Sweet Revenge

by Diane Mott Davidson

  Sweet Revenge

  Diane Mott Davidson

  To Katherine Goodwin Saideman,

  with deep thanks for nineteen years of incisive comments and

  affectionately rendered recommendations

  They flee from me that sometime did me seek….

  —Sir Thomas Wyatt

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1

  A month before Christmas, I saw a ghost.

  2

  Well. Insofar as possible, I tried to put seeing Sandee—or…

  3

  The sheriff’s department had an outpost, an office actually, that…

  4

  Boyd regarded me with his black eyes. When he shifted…

  5

  On the way home, the snowfall thickened. Once Tom and…

  6

  Tom lifted his chin, set my face in his gaze,…

  7

  I cursed anorexia as I struggled to keep rail-thin, ultra-light…

  8

  Are you sure it’s an old and valuable map?”

  9

  Goldy, God, I’m so sorry,” Julian kept saying as he…

  10

  I sat, stunned, for a few minutes as I tried…

  11

  Tom disconnected, and suddenly I missed him terribly, his wisdom,…

  12

  Goldy!” The male voice and knock at the door startled…

  13

  I didn’t have a whole lot of time to ponder…

  14

  Half an hour later, I was showered, dressed, and in…

  15

  He looked awfully peeved,” Marla whispered under her breath. “Didn’t…

  16

  Sergeant Boyd, was he murdered?”

  17

  I tried at first not to take sides,” Grace explained.

  18

  As soon as Father Pete left, I grabbed the kitchen…

  19

  Once I was outside Neil Tharp’s door, I pressed Talk…

  20

  That did not make me feel great,” I said, once…

  21

  The next morning the doctor was proved right. I had…

  22

  Before you could say “snow,” I’d grabbed my jacket and…

  Acknowledgments

  Recipes in Sweet Revenge

  About the Author

  Also by Diane Mott Davidson

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  * * *

  LIBRARY STAFF AND VOLUNTEERS’

  What-the-Dickens Holiday Breakfast

  Great Expectations Grapefruit

  Chuzzlewit Cheese Pie

  Tale of Two Cities French Toast

  Bleak House Bars

  Hard Times Ham

  Christmas Carol Coffee Cake

  Butter, Syrup, Assorted Jams

  Juices, Eggnog, Champagne

  Coffee, Tea

  * * *

  1

  A month before Christmas, I saw a ghost.

  This was not the ghost of Christmas past, present, or future. I didn’t need to be reminded of bad things I’d done, nor, as far as I knew, of good things I ought to be doing. This wasn’t, as my fifteen-year-old son, Arch, would say, any high woo-woo stuff either. I liked the past to stay in the past, thank you very much. Anything I hadn’t handled well in my first thirty-four years I certainly didn’t want to be reminded of in my busiest season, when I had twenty-five parties to cater between the first of December and the New Year.

  Still, there had been that ghoul, that vision, that whatever it was.

  The specter appeared on November 25, which fell on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when I was on my way to Smithfield and Hermie MacArthur’s house to book two parties. I’d been looking forward to seeing the MacArthurs’ place, because the events promised to fill my Christmas stocking with dough, and I didn’t mean the kind I made into cinnamon rolls.

  Hermie MacArthur had introduced herself to me at a churchwomen’s luncheon I’d done earlier in the fall. In her midforties, with a much-powdered face, grayish-blond hair, and a commanding Southern accent, Hermie possessed an imposingly tall body that was shaped like a McIntosh apple—a hefty chest on stick legs. The luncheon speaker, a local woman named Patricia Ingersoll, headed a weight-loss group. Patricia had been droning on about how nobody should be consuming my gingerbread, made with unsalted butter and freshly grated ginger and—secret ingredient—freshly grated black pepper. I’d enjoyed catering Patricia’s wedding reception four years ago. I also felt very sorry that she’d lost her relatively new husband to cancer in just the last year and a half. But I did wish she could have found another outlet for her energies besides telling people to stop eating.

  The churchwomen had been shifting, murmuring, and whispering about regretting inviting Patricia. I’d escaped to my event center’s kitchen, where I’d been wondering what I was going to do if nobody ate dessert.

  Hermie MacArthur had followed me in, cornered me, and said, “Darlin’, we need to talk.” She’d fingered her multiple strands of pearls and diamonds while telling me that she and her husband had lived in Aspen Meadow’s Regal Ridge Country Club area for only ten months, and she felt the holidays would just be a heavenly time to get to know her neighbors better. Yes, yes, I’d echoed as I reached for my calendar. Great idea. I was all for rich folks getting to know one another better.

  We’d set up our November meeting date. But Hermie had been reluctant to leave the kitchen, and it wasn’t because she couldn’t stand to listen to Patricia anymore. I thought perhaps she wanted a second helping of something. Or an early piece of gingerbread? But no. Finally she confided that she was eager for the parties to go well, for her husband Smithfield’s sake. It had been Smithfield who’d had the idea that they combine their holiday parties with a celebration of his hobby.

  “And what is his hobby?” I’d asked with trepidation, fearing something to do with snakes.

  “Why, darlin’,” Hermie had replied, “it’s map collecting!”

  I’d almost choked as I imagined having to make a cake in the shape of North America, complete with squiggly lines for the rivers. But Hermie didn’t mention a cake. I smiled and reminded myself that I’d had plenty of practice dealing with ultrawealthy people and their eccentricities. So if the MacArthurs wanted to haul out their Rand McNallys along with some mincemeat pies, who was I to complain?

  I did tell Hermie that the one famous map of Aspen Meadow, with its maze of dirt and paved roads winding through the mountains, was You Use’ta Couldn’t Get There from Here! She’d frowned. She said she was hoping I could do some reading on map collecting before I came, in case Smithfield wanted me to help with a slide, and I needed to reach for South Africa and not the South Bronx. Plus, Hermie went on, there would be at least two map dealers at the party, and one of them, Drew Wellington, was a former district attorney. Did I know Drew Wellington? she asked.

  Yes, I said after a pause. I knew Mr. Wellington.

  Hermie also wanted a touch of elegance, she said, and shook a ringed forefinger with a diamond the size of one of Arch’s old marbles. Elegant was my middle name, I replied cheerily. Of course it wasn’t, and my business, Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right!, could be as low-down as a cowboy barbecue. But Hermie had seemed satisfied.

  So there I was on November 25, tootling along Regal Road, the curving mountain byway that led past one of Arch’s favorite snowboarding places and ended at the entrance to Regal Ridge Country Club, a relatively new fancy development built after Aspen Meadow Country Club had filled up. Hermie and I were set to make decisions on the menus for a dinner for eight to be held on Saturday, December 16, and a luncheon
on Monday, the eighteenth. Elegant meant we weren’t just talking soup to nuts. I was offering her crab dumplings in fresh herb broth to precede her first event, a curry dinner that would conclude with lime—not mincemeat, thank goodness—pie. For the Monday lunch, Hermie had asked for lamb and potatoes. I was going to propose lamb chops persillade and potatoes au gratin. The potatoes would be made memorable with fresh sage and caramelized onions. After we’d decided on the food, we’d hammer out the details of a preliminary contract. I would see how the MacArthurs’ kitchen, dining, and living areas were set up. Then, most importantly from my point of view, Hermie would write a check for a down payment.

  Accelerating up a steep hill, I felt phat, an expression of Arch’s that he now told me was so over. Phat meant happy, not overweight, although I probably was that, too. I had a reason to feel good: the upcoming slew of holiday parties had, for the most part, been planned and paid for. Six weeks prior to the holidays was my cutoff date for booking events, but Hermie MacArthur had begged so earnestly that I’d agreed to take her on. For the rest of the affairs I was catering, the food had been ordered and the servers lined up. And I was especially happy that my event center by Aspen Meadow Lake had been cleaned and professionally decorated. Artificial trees and thousands of tiny colored lights had transformed the place into the proverbial winter wonderland.

  I’d offered the center to Hermie. But she wanted to have their parties in their home. They had more maps than I had twinkling lights, she explained, and if they tried to move them, they had insurance concerns. I said I understood. Their residence wasn’t a pretend mansion, I’d been told by Marla Korman, my best friend and the other ex-wife of our now-deceased ex-husband. It was an estate. In fact, Marla had said, the MacArthurs’ home was an exceptionally fortified palace that had been built on one of the outcroppings of the Regal Ridge itself. According to Marla, the mansion commanded an impressive view of Denver, forty miles to the east. But the back side of the house perched on a sheer cliff overlooking a thousand-foot drop. It wasn’t a place where herds of elk would ruin your garden, that was certain.

  All this was okay with me, except for one thing: how you got to the MacArthurs’ house. After you passed the snowboard area, the road narrowed. And even when you were driving below the speed limit, which I was, I later told my husband, Tom, the road presented problems. It was one of those two-lane Colorado byways that wind up the side of a mountain and are always losing their guardrails. If we were subject to a sudden snowstorm or one of the MacArthurs’ guests had too much to drink, somebody could drive a Mercedes over the cliff, and no map was going to help you find those folks until the snow melted in springtime.

  I tried not to think about all this as I slowed to negotiate a particularly nasty curve. When I got to the other side of the hill, the road dipped sharply before climbing again. I made sure I was slowing my van as I went down. Then I gave the gas pedal a gentle nudge to start back uphill.

  And that’s when I saw her.

  Actually, I saw the approaching car’s passenger first. She was young, fourteen or fifteen, I thought. She sat in the front seat, talking and waving her hands in the air. Something about her was sharply familiar. I took my foot off the gas and watched in fascination as she chatted up the driver of the car, a woman not much older, whose smiling face was in partial profile. The passenger, at that age between childhood and young womanhood, had bouncy shoulder-length dark brown hair. She was very lovely, but my memory stubbornly refused to give up a name or a family. A schoolmate of Arch’s? Somebody from the church? Wherever that memory was, it was just out of reach. So I squinted at the driver. Was she having as good a time as her passenger? Was she just as lovely?

  The driver turned her attention back to the road. Smiling, nodding, dark hair, pretty, Wait a minute. I knew that face. Okay, the hair was wrong. It was brown, not bleached blond, and it was pulled back in a ponytail. But I recognized her nonetheless.

  Suddenly I was like a speeder who sees a state patrol car. I inadvertently smacked my brakes so hard they squealed, and my van skidded sideways. Trying to stop was a mistake, because then the driver of the other car hit her brakes, but only for a moment. When she glanced over, it was with the practiced, furtive movement of a criminal.

  Am I in trouble? her look said. Did somebody see me?

  The driver stopped smiling and tucked her chin. She spoke to her young passenger, zoomed around my crookedly stopped van, then raced up the hill I’d just come down. I eased my vehicle onto a narrow gravelly shoulder that was the only surface between me and a dented guardrail overlooking a very long plunge that ended on the interstate. In my confusion, I hadn’t gotten a license plate. As I strained to catch a glimpse of the departing car, I couldn’t even remember what kind of vehicle it was. A station wagon? An SUV? How about a color? I asked myself. All I could remember was that the vehicle had been dark.

  But I really thought I knew that face, and the woman to whom it belonged. Maybe I was very much mistaken, and I could have been, I told Tom when we talked. Still, I was 99 percent sure that the driver of the car was named Alexandra, also known as Sandee, Brisbane—the woman who, six months earlier, had shot and killed my ex-husband.

  In June of this year, Sandee Brisbane had confessed to the crime in front of me and a dozen others. Then she’d disappeared over a ledge into a raging forest fire that had, by the time it was put out, destroyed ten thousand acres of the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. Sandee had been only twenty-two.

  She had perished, law enforcement had concluded. No one could have survived that inferno. Case closed.

  Could Sandee not have died? I wondered as I sat in my van and tried to catch my breath. Could she be living in Aspen Meadow, half a year after she’d been declared dead? I shakily retrieved my cell and pressed the speed dial for Tom’s office at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department, where he was an investigator. After I blurted out what I’d seen, my husband said he just had one question.

  When was the last time I’d been checked for glasses?

  Very funny, I retorted as I stared up Regal Road and waited for my heart to resume its normal rhythm. I breathlessly repeated my description of Sandee and the teenager, then told Tom that I was sure Sandee had recognized me. She hadn’t stopped to make sure I was all right, as most Colorado folks would have. Instead, she’d wrenched her car around my van and gunned her engine to speed away.

  Whether or not Tom believed me, eventually he did realize how upset I was. He started taking me seriously, or he pretended to. In fact, he asked so many questions and paused so long while writing down the answers, I thought I was going to be late for my meeting with Hermie. I finally told him that I would see him that night. I resolved to put the apparition—the phantom? some inner voice asked—of Sandee Brisbane out of my head. I eased the van back onto the narrow road, and continued along to the stone gates marking the entry to the Regal Ridge Country Club area.

  Marla had been right. Wending my way down a dead-end street, I passed two impressively massive homes, then reached the end of an enormous cul-de-sac, where the MacArthurs’ house sat, a contemporary stone castle complete with a crenellated roof and turrets at either end. I smiled as I descended the steep driveway, then put on my professional face and demeanor as I ascended the staircase that led to the kitchen.

  Working with “please call me Hermie, darlin’” to decide on the menus went reasonably well. I assured her that the first event, the curry dinner celebrating a recent acquisition Smithfield had made, would be fantastic. It was while Hermie and I were figuring out the flow of guests and times for serving that Smithfield MacArthur burst into the kitchen.

  “Hermie!” he exploded. Like Hermie, he was quite tall and had thin gray hair. But what made my mouth drop open was that he had a very, very red face. Was he from Virginia, I wondered, and had his parents laughingly named him after a Smithfield ham? No, no, that would be too cruel. I closed my mouth and noted that like many megarich folks, Smithfield did not care a whit about hi
s clothing. He wore a rumpled white shirt, much-creased khaki pants, and ancient, loose penny loafers that were literally coming apart at the seams. “Hermie!” he yelled again.

  Hermie languidly lifted her wide, well-powdered chin and clacked her pearls together with her hand. “What, darlin’?”

  Smithfield squinted and moved his head around wildly, as if he couldn’t see the two of us seated at the black granite breakfast bar. He was perhaps ten years older than his wife, but that didn’t stop him from acting as if he were her child. “Hermie!” he bawled for the third time. “What did you do with my glasses?”

  “I put ’em on your head, darlin’,” his wife patiently replied.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Smithfield cried. He reached up, nabbed his specs, and slid them into place. He thrust his jaw forward and demanded, “Are you sure you invited both Drew and Larry to the party?”

  “We’re plannin’ the party right now.”

  “Is my caterer here?”

  “She’s sittin’ right beside me, darlin’.”

  Smithfield thrust his scarlet face toward me. “Have you done your reading yet?” he bellowed.

  “Reading?” I echoed.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Hermie!” Smithfield shouted.

  “I’ll give her a copy of your book,” Hermie promised.