“Gorgeous!”
And, I was happy to note, the scent in the air was fresher than usual, probably because of the presence of a dozen gorgeous spruce, holly, and pine arrangements that the garden-club ladies had made up and delivered the day before.
“This is a beautiful place to work,” Grace said, her voice full of admiration.
Well, then. As Grace and I headed toward the kitchen, I squared my shoulders and felt proud again. I loved this space, from its old-fashioned hearth in the center of the dining room to its uneven wood floors. The floors made carrying loaded trays a precarious enterprise, but so far, I’d avoided a disaster in that department. I glanced at the big round tables as Grace and I walked past. I’d rented gold-rimmed white china. It looked stunning next to the overflowing greenery baskets, which I’d asked the garden-club ladies to decorate with big red bows. I was so glad I had attended to all this before all hell had broken loose at the library the previous night.
In the kitchen, I turned on the bright, Tom-found chandelier and asked Grace if she’d like some coffee. She swept the space with her gaze, taking in the stainless espresso machine, the walk-in refrigerator, the freezer, sinks, and shelves full of glass jars and metal cans, all shimmering in the light.
She pulled out one of the ladder-back chairs Tom had found to go with an oak farm table he’d brought from his cabin. “Yes, please, two shots. And if Julian has bestowed you with any of his famous fudge, I’d love some of that, too.”
I exhaled and fired up the machine, then clattered espresso cups into saucers. While the coffee machine was heating up, I placed the cream, sugar, napkins, two dishes, and the can of fudge on top of the farm table. The can actually held two fudge favorites: one was Julian’s patented dark concoction dotted with sun-dried cherries. The other was my own holiday favorite: fudge mixed with crushed peppermint candies. Breakfast!
When I served the espresso, Grace made the appropriate ooh and aah noises, said no thanks, and drank the dark stuff without cream. After she’d taken a sip, I told her she was very welcome, and concentrated on my own dose of caffeine. When things remained quiet, I fastened my gaze on the holiday fudge, in which the peppermint candy glistened like ice. I popped a piece in my mouth and closed my eyes. The luscious, melting texture of the dark chocolate was a perfect foil for the crunch of peppermint. Why didn’t more people have candy first thing in the morning? And while we were at it, how about ice cream for the first meal of the day? I’d given it to Arch when he had his tonsils out—
“I’m here first of all because Julian asked me and I wanted to help you,” Grace began finally. “But,” she said after a pause, “I know about Patricia Ingersoll and her accusers.” Her accusers? Had I imagined it, or had Grace’s voice hardened? In any event, my antennae zinged straight up.
“Okay.” I concentrated on sounding nonchalant. “I guess the news is out everywhere about Drew Wellington—and Patricia’s arrest. But I’m not supposed to talk about the case.”
Grace’s tone softened. “You don’t have to talk to me about it if you don’t want to, Goldy, but I need to get into Drew Wellington’s house.”
I burst out laughing so fast that coffee shot out my nose. Okay, I wanted to know about Sandee Brisbane. Patricia Ingersoll had been arrested. There was that map they’d found on Drew. And now Grace Mannheim wanted to get into the victim’s house.
“Are you nuts, Grace?” I asked when I’d recovered. “The police investigators are there now. They’re combing through every note, every file, every bit of correspondence they can find. They’re tracking Wellington’s movements, checking who called him and the folks he called, from both his home phone and his cell, and when the calls took place. They’re not going to let you into the place. And even if they did, which is a very big if, I doubt you’d find anything of significance.”
Grace said smoothly, “If you don’t know what I’m looking for, how can you say I won’t find it?”
“What are you looking for?”
“Something that belongs to a friend of mine.”
“What?”
“She hasn’t given me permission to say.”
I took another piece of fudge and chewed it thoughtfully. “There’s such a thing as impeding an investigation. Obstructing justice.”
“I’m doing neither.”
I gave up on that tack and said, “So do you know Patricia? Or does your friend whom you’re helping?”
Grace pressed her lips together, all the while assessing me with those dark blue eyes of hers. What was she thinking? It was as hard to tell this time as it had been when I’d first visited her.
“I know Patricia.” She didn’t say anything more.
Why did I always feel as if Grace controlled every conversation? “Come on. Don’t give me such a hard time. I’m trying to help Patricia, too, but we have to be reasonable.”
“You have misgivings about talking to me,” she said at length. “Why? Do you think my emotions, my fondness for Patricia, say, are coloring my thinking? As I recall, it’s because of your emotions, your feelings one way or the other, love or hate, that you get involved solving crimes.”
“Well, I suppose—”
“Stop, let me say my piece.” She canted her head to one side. “I’m not being emotional. In fact, I’ve found that when I’m trying to figure something out, I need to be as bloodless as granite.”
“Blood or no blood, you’re not going to get into Wellington’s house. And why do you think you’d find things the Furman County Sheriff’s Department missed?”
“Because I see things. I do research.” She pursed her lips, and once again that delicately featured face of hers made me smile. “I’m not kidding, Goldy. Yes, I offered to help Julian and you with the lunch today, and I will. But I didn’t make the offer until I heard Patricia had been arrested.”
How do people hear these things? I wondered. Are the gossip lines better than police-band radios?
Grace went on: “I found out her boyfriend, Drew Wellington, had been murdered last night at the Aspen Meadow Library. You were there, I heard, although you didn’t find the body. Patricia had been in the library earlier in the day. Neil Tharp, Drew’s right-hand man in his map-collecting business, was in and out of the library. Elizabeth Wellington, Drew’s ex-wife, we don’t know about. But probably most significant of all, Larry Craddock was there.”
“Who is Larry Craddock?”
She crossed her arms. “Bald? Bad-mannered? Aggressive? He’s a map dealer. Drew used to do business with him, but they had a falling-out. I think Drew drove him out of the market. Drew certainly was more successful than Larry, at any rate.” I blushed, thinking of the fellow who’d harassed Arch. “Ah, I see you may have encountered him.”
“Maybe. There was a bald man who was very uncooperative at the library last night. They kicked him out.”
“That sounds like Larry. As I understand it, the man is obsessed with maps. He also loved his map shop, which went under. Drew used to brag that he could always undercut Larry’s prices. You want my opinion? Drew was in map collecting for the money. Larry, if you’ll allow a bit of possible exaggeration, was in it for his life.”
“Back up. Did you get hold of the surveillance video from the library? I mean, how do you know all this stuff? I thought the cops were the only ones—”
“They are. But Drew’s death is big news and people are talking about it. I made phone calls. I paid visits to old friends. I’ve been up most of the night.”
“If you’ve been up all night, you’re going to find catering awfully fatiguing.”
“I took a power nap very early this morning.” Grace smiled. Once again I found her impenetrable gaze disconcerting. I glanced longingly at the fudge. Would I have better powers of observation if I had another couple of pieces? “Don’t worry about me,” Grace said, her voice gentle. “I really will help you, and I do want to help find out what’s…going on with Patricia.”
I took a deep breath. I needed more
coffee. I needed another report from Marla, and I wanted to know what Tom had found out from the surveillance camera—if he’d tell me—and if there were any other skeletons in Drew Wellington’s closet. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since Drew Wellington’s body had been discovered, and Grace Mannheim knew half the people who’d been in the library. Or at least it seemed that way. Marla might have to give up her Gossip Queen crown.
“Listen, Goldy,” she explained, “I came to know Patricia quite well because I knew Frank, her late husband. After Frank died so suddenly, Patricia started running a sort of self-help group for people who wanted to lose weight. When she started a Boulder chapter, she told me they were having trouble finding a place to meet. So I offered my house. I…grew to like her.”
“You needed to lose weight?” I pulled myself another espresso. “You, Ms. Senior Softball? Baloney.”
“I don’t have anything against people trying to improve themselves. After Frank passed away, I knew Drew Wellington became her lover because she told me. I was glad to see her getting back out into the world after being widowed so young. Drew even dropped her off and then picked her up at my house a couple of times.”
I slugged down what had to be my twelfth shot of espresso that morning. “Did Drew talk much about his business? You said he bragged about how much money he was making. What sort of maps did he sell?” I asked.
“Old maps. Maps of the Old World. Maps of the New World. They’re collectors’ items, antiques. They go for a lot of money these days.”
“Yes, don’t I know. Did Drew ever mention meeting clients at the Aspen Meadow Library?”
Grace narrowed her eyes at me. “Is that what he was doing when he was killed? Meeting a client? Did he have a map with him?”
I could feel my cheeks becoming hot again. “I don’t know.” Yeah, right. And there was Grace, reading me like a fat, fudge-loving foodie. “You say that Larry Craddock was in the map business, too?”
“He helped Drew out when Drew was just getting started, after Drew lost the D.A. election. I guess you could say Larry was Drew’s mentor. But Larry doesn’t really have the temperament to be a salesman,” she said. “One time when Patricia was waiting for Drew at my house, this bald fellow marched onto my front yard. He stood there on the grass as if he owned the place, stamping from foot to foot, impatient for something. Impatient for what? I wondered, since this was my place. Had he not lost the weight he wanted to? I asked myself. Was he going to give Patricia what for? I grabbed the Mace from my cookie jar—I’m not talking mace the spice, here, I’m talking Mace the—”
“I know.”
“But then Drew’s Bentley pulled up, and Patricia, who’d been watching from my dining-room window, ran past me, out of my own house. Turned out, Larry hadn’t been waiting for Patricia, he’d been waiting for Drew. Drew hollered for Patricia to go back into my house, that he would handle things. She turned on her heel and came racing back. At that point, Larry began to shout at Drew, saying he was ruining his business, and that Drew owed him and should let him in on some deal Drew had going, or Drew would end up being sorry. Drew said something to him that calmed him down, and he left. I wanted to call the police, but Drew insisted it wasn’t necessary.”
“Uh-huh,” I said as caffeine finally sparked in my veins. “Who told you that this Larry fellow was at the library yesterday?”
“One of the calls I made was to the Furman County Jail. You leave a message for an inmate, she can call you back. Which Patricia did. And she told me she’d seen Larry Craddock at the library.”
I began to get worried myself, but not about Larry Craddock and whether he was the bald man who’d fought with Arch. I needed to bring in the crates holding the garden club’s chicken, the salads, and the rolls. The tables had to be set. I was not, by God, going to have a second event in two days wrecked by issues of crime and punishment.
“So are you going to let me help with the lunch or not?” Grace asked, her chin tilted up. “You could learn all kinds of things from me that would help in the investigation. Between the two of us, maybe we can figure this thing out.”
“You can help me,” I said at length. “But I’m not sure we can talk about what happened to Drew Wellington.”
Grace turned and began that quickstep out of the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she called, “Why ever not?”
“Because my husband the investigator would go nuclear!” I called back.
Over the next two hours, Grace refrained from asking me any more questions and worked smoothly doing the setup. When the tow truck from Gary’s Garage arrived at half past nine, she oversaw the removal of the errant vehicles. Julian showed up at ten, as promised. He seemed to be enjoying getting to know Grace, as he nodded to acknowledge her and said, “You can be our extra server after all? Cool.” He put down his first crate of vegetables and gave her a quick smile and hug.
“Hey,” I said, half teasing, as I rinsed the baby artichokes he’d brought, “what about me?”
Julian crossed the kitchen and embraced my shoulders. Then he gazed critically at the baby artichokes.
“You going to prep those?” he asked.
“Feel free to take over, Bistro Man.”
“No problem, boss. Plus, I found some great asparagus, and the chocolate cupcakes look fantastic.” Julian’s compact, muscled body darted in and out of the kitchen as he brought in foodstuffs. Then he washed his hands, chose an appropriate knife, and retrieved his favorite vegetable cutting board. He set to work trimming the vegetables. I sighed. When I was Julian’s age, I’d been a young mother up to my elbows in laundry, housecleaning, meals, child care, and dealing with an impossible husband. As a result, I’d tossed perfectionism out the window. Julian, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy being fussy and deliberate. More power to him, I thought as I moved on to buttering the big pans that would hold the chicken.
Grace, meanwhile, was making neat piles of forks, knives, and spoons while cross-examining Julian on any knowledge he might have of Drew Wellington.
Julian concentrated on his cutting board. “I know he was seeing, you know, ah, having an affair with Patricia Ingersoll, ’cuz Marla told me. Patricia is that woman who heads the weight-loss—”
“I know her,” Grace interrupted briskly as she gazed at my printout for the chicken prep. She asked if it was okay to drain the brine off the chicken, rinse it, and pat it dry. Since it was a messy job, I was all too happy to acquiesce. I started to show her where the plastic gloves were that she needed for poultry handling, but she said she knew where they were. How she seemed to have a second sense as to where everything was located in the kitchen, from utensils to foodstuffs, was beyond me. Had she somehow scoped the place out before I arrived? I told my paranoid brain to take a break, and began counting the rolls.
“I did a low-fat, low-cal dinner for Patricia’s Losers group when they met at a Boulder church. It wasn’t fun.” Finished with the artichokes and asparagus, Julian turned on the water so that it gushed into my big steamer. When he moved over to the stove, he went on: “The prep took forever, because Patricia wanted fifty different types of chopped vegetables, a frittata for an appetizer, grilled halibut with stir-fried vegetables for a main course, fudge soufflés for dessert. Technically, it was all low-calorie. But if you had seconds and thirds, which some of the members wanted, you wouldn’t be losing any weight.” Julian looked up from the stove and scowled at us. “Those women came out to the kitchen and began snacking on all the prepped veggies! They were starving, they said. They cut corners off the halibut while I was grilling it. They kept ordering me to hurry up with the appetizer, and then, while the eggs were setting up, one of them lifted the pan lid and dug her fork into the center of my frittata.” Julian shook his head and turned back to the printout. “Since we were in a church, I kept praying she’d get salmonella before the dinner ended. And people wonder why chefs become crazed. It’s a defense, I’m telling you. You start screaming at folks to get out of your kitchen, you h
oller that they’re wrecking your food, you shriek that they’re idiots and you’re going to double-charge them or walk out, and pretty soon you’ve got some street cred in the bitch-slap department.”
“Julian!” I exclaimed, but Grace was laughing. Then she frowned.
“Julian,” she asked, “did you ever cater for Drew Wellington?”
“Now there was a narcissist,” Julian observed as his tennis shoes squeaked across the kitchen floor. He peered into the walk-in, then reemerged with unsalted butter. “Drew Wellington. What a jerk.”
“He’s dead, Julian,” I said in what I hoped was a low, respectful tone.
“Well, that figures,” Julian replied, without missing a beat.
“Julian!”
But Grace held up a hand to keep me from talking. “I need to know why you said that.”
“Because he stiffed me, that’s why!” Julian said vociferously. “The only reason I came all the way over to Flicker Ridge to cater for him was ’cuz Goldy and Tom were on a fishing trip, and ’cuz Drew was old pals with the owner of the bistro where I work. Drew seemed to have lots of old pals. Guess his being a former district attorney let him still play the very big shot role. But he lost his last election, right?”
“Sounds as if you hated him, too,” I said.
“He gave me no tip. Not a nickel. Even Patricia Ingersoll’s women dug into their purses when I was cleaning up. I guess they felt guilty that they’d done so much food snitching. But not Drew Wellington. I doubt he knew the concept of guilt.”
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