attended the University of Michigan. That’s more than you can say for the royal Russian Marenskys, I’m sure.”

  Stan Marensky grunted in disgust. His fists clenched.

  I had resolved not to get involved in this, of course, but perhaps I could get us out of this.

  “Please, men,” I said amicably, wafting biscotti under their noses—I’m a great believer in the peace-making abilities of good food. “The kids will get the wrong idea of what college is all about if you don’t quit arguing. You’re both winners. I mean, remember the time when the Broncos—”

  “Who asked you?” bellowed Hank Dawson as if I had unexpectedly betrayed him. He certainly was not in the mood for Bronco talk. Well, hey! I was just doing my referee imitation. I whisked off to set down the tray. Audrey and I had food to set out, conflict or no.

  In catering weddings, I had discovered that there is absolutely no time to become overly involved in arguments between clients while you are trying to serve. To my great relief, and in the manner of wedding receptions, the Marenskys and the Dawsons now settled on opposite sides of the meeting area. More students and parents joined us. Audrey and I kept the trays filled and tended to the glasses. Miss Ferrell, who had watched the bitter exchange between the two sets of parents but sagely declined to interfere, pointed Julian out to me when he sauntered up the stairs to the third floor. I handed my tray to Audrey and rushed over to him.

  “Congratulations,” I gushed. “I heard. This is so—”

  But the hard look in his eyes stopped me short. His face was cold with defiance.

  “What is it?” I stammered. “I thought you’d be ecstatic.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Even in the catering business, you know there’s no free lunch.”

  “I’m happy for you anyway,” I said lamely. The initial doubts I’d had about the scholarship loomed.

  Julian nodded grimly and walked over to join the chatting students and parents. Several members of the crowd took their seats in response to Headmaster Perkins’ agitated appearance at the table where the evening’s speaker, a young fellow with wire-rimmed glasses and slicked-down blond hair, had just settled himself next to an enormous pile of books.

  “I think we should have a moment’s silence for our”—Headmaster Perkins gushed into the microphone—“our classmate and friend, Keith Andrews.”

  There was shuffling and rearranging of chairs. Along with the noise from the customers on other floors, it was not exactly silence.

  Miss Ferrell stood to introduce the author. Now, I would have thought that a Halloween speaker would at least have had a few lighthearted things to say about how scary the college-application process was, or something along those lines. But when the blond fellow regaled us with no jokes, and instead began with a fluttering hand gesture and the line, “When I was at Harvard …” I knew we were in trouble.

  There would be no more serving until the man had finished his spiel and the question-and-answer period was over, so I slipped around to the back of the room and found Audrey.

  “Any way I can get out of here without creating a fuss?”

  “You can’t go by the main staircase, they’d all see you. Where do you want to go?”

  “Cookbooks?” Any port in a storm.

  She led me around to the back of the third floor and then circled the room through another maze of bookshelves. Eventually we made our way to the other side of the main carpeted staircase from the speaker. Audrey stopped in front of a door taped with a photo of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

  I said, “Not a cookbook by this guy.”

  “We’re in Crime, silly,” Audrey said quietly so as not to disturb the stultifyingly boring speaker, who was declaiming, “College is an investment, like real estate. Location, location, location!”

  Audrey whispered to me, “Go down two flights and you’ll come out in cookbooks.”

  “What’s on that window, a poster of Julia Child?”

  “They just do it up as a refrigerator door.” She glanced over at the speaker. “I’ll handle things. Better not he gone more than thirty minutes, though.”

  I thanked her for being such a great assistant and pushed through the Silence of the Lambs door. It closed behind me with a decisive thud. With the guilty enjoyment of escaping duty, I quickly descended the concrete stairway. Once I made it down to the cookbook section, I felt immediately at home. I searched out a recipe for piroshki, then flipped through a marvelously illustrated book on the cuisine of Italian hill towns. Educating Your Palate was the name of one of that cookbook’s subsections. I sat in an armchair next to one of the windows.

  My uniform-coated reflection looked back at me, cookbook in hand. Educate your palate, huh? I had never had a formal education in cooking; I had taught myself to cook from books. But I made my living at it. Nat
urally, the courses I’d had on Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare hadn’t helped, although they’d been enjoyable, except for the Milton. And needless to say, the psychological savvy needed for the business had no referent in any of my papers on the early thinking of Freud.

  But so what. I was educated, self-proclaimed. Period. With this delicious insight I walked over to the first-floor bank of registers to buy the Italian cookbook, then realized I’d left my purse upstairs. I reached into my apron pocket, where I always kept a twenty in case someone had to run out for ingredients, and had the satisfaction of paying for the book with cash earned from catering.

  When I pushed past Hannibal Lecter again, Tom Schulz stood waiting near the door. The speaker said, “One last question,” and moments later the parents were milling aggressively around and standing in line to have their books signed by the expert. Audrey and several other staff members began folding up the chairs.

  “I’m glad to see you,” I said to Schulz. I looked around at the breakdown of the room. “I really should help them.”

  Schulz shook his head. “The food’s gone, the people are leaving, and you have some disks to give me so I can deliver them to the Sheriff’s Department tonight.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said suddenly. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why hadn’t I taken them down to the first floor with me? I fled into the kitchen. No purse. I rushed back out to Audrey.

  “Seen my purse?” I demanded.

  “Yes, yes,” she answered primly, and snapped a metal chair shut. “But don’t ever leave it out like that again, Goldy. Kids at that school have a terrible reputation for stealing. The only time I bring a purse is when I need my wallet with all my cards. Otherwise, I wear my keys.” She went to a closet and returned with my purse. I almost snatched it from her. The computer disks were inside.

  I handed Schulz the disks. He hadn’t mentioned coming over to my house later. Perhaps he didn’t want to. I immediately felt embarrassed, as if I’d overstepped some invisible but important boundary.

  Once again he was reading my mind. Leaning toward me, he whispered, “Can I meet you at your house in ninety minutes?”

  “Of course. Will you be able to stay for a while?”

  He gave me such a tender, incredulous look: What do you think? I turned away. When I looked back he was saluting me as he sauntered out the third-floor exit. Julian had gone, presumably to his friend Neil’s house; the Marenskys and Dawsons had disappeared. Chalk another one up for Greer not helping with catering cleanup. Maybe that wasn’t required for Occidental.

  Audrey and I cleared the trash and washed dishes. My heart ached for her as she recited all the latest cruel deeds foisted on her by Carl Coopersmith’s insidious lawyer. Finally, but with some guilt, I told her I was expecting a guest at my home momentarily. With Heather’s begrudging help, the three of us loaded our boxes into the van. In an extremely casual tone Audrey inquired, “What was that policeman doing at the store tonight?”

  “I told you, I was giving him those disks.”

  “It’s like he doesn’t trust us,” she said darkly.

  “Well, can you blame him?” came Heather’s sharp voice from the backseat.

  “When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” Audrey snapped.

  “Oh, Mom.”

  And we drove in unhappy silence all the way back to their house in Aspen Meadow.

  Plumes of exhaust drifted up from the tailpipe of Schulz’s car when I pulled up by the curb in front of my home.

  “Everyone will see you if you park here,” I said when he had rolled down his window.

  “Oh, yeah? I wasn’t aware I was doing anything illegal.” He hauled out a plastic bag. It said BRUNSWICK BOWLING BALLS.

  “What did the disks say?”

  “Talk about it inside.”

  I pushed the alarm buttons and opened the door. The bowling ball bag yielded a bottle of VSOP cognac. In a cabinet I found a couple of liqueur glasses that John Richard had not broken on one of his rampages. As we sat in my kitchen and sipped the cognac, Schulz said he wanted to hear about my evening first. I told him about the bookstore spats, and about Macguire Perkins getting in the middle of it. I also told him about my suspicion concerning Macguire’s use of steroids.

  “Was that what Keith’s newspaper article was about?” I asked.

  “No,” he said pensively, “it wasn’t.”

  I toyed with my glass. Relax, I ordered myself. But Arch’s problems at school and Julian’s troubling anxiety seemed to be in the air, even though neither of the boys was at home. And despite the afternoon interlude with Schulz the day of the spider bite, I was not used to being alone with him in my house. At night.

  Schulz refilled my glass. “How about Julian? Did he get involved in the argument at the bookstore?”

  “Oh, no.” I brightened. “Good news on that front, in fact.” I told him about Julian’s scholarship.

  “No kidding.” Schulz seemed both pleased and intrigued. “That’s interesting. Who gave him the money?”

  “No one knows. I’m wondering if it’s some kind of bribe.”

  He sipped his cognac. “A bribe. For what? Did you ask him?” I told him I had not. He pondered that for a minute, then said, “Now tell me how you got those disks.”

  “Can’t, sorry, they were given to me in confidence. Do they contain evidence? I mean, is it something you’ll be able to use?”

  “I don’t know how.” But he reached inside the Brunswick bag and handed me some folded papers. “I got a printout of Keith’s article. The rest was notes for a paper on Dostoyevski. The other disk had a list of expenses from his visits to ten colleges. The article sums up the trips.” Seeing my puzzled expression, Schulz added, “That’s what Keith was going to expose, Goldy. His personal views on college education as he’d already experienced it. I wanted you to take a look at it, but it just looks like his opinions.”

  If that was all it was, I told him I would read it in the morning. I was too tired even to read the word midterm tonight. “If it’s just Keith’s opinions on what’s going on in higher education in the world at large, what’s the big deal?”

  “I don’t know. But nobody I can find seems to have had the slightest idea what he was researching for that article. Sometimes people are more afraid of what they think you’re going to expose than they ever would be if they knew exactly what you were going to expose. You fear what you don’t know.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said as I drained the last of the cognac in my glass. Heady stuff.

  “Like with this smoke stunt. Someone wants you to think you’re going to be hurt.”

  “Marla broke her leg,” I pointed out.

  “She may have gotten off easy.” He put his glass down. His face was very grim. “I know I’ve said this a few times already, Miss G., but I’d feel a lot better if you’d all move out, quietly, until we solve this murder.”

  I blinked at him. How many times had I run away in fear? Too many. The running part of my life was over, and I was not going to budge.

  17

  Schulz moved restlessly in his chair. I poured us some more cognac and had the uncomforting thought that if we got really drunk, we wouldn’t even notice if someone smashed another window or stopped up every chimney in the neighborhood.

  I sipped and looked at the clock. Ten o’clock. The odd feeling of being alone in my home with Schulz brought full wakefulness despite the fact that catering in the evening usually exhausted me. My mind traveled back to the Marenskys and the Dawsons, Brad Marensky morose and silent, Macguire Perkins embarrassed when ordered to shut up. When our tiny glasses were again empty, Schulz stood and walked out to the living room. I followed. The place still smelled faintly of smoke, and the pale yellow walls were the color of toasted marshmallow. In the near future I would have to hire someone to do a cleanup. Schulz got down on one knee to peer up the chimney.

  “Any ideas? Did you ever hear anything out on the roof?”

  “No ideas, no weird sounds. My theo
ry is that this is the same person who did the rock and the snake. I wish I knew who was so pissed off with me. Arbitration would be cheaper than making glass repairs and paying for professional cleaning.”

  “Somebody strong, somebody athletic,” Schulz mused. “The only thing all these things have in common is a threat to Arch. Scare him while he’s home alone, put something in the locker, fill the house with smoke while he’s here with you and Julian … but that part wasn’t planned, was it?”

  “Being home? No, he fell on the icy front steps, prelude to Marla. Maybe that one was meant for me,” I said wryly, remembering the spider-bite incident.

  “Who’s mad at you? Or Arch?” His eyes probed mine and he gently took my hand, then reeled me in like a slow-motion jitterbug dancer.

  “I don’t know,” I murmured into his chest. He was warm; the clean smell of aftershave clung to his skin. I pulled back. Around his dark pupils was only a ring of green luminosity.

  “All this talk about starting fires …” I said with a small smile.

  And up we tiptoed to the silent second story. The cognac, the desire, the comfort of Schulz, seeped through me like one of those unexpected warm currents you encounter in the ocean. In the dark of my room he stood beside me while we looked out at the glowing jack-o’-lanterns in the neighborhood. He rubbed my back, then kissed my ear. I set my alarm for four and then slipped out of my clothes. We both laughed as we dove for the bed. It was a good thing Schulz always used protection. Ever since we had started making love, I had forgotten the meaning of the word caution.

  When he pulled me next to him between the cool sheets, his large, rough hands brought calm to nerves inside and out. When he kissed me, something in my brain loosened. Before long I had abandoned not only caution but all the other petty worries that had crowded into my brain.

  After our lovemaking Schulz went downstairs. He came back up and said, “Twenty minutes,” then got dressed.