Sweet Revenge

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Yes.”

  “That’s awful,” Arch said. “He was a good guy.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “He came to our American history class and showed us maps. They were really cool, with lots of colors and stuff. He didn’t bore us with a lot of dates either. We asked him how he’d learned so much, and he said he was an autodidact.”

  “Is that Latin?”

  “No, Mom, it’s Greek. It means you taught yourself.”

  “So what made him such a…good guy?”

  “I don’t know. He said his favorite thing to study was smuggling.”

  “Smuggling? That’s what he taught himself? As in, how folks used to smuggle rum?”

  “He talked about how the countries that had the maps controlled trade. In the fifteenth, sixteenth, or even the seventeenth centuries? If the Portuguese or Spanish authorities caught a foreigner smuggling out one of their top-secret maps to the Indes, the foreigner would be executed. And in wartime, traitors have always smuggled out maps showing military encampments and defenses. They put the maps inside their underwear, their boots, you name it, to give to the enemy.”

  “Traitors smuggled maps, huh?”

  “Yes, and some Mennonites who were emigrating to this country were afraid they wouldn’t be able to bring over seeds of the winter wheat they’d raised in Ukraine.”

  “But we have winter wheat all over the Midwest in this country.”

  “We do now,” Arch said patiently, “because the Mennonites brought the seeds over with them. Not all of them hid the seeds, but some did.”

  “So, where’d they put them?”

  “In their clothes, Mom. Now please, I need to study.”

  I told him good luck on the exam and hung up. So spies had smuggled out maps to trade routes, war traitors had smuggled out maps in their undies, and some of the Mennonites had concealed seeds in their clothes, eh? I’d once caught a guest trying to steal a whole beef tenderloin from a party. He’d stuck it down his pants, but when he moved, it had slipped to the floor. I’d picked it up and firmly asked him to leave. Marla, who’d been attending, had called after him, “George, we knew that wasn’t all you in there!”

  Thinking of that party, and of Marla and her antics, made me realize again how lonely I felt. I glanced at the clock: half past eight. Well, I knew what would make me feel better, or at least warm things up: cooking.

  There really wasn’t anything left to do except prep the lettuce that would line the plates for the garden club’s strawberry salads. I washed the leaves and wrapped them. Nine o’clock. Time had been passing too fast, and now it was going too slowly.

  I decided to add another dish to the garden-club ladies’ buffet. I mean, what was a ladies’ lunch without a molded salad? A friend in the Episcopal Church Women had shared a recipe for a holiday molded salad that was made from lime Jell-O, mayonnaise, horseradish, sliced bananas, and crushed pineapple. It sounded weird but was actually luscious—and festive. I hunted up the ingredients, drained and boiled the pineapple juice, mixed in the Jell-O until it dissolved, then stirred in everything else and poured the concoction into several oiled molds. I put the molds in the walk-in, then stared at the marble counter Tom had so lovingly installed. I glanced at the clock for at least the sixth time since he’d left: 10:30. He must still be in his meeting.

  But he hadn’t called, as he usually did. Dammit to hell. Fighting with the Jerk for seven years had made me quail at the prospect of marital conflict. I didn’t know how to handle it, because before I could get close to handling anything, the Jerk had always slapped my face and yelled at me to shut up!

  I forced myself to check my computer. Was there anything else that needed doing for the luncheon? There was not. At some point, the police would have to let me into the library to retrieve the dishes, silverware, and linens I’d set up for the breakfast…but I imagined that wouldn’t be any time in the immediate future. Luckily, I had plenty more where those had come from.

  I clicked over to my calendar. The MacArthurs’ dinner loomed. I’d promised Hermie a genuine twelve-boy curry. Unfortunately, I suddenly remembered, I didn’t have the main dish put together, and on the condiment side, I was still a few boys short.

  The previous evening, I’d prepared, strained, and chilled the chicken stock. This morning, I’d defatted the stock. The chicken I’d used to make the stock was also going to form the base for the curry…as soon as I could skin and bone all those thighs. I put on my plastic gloves and got to work.

  There’s nothing quite like skinning and boning cooked chicken thighs to concentrate the mind. The work was tedious and dull, and required none of the aesthetic sense and skill one needed to prepare a salade composée, nor the culinary know-how involved in making soufflés or timbales. For the fiftieth time, I mentally ran through the events I’d witnessed at the library.

  I’d been setting up when Arch and a bald fellow had become embroiled in an altercation. Then I’d noticed someone stalking through the shelves at the back of the library, and right after that, I’d seen Sandee, or someone who looked just like her, at the windows. Had she been the one creeping around the stacks? I thought so. A few minutes later, the emergency exit alarm had gone off. I’d heard Roberta moaning for help. We’d lowered Drew Wellington to the floor. I hadn’t been able to find a pulse.

  Then Neil Tharp, Drew’s assistant or business partner or whatever he was, had demanded information from me. So had Elizabeth Wellington. I hadn’t given them any.

  I also went over what I’d learned: that Marla said Drew had had woman problems, and that the cops still thought Sandee was dead. Plus, the cops had led me to believe that there was some kind of scandal associated with Drew Wellington’s election defeat. And it wasn’t just trying to get the news of his DUI hushed up. Okay, I was speculating…but could there have been something else? Something worse than what had come out in the news? Unfortunately, I hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask Tom about it once we’d gotten home.

  Also, Drew had been receiving threatening e-mails, and Patricia Ingersoll and Drew Wellington had been an item. But for some reason, Drew had complained into a cell phone that his ex-wife and his girlfriends, plural, were making life difficult for him. Who were the girlfriends? Or had he just been boasting?

  And then Patricia had come over, sobbing and asking for help, because she was scared. She’d had lots to say about Drew’s enemies, including the fact that she thought Drew was being followed. Drew and his partner, Neil, were on the outs. But before she could go into much detail, she’d been arrested.

  Which you had to admit, was pretty darn quick. A bloody X-Acto knife had been found in Patricia’s house? Someone was going to an awful lot of trouble to get Patricia arrested before Drew Wellington’s body was even cold.

  I placed all the chicken morsels into a large vat, covered it, and placed the vat into the walk-in. Then I chopped apples and onions and sautéed them in butter and curry powder. The luscious, pungent aroma perfumed the air. I added flour, cooked it into a roux, and added judicious amounts of stock until the sauce was thick. Then it was time for adding whipping cream. Patricia Ingersoll wouldn’t have approved, but my mind screamed, Yum!

  I retrieved the vat of chicken, stirred all the morsels into the sauce, and set the whole thing aside to cool. Then I opened a new file in my computer. I titled it simply Drew, then wrote down all the things I knew and all the things I wanted to know. At the top of the list was: Did I in fact see Sandee Brisbane? After she killed my ex-husband and confessed to the crime, had she indeed escaped through a burning forest? If so, then why in the world was she back in Aspen Meadow? Because Sandee or her look-alike wanted something from Drew Wellington, I guessed. But if so, what? I stared at the screen.

  Sandee’s parents were dead. Tom had told me her boyfriend was long gone back to Nashville and was living with another woman. But Sandee Brisbane had graduated from Aspen Meadow High School; I’d seen her photo in a yearbook. Not only that, but
she’d worked at the Rainbow Strip Club. So I was willing to bet that somebody in town knew more about Sandee than law enforcement did.

  I thought I heard a noise outside, and I jumped. What was the matter with me? I did a check of the security system: everything was turned on and working. Was my paranoia exploding because I was upset about Drew? No, I told myself. I’d seen dead people before. I was married to a homicide investigator; I knew the nature of his work. But this thing with Sandee was personal. She’d killed my ex-husband, in revenge for raping her when she was a hospital patient. Now I believed she was back, and I was afraid.

  At midnight, my brain and body gave out, so I showered and went to bed. Much later, I registered Tom running the bathwater. The clock said it was just before two. When he rustled the sheets, I asked if he wanted to talk. He said no, and mumbled something about being wanted down at the department first thing in the morning. The county pathologist and the coroner were working overtime tonight.

  “I don’t want this case to come between us,” I whispered once the lights were out.

  Tom pulled me in for a long hug, his cool, slightly damp skin next to my already warm body. It was delicious and made me shiver with delight. He murmured, “Nothing will come between us.” Then he fell asleep.

  The next morning, Tom was up even before our alarm went off at five. By half past five, I was standing in our kitchen, bleary-eyed and foggy-brained, tapping my foot as I waited for the espresso machine to hurry up and heat.

  “I’m afraid to ask how much of that stuff you’ve had in the past twenty-four hours, Miss G.” Tom’s voice startled me. “You should try some of the coffee from our department machine. That’d cure your addiction in a hurry.”

  “Thanks for the words of encouragement,” I replied as the twin ropes of espresso finally began spurting into my cup. “Remember, you promised to tell me if you found out anything significant.”

  “So how do you define significant, wife? That there was so much snow outside the library emergency exit, we couldn’t even tell how many people had been there?”

  “I want to know if I did indeed see Sandee Brisbane at the library. She killed John Richard and she could go after Arch.”

  Tom’s ski parka made a silky brushing sound as he put it on. “That proves my point: that you are not the person to try to search for someone you think was stalking Drew Wellington.” He gave me a serious look. “Drew was a prosecutor. We’re going to look at everything, Goldy, which means you don’t have to.”

  “You’re going to have your cell phone on today?”

  “Are you planning on calling me while I’m meeting with my lieutenant? Or when I’m listening to the coroner give his report?”

  “Okay, okay.” I sipped some espresso, then allowed myself to be kissed on both cheeks.

  At the door, Tom said, “Look, the temperature dropped like a bomb last night. It’s two below zero out there, and I want to make sure your van starts.”

  “I’m just going to Marla’s. Hopefully, folks will have gotten the word that the library shindig is at her place.”

  “You’re not going anywhere if your engine doesn’t turn over, Miss G. Give me your keys, okay?”

  “Sure. Thanks.” I rooted around in my purse until I found my key chain. Once Tom was out the door, I tossed my espresso, which had gotten cold. Then I steamed some whipping cream, pulled a second double espresso, and combined the two into a hot, foamy mass. If it was that cold outside, I could work off the extra calories trucking my stuff to and fro.

  Back to business. I sipped my drink and printed out the day’s menus. My walk-in revealed the wrapped grapefruits, ingredients for the cheese pies, and ham. I hustled these, along with the hotel pans of French toast, that also required an egg mixture—this one containing Grand Marnier—that I would bake at Marla’s house. The trays of Christmas Carol Coffee Cake and Bleak House Bars looked passable, despite Boyd’s premature decimating of same. It was good I always made plenty of food. Besides, if the weather was as cold as Tom had said it was, we might see very few folks at Marla’s place. Once the temperature dropped below zero, Aspen Meadow folks tended to weave themselves inside cocoons.

  Outside, I gasped as the wind bit more shrewdly than it ever had in northern Denmark. Out in the driveway, my van, which was running, exhaled plumes of exhaust. Thank goodness for Tom, who had already taken off in his Chrysler. Balancing the box with the grapefruit and pie ingredients, I moved forward too quickly, and my boots slipped on the stepping-stones. I plunked into a stone wall and barely avoided crashing into one of Tom’s lovingly developed beds of Lamium maculatum, now blanketed with white. Once I’d righted myself, I inhaled more of the crystalline air and blinked. All around, every tree branch was perfectly coated with snow. But some of it was blowing into my mouth as I started forward, slid again, uttered an obscenity, and finally heaved the box into the rear of the van.

  It was a miracle that I managed to load the food by quarter past seven and start out for Marla’s place, over on the upper-crust side of town. On Main Street, even though it was early on a Saturday morning, I knew I had to be extra careful, as it was hard to see a thing, including any vehicles that might loom in front or in back of me. Snow blew in great swaths across the pavement, occasionally completely enclosing my vehicle. I couldn’t see how close the car behind me was, or worse, what vehicle might suddenly heave into view. Once I had to brake when a delivery truck appeared out of nowhere. The grille of a pickup loomed in my rearview mirror, and I thought he was going to hit me. It was one of those old trucks you see all the time in Colorado, remnants of the fifties, I supposed. Anyway, I sure hoped the driver had had his brakes checked in the intervening decades.

  “Thank God you made it,” my best friend greeted me when I pounded up her front steps and hit the doorbell with its brass-engraved nameplate: Chez Marla. “Come on, I’ve already got my coffee machine going.”

  Marla’s was undoubtedly the only place where I would feel entitled to show up at the front door, and where the hostess would offer me time to warm up and have a hot drink, in this case another double espresso stirred with cream and spoonfuls of designer fudge sauce. I hugged my friend, took a sip of the drink she offered, and promised to finish it in a bit. Then I backed the van up to the garage doors. Marla offered to help unload the boxes, but I begged her to stay put and field phone calls, in case folks from the library staff were confused as to whether the breakfast was still on, and where it would be held.

  “I’ve already heard from half a dozen people who aren’t coming,” Marla admitted, her voice rueful.

  “I don’t want to know any more, it’ll just depress me. Let me finish with these boxes, and I can start cooking.”

  Marla, who wore a red-and-green-plaid taffeta hostess gown, insisted on taking each box as I arrived at her back door. Once inside my friend’s kitchen, I marveled, as usual, that it was so well equipped—two Viking stoves, a pair of ovens, and three sinks—not to mention great expanses of black granite sparkling with veins of white quartz. Marla had had all of it installed the last time she’d done a remodeling. I always found myself annoyed as well as jealous of this opulence, because Marla did not even cook. But I found this same phenomenon in other houses where I catered. The larger and more luxurious the kitchen, the less likely it was that either husband or wife did anything more in there than make coffee and mix cocktails. Still, I had learned to revel in these situations, because it meant these folks were in ever more dire need of a caterer.

  I put on my apron, washed my hands, and preheated the ovens. Marla shook a finger at me.

  “You didn’t tell me Patricia Ingersoll had been arrested.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Cut the crap, Goldy. And what’s that stuff you started to tell me about Sandee Brisbane?”

  I worked at unwrapping the ingredients for the cheese pies. “I thought I saw Sandee Brisbane out by Regal Ridge a few weeks ago. Then I thought I saw her at the library last night.” Marla’s
eyes widened and her mouth dropped. Silence fell in the kitchen, an unusual occurrence whenever you were with Marla. “You didn’t find that out from the country-club set you’ve been calling, did you?”

  “Sandee survived the fire in the wildlife preserve? How? And if she did, where’s she been for the last six months? Not to mention, why would she come back here?”

  “All good questions, Marla, for which I have no answers.” I mixed the ingredients for the pies and placed them in one oven, then put the ham on a roasting pan and slid it into the other oven. Finally I eyed the pans of French toast. Did Grand Marnier lose its taste or alcohol content if it sat overnight in the refrigerator, suspended in an egg mixture? “Will you taste a piece of French toast if I fry it up quickly for you?” I asked Marla, interrupting her interrogation.

  “Is there sand in the Sahara?”

  I hunted for—and quickly found—a never-used, and undoubtedly prohibitively expensive, copper sauté pan. Once I had several pats of butter sizzling, I dropped in two egg-and-Grand-Marnier-soaked pieces of brioche. Meanwhile, Marla interrogated me on whether the sheriff’s department believed Sandee was back, and by the way, what had they found out about Patricia Ingersoll that had led to her arrest?

  “You never tell me anything,” she complained as she snitched a corner of unsliced brioche.

  “I tell you everything,” I countered, “if you just give me a chance.”

  “By the way, Louise Munsinger called this morning to say Drew was indeed going to marry Patricia, but there was a problem. Something with Elizabeth, she thought. Did you know that?”

  “No. Did you get any details?”

  “Oh, Louise didn’t know any,” Marla said, her voice grumpy.

  “If you learn something, it might help Patricia,” I replied. “Also, we need to find out as much as we can about Sandee Brisbane—”

  “Is that French toast about done?”

  As it turns out, Grand Marnier does not lose its flavor or its proof value if it sits overnight. While Marla made mm-mm noises, I bit into the rich toast, with its crunchy exterior and warm, meltingly moist interior. There are rewards to catering, and one of them is that your delight in food can be indulged from time to time.