Sweet Revenge

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Make sure she pays for it,” he grumbled.

  Then he stomped out of the kitchen. Hermie sighed, and I wondered if I could slip Smithfield one of Marla’s Valiums the night of the curry party.

  Two hours later, I drove back up the MacArthurs’ long driveway with a copy of Smithfield’s fat, self-published volume, Map Collecting Through the Ages, tucked against the passenger seat. Hermie had waved her hand and said I could have it, no charge. And if I could read it in my spare time—I almost choked with laughter at that idea—then I could return it when I did the curry dinner. Whoopee!

  At the top of the drive, I came upon a gaggle of teenage girls playing lacrosse in the dead end. Since the MacArthurs’ house was right next to the cliff of Regal Ridge, I wondered what happened when lacrosse balls went over the edge. If it was your ball, you were out of luck.

  While I was stopped, the players parted slowly, a Red Sea of masks, sticks, and sweatsuits. It had been several hours since I’d passed the dark car with its two inhabitants. Was one of the lacrosse players the girl I had seen with Sandee, if indeed it was Sandee I had seen? I scanned their faces and shook my head, then eased the van into the cul-de-sac and away.

  With the winter solstice fast approaching, darkness fell over the mountains like smoke. I drove the winding road past the Regal Ridge Snow Sports Area, where man-made snow and bright spotlights were now allowing snowboarders to whiz down the hill until nine at night. Was Arch there now? I wondered. I couldn’t remember, and frantically called his cell.

  He was at home, he reminded me when he picked up, because I’d said he needed to work at least an hour decluttering his bookshelves before he could go to a sleepover. I exhaled in relief, then asked if he knew a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl with long brown hair.

  “I know about fifty of them.”

  “Well, she’s very pretty.”

  “Twenty-five, then. Are you going to let me work on these books?”

  I told him to remember to pile them into boxes, then signed off and headed home. When I finally came through the front door, Tom gave me a long hug. He was handsome, brown-haired, and just enough taller than I was to make an embrace both comforting and exhilarating. I closed my eyes and happily let his mountain-man body encircle mine.

  “Miss G.,” he said when we parted, “you’re beginning to worry me. You think you see things, and you call Arch because you forget where he is but he’s home doing what you’ve been nagging him about all week. You need to get more rest. You’ve been working too much, and you’re beginning to act like a nutcase.”

  “Never call a caterer a nutcase. We think it’s something to eat.”

  “Exhaustion makes you see things,” he reminded me.

  “Right. So what you’re saying is, I’m tired, I’m exhausted, I’m totally whipped? And therefore it follows that what I saw was a hallucination?”

  “Is that whipped like potatoes?”

  I tried to punch him. But he was too quick for me, and I missed. He laughed, but I didn’t. I was still thinking of that ghost.

  2

  Well. Insofar as possible, I tried to put seeing Sandee—or whoever she was—out of my mind. But this did not prove easy. It wasn’t that I fumbled with my work. The first two weeks of holiday events went off as planned. Under Tom’s watchful eye, I began going to bed earlier—no later than midnight, unless a party ran over. When I did fall onto the mattress beside my warm husband, I’d be asleep before I landed.

  But then…four hours later I would awaken in a sweat. Somehow I couldn’t forget the vision of Sandee’s surreptitious glance, of her quick move to avoid my van. Worry enveloped me like a miasma. Why was she back? What had she been doing on Regal Road, and who was the girl in the car? Would Sandee come after me the way she had John Richard, my ex-husband, because I’d seen her…and knew she was very much alive? What about Arch? Was he in danger?

  I didn’t have any answers. Tom sensed my distress and repeated to Arch that he was never, ever, to take a ride from someone he didn’t know. Arch, with only the faintest band of freckles still running across his turned-up nose, nodded sagely and said, “I wouldn’t, and I won’t.”

  I went on working. Some parties brought in big money, others less. A shipment of oysters was lost somewhere between the Mississippi and the South Platte. A truck carrying beef tenderloins was hijacked. These things happened. Caterers coped.

  But then there was the one celebration I was doing at cost, which basically meant at a loss, for the Aspen Meadow Library.

  This proved different.

  The library had contracted my business to do a holiday breakfast for their staff and volunteers. No one is immune to flattery, least of all yours truly. I suppose that was why I agreed to do the unprofitable, labor-intensive fete.

  “We voted, and you were the clear winner,” Roberta Krepinski, the ultrathin reference librarian, had gushed. When Roberta talked about how much she loved her work, her tightly curled carrot-colored ringlets all bounced at once. I worried about her, though, because I was always afraid she wasn’t eating enough. I thought devouring books and chocolates should go together, but Roberta didn’t like people to munch while they were reading her books, by which she meant the library’s. I didn’t argue, because I’d learned long ago you couldn’t win an argument with a librarian.

  Where I came into Roberta’s line of sight revolved around the fact that she ran special events at the library. “And anyway,” she’d burbled while working with me in October, “everyone is so sick of the usual Christmas potluck.”

  “So that’s what you voted between?” I asked. “Me and potluck?”

  A frown creased Roberta’s brow. “No, Goldy. We wanted you.”

  So Roberta and I hammered out the details. First issue for discussion in the contract: Why was Roberta insisting on my doing a holiday breakfast? What were we going to have, rum toddies and toast? No, no, Roberta replied. This, too, was something the staff had voted on. With an early Saturday-morning event, everything could be cleaned up by nine-thirty, and the library could open on schedule at ten. The party would have a festive air, Roberta assured me, because volunteers already were planning on decking out the shelves with ropes of greenery and a profusion of red bows. The breakfast itself would be held in the library’s high-ceilinged reading room. There, a gas fire produced flames that looked so realistic, the librarians sometimes caught kids trying to roast marshmallows.

  At the beginning of the second week of December, despite my early-to-bed routine, Tom assessed me grimly and said I looked horrible. Not only was he concerned about the number of events I’d done, he told me I hadn’t been able to hide my insomnia. I said my bout of not sleeping had been precipitated by the appearance of Sandee, and if his department would do their job and find her, I’d be able to drift off to Dreamland without a care. He ignored this and urged me to cancel the library event. He asked why I couldn’t let them have their potluck after all. I pointed out to him that our town’s librarians had put their hands on every single one of my requests for out-of-print French cookbooks. I couldn’t abandon them at the last minute.

  “You never say no,” Tom said. “You’re planning a breakfast that morning, a lunch at noon, and a dinner that evening. You’ll never make it.”

  “Not true.” From the oven, I pulled a test of the cheese pie I was hoping to serve the librarians. “Julian will be helping with the lunch and dinner,” I went on, referring to my enterprising twenty-two-year-old helper, who lived in Boulder. “And if I truly am out of the library before ten, I’ll have plenty of time to skedaddle over to the conference center and get set up for the garden-club ladies.”

  “That’s another group you should have let fend for themselves. Whoever heard of a cookie exchange where nobody makes cookies?”

  Actually, I had, and was grateful for it. Unlike the library party, the lunch and cookie exchange for the Aspen Meadow Garden Club was going to he hugely profitable. All the cookies the ladies would be trading had been
made by two people: Julian and me. To the garden-club ladies, who was actually making the cookies was a mere technicality. Like the library staff considering a potluck, the garden-club members had thought making their own cookies would ruin all the fun. I mean, who really wants to be hassled with rolling, shaping, baking, icing, and decorating mounds of sugar-cookie dough during the holidays?

  Who indeed. Julian and I had spent hours happily cutting out reindeer, snowflakes, Santas, trees, wreaths, and bells, which we’d then frosted and frozen. Before the luncheon, I had one last baking chore to complete: the making of the gingerbread-house door prizes, to be given to three lucky ticket holders when things wrapped up. My other server had canceled, claiming her husband had surprised her with a ski trip. Julian had promised to look for a replacement. I doubted he would be successful. And if the weather turned suddenly frigid, I was worried about Julian’s and my ability to zip around serving sixty women without anything getting cold. But we would manage, I reassured myself. We always did.

  Still, the library event came first…chronologically, anyway. Roberta had said that the staff would love to have a Dickens-themed party to celebrate the end of another year of dealing with budget cuts, book damage, thefts of movies, and folks who had to be kicked out of the library for drinking pop, eating pizza, and being disruptive…usually when there was a fight over cell-phone usage.

  So in the end we’d decided on several dishes: French toast, made in the library kitchen and kept warm in their oven. I’d also be offering the cheese pies, slices of coffee cake, chocolate cookie bars, bowls of fresh fruit, and for the meat lovers, spiral-cut ham. Roberta gave me free rein to use Dickens titles for the dishes. I said what I always did when clients wanted something: No problem!

  To drink, I’d be serving coffee, tea, rum-laced eggnog, and champagne. At breakfast. On a workday. I had learned that librarians could be naughty, too.

  Because I was going to be making the French toast and cheese pies fresh the morning of the event, Roberta and I had agreed that the evening before, she and a couple of staff members and volunteers would help me put out all the long tables, folding chairs, linen, and tableware. We were set to do this between four and five o’clock, which was closing time on Fridays. I’d been more than happy to do the afternoon setup, as I’d had an extremely busy week. That Friday evening, the one obligation of Goldilocks’ Catering was a six-course vegetarian dinner for two that was paying more than a buffet for twenty. It was being ably handled by Julian.

  Directly after the reading room was set up, I was looking forward to the night off. While I was involved with the tables, linens, and china, Arch, whose room was still a wreck, was going to study in a carrel at the library. Then he was spending the night with Todd Druckman, his best friend. Arch and Gus Vikarios, Arch’s newly discovered half brother, had become very close over the last six months, and I’d been a bit worried about Todd feeling like a fifth wheel. But the three boys had bonded so well that I’d been pleased, if only because it meant we had one more set of drivers when it came to skating, snowboarding, and staying or sleeping over—the boys’ term for slumber parties, an expression way too girlish for cool guys to use.

  This sleepover was ostensibly for the boys to study together for their Latin exam, their last test before the holiday break. Todd’s mother had offered to drive them to and from the exam. I was so grateful I could have kissed her, but instead I gave her several bags of frozen cookies. We had plenty.

  Tom did not have any pressing investigations under way, and he had promised to come home Friday night and make a ragout “just for the two of us,” which we would enjoy, he said, before a roaring fire—the real kind. The rest of the night, he’d warned, was also “just for the two of us.” Maybe I wouldn’t be going to sleep early. But we would be in bed. Yes!

  I put Sandee, or whoever she was, out of my head…at least during the day. I ordered food, worked with clients, put on a flurry of parties, and looked forward to my husband’s ragout…and whatever else he had in mind.

  When Friday, December 15, finally rolled around, I was exhausted and wanted to get set up for the library breakfast as quickly as possible. Arch told me I should be careful. The Latin for “as quickly as possible” was quam celerrime. Julius Caesar, Arch explained, had been exceedingly fond of doing things quam celerrime—and look what had happened to him.

  Was today the Ides of December? I asked as the van’s tires crunched through the packed snow on Main Street. It was not, Arch replied. The fifteenth of March, May, July, and October were the Ides. It was the thirteenth of every other month, including December. But he didn’t think the teacher would ask that, he added, since their teacher had just explained it to them two days ago.

  Well, at least we got that straightened out, I thought as I circled the packed library parking lot for the staff entrance. Unfortunately, that door was blocked by a library van and an SUV. Peeved, I did another two laps of the lot before someone finally backed out and I snagged a space. As Arch and I stepped out of my van, I took a deep breath. The air had turned cold and sharp, and the snow that had begun to swirl down in the early afternoon was now falling steadily, blown sideways by a frigid wind. At least Arch, who had a learner’s permit, had not wanted to practice his driving skills by piloting the van through the white stuff. For this I was thankful.

  Once Arch was seated at a carrel outside the big reading room, Roberta, two staff members, three volunteers, and I began our work. Roberta promised to ask the library van driver to hurry his unloading so I could back my own vehicle up to the staff entrance and off-load my supplies. The library was busy. Roberta’s curls all bounced at once as she told me heightened activity on Friday afternoon was normal. Folks wanted to snag their books, CDs, and DVDs before the weekend began. With the return to standard time, the days shortening, and darkness falling earlier and earlier, folks were reading more. Of course, I was also aware that people were eating more, and for that I was grateful.

  The trio of patrons in the reading room when Roberta and I started working were all men, all beavering away on laptops. Two were gray-haired and one, working in the area with wi-fi, was bald. They sat as far as possible from one another. It didn’t look as if a single one of them was using library materials. These fellows were hunched over their keyboards, I surmised, because they were working on résumés. With their furrowed brows and secretive manner, I recognized the desperate look of the unemployed. I knew; I’d been there once myself. Sadly, Roberta whispered to me, once folks were dumped from their places of work, they often made the library their office.

  When Roberta politely asked them to take their computers elsewhere so we could get ready for a staff breakfast, every one of the men balked. Even though there was less than an hour before the library closed, they didn’t have time to move their…stuff, as they called it, and get set up again. They needed to use every minute, they insisted. After squabbling with Roberta for a moment, the bald one stalked out with his laptop under his arm. The obstinacy from the two remaining men melted when I offered them Christmas cookies, which they could take home. Inside my van, I just happened to have a couple of extra treat bags.

  It never ceased to amaze me how useful food bribes could be.

  I dutifully trooped with the two fellows to the parking lot, where I handed them their cookies. The profusion of thanks they gave me made me wish I could fix them dinner, too. I remembered thinking: Too bad that angry bald fellow hadn’t stayed, so I could have offered him a treat.

  But I had, as we say in food service, other fish to fry. Back in the library, Roberta, the staff, the volunteers, and I hustled around setting up. By four-fifteen, we had moved the chairs and end tables, plus the desks, out of the reading room. I raced back outside. The library van was gone from the staff entrance, but the clown with the SUV had parked it halfway between two places, and I had to maneuver and reverse, maneuver and reverse, just to get my van to a decent unloading position.

  With ten minutes lost, the volunteers and
I worked frantically to carry in all my dishes, linen, and serving paraphernalia. When the first warning came over the loudspeakers that the library would be closing in fifteen minutes, I jumped. Ominous blinks from the overhead fluorescents illuminated the fact that the reading room was not even close to being ready for the next morning. The workers and I waited until the announcement concluded and the library lighting returned to normal before cracking open the serving tables and covering them with tablecloths.

  “Oh, dear, I thought you all would be further along by now.” When Roberta spoke and nodded at the same time, all her hair’s red ringlets bobbed in agreement. “I’d love to help you finish, but it’s my job to go around and make sure patrons are aware we’re shutting down.”

  “We’ll manage while you round up the stragglers,” I replied, although I sure couldn’t understand why the blaring announcement and flashing lights weren’t enough to scare any soul out of the stacks.

  Roberta sensed my doubt and leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially. “I have to make sure people aren’t ignoring us, and that we’ve allowed enough time to clean up. Last week at this time, somebody had brought in fried chicken, coleslaw, and beans, and spilled it all over one of the tables. Can you believe it? It took us an hour to make things presentable again.” I nodded; I’d seen food messes—including ones spilled over books—that would have straightened Roberta’s hair. “The single fear the food smugglers have is that a real human is coming around to chuck them out. That usually forces them to clean up their act.” Her thin strawberry eyebrows climbed her pink forehead. “Still other folks are so soothed by the quiet and warmth of the library, they fall asleep. It can take the dozers the full fifteen minutes until we close to wake up. I keep threatening to buy an electric cattle prod, and use it to give the stragglers and secret eaters a real shock.”

  “Okeydoke,” I replied, not wanting to conjure up that particular mental picture. The workers and I unfurled the first of the white tablecloths. “We’ll be fine.”