Sweet Revenge

by Diane Mott Davidson

  10

  I sat, stunned, for a few minutes as I tried to think of what to do. Finally the sergeant told me it was time to go.

  “Criminals do that, don’t they?” he remarked as he walked me to the staircase. “Make ya feel awful whenever ya see ’em.”

  I wanted to retort that Patricia was no criminal. I’d catered her wedding reception, for God’s sake. I’d seen her put a forkful of low-cal angel food cake into Frank Ingersoll’s waiting mouth. She’d burst out laughing when he’d swallowed it, and she’d winked at me. Even if she’d figured out Sandee was following Drew, and had been less than pleasant to deal with, it wasn’t all her fault. The sergeant had told her she was free to leave. So…she’d been let go. But I supposed sergeants became jaded and saw most of their charges as guilty. So instead I merely thanked him and walked haltingly back down the stairs. I tried to think. By the time I arrived at the ground floor, I had gathered my wits enough to realize I wanted to talk to Patricia some more.

  I asked the desk sergeant if I could give Patricia Ingersoll a ride home. A smile cracked his doughy face as he said he would make a call and find out the prisoner’s status. After a few moments of bureaucratic squabbling interspersed with being put on hold, the sergeant informed me that my friend was all set and didn’t need transport, as he called it. When I asked if I could meet my friend at the door where she was being discharged, he replied that she’d already left.

  “That was quick.”

  “Yeah, they’re usually real eager to get out of here.” I got another big smile, which I returned. The sergeant was much friendlier since I’d given him the cookies, and he offered the information that a couple of folks from Brewster Motley’s office had dropped off Patricia’s car in the jail parking lot. I shook my head, trying to imagine how much Brewster’s office would bill Patricia for that particular favor. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t have worked to fold Patricia into my van alongside Arch, Gus, Todd, and a truckload of snowboarding equipment. The three boys would call and holler to one another and command me to turn up the music!, all while Patricia tried to tell me her theories about Drew’s murder.

  Perhaps it was good Patricia had her own transport.

  I plodded toward the van through the whispering fall of snow. I realized that my visit with Patricia had not made me feel like a kind, moral person who had visited her catering client and friend in need. Instead, after the library breakfast and the garden-club lunch, my interchange with Patricia had made me painfully weary. I wasn’t talking run-of-the-mill weary, but bone-weary, ready to spend a day or two in bed. Maybe that was because now, given what Patricia had said about Drew’s stalker, I was convinced that Sandee Brisbane was really alive and somehow involved in what had happened to the former D.A.

  Were we next, as Patricia feared? Remembering John Richard’s shot-up, bloodied body, I simply could not face the thought. Plus, I was scheduled to cater tonight, and for that I needed to be alert. Instead, I leaned against the van for a few moments, drinking in the cold, snowy air.

  What was called for, I decided once I’d pulled myself together and started the van chugging out of the department lot, was some more caffeine. Or chocolate. Or both. In any event, the boys would definitely want steaming cocoa with marshmallows melting on top, so I rationalized stopping at an expensive coffee shop to do some indulging.

  Fifteen minutes later, after laying out enough money for the down payment on a car, I concentrated on not allowing my hands to wobble as I carried a heavily laden cardboard tray out to my van. I’d splurged on new thermally lined covered mugs, which the coffee-shop employees had happily washed. They’d filled three of them with extra-hot cocoa mounded with fluffy marshmallows, and one with extra-hot mocha—for yours truly. I put the tray on the passenger seat, started the van, and pulled out my mocha.

  The first sip was too hot. I replaced the drink in its carrier as unexpected tears rose in my eyes. Back on the road, I stomped on the accelerator and kept myself warm hoping Sandee was somewhere extremely cold. Incredibly, this worked for the entire twenty minutes it took my straining van’s engine to make it back up the hill, to the Regal Ridge Snow Sports Area.

  Even at four o’clock, darkness was descending like a velvet cloak. Enormous overhead lights at the RRSSA illuminated the thick veil of swirling flakes, behind which skiers and snowboarders merrily squirted down the mountain. I could not make out Arch and his pals, so I parked in the lot facing the ski slope, alongside a line of cars with their motors running. I had no doubt that those vehicles held mothers as worried and protective as yours truly. Why did we think anxiously watching for our children would keep them from harm? I had no idea.

  I put in another call to Tom, reached his voice mail again, and told him where I was. I left a brief summary of my visit with Patricia Ingersoll, which had brought up more questions than it had provided answers. And speaking of questions, had Tom discovered anything about Sandee? I asked. Oh, and I’d had a bit of an encounter with Larry Craddock. Sergeant Boyd could fill him in on the details. Also, Larry had claimed that Drew had had two valuable maps, and had offered them for sale. Meanwhile, Drew had only had one map on him, which the department had discovered inside his clothes. So either somebody had stolen the additional map, leaving the one inside the coat, or somebody had stolen both, and Drew had had another map in his inside pocket when he’d offered the first two to Larry.

  What did Tom think? I wondered.

  And while I was asking questions, I went on, had the department figured out by what means Drew Wellington had died?

  While speaking into my cell, I furrowed my brow as I noticed a particularly fast-moving skier. It was a woman, judging from her slender shoulders and long hair. She wasn’t wearing a hat, and her curly hair flew out above her goggles and around her head. As I watched in horror, she began to ski even faster as she approached a group of kids waiting in the lift line near the bottom of the hill. The kids yelped and jumped out of her way, but the woman kept on going. What was the matter with her? Was she in some kind of race? If so, with whom? I thought I heard her scream for help as she approached a crowd of skiers who’d already reached the bottom and were making their way over to the lift line. The woman was still skiing madly, out of control.

  She crashed into the moving snake of skiers like a grenade. Bodies, skis, and poles went flying. There were shouts for help. I leaped from the van at the same time that a dozen mothers with the same idea jumped from their vehicles. We all were intent on hurrying over to see who was hurt and how badly. Unfortunately, it was slow going. A cold wind bit through my jacket. My sneaker-clad feet slipped and slid on the snowpacked pavement. By the time I got to the scene of what Arch and his pals would have called a major yard sale, I was cursing snow sports. Really, though, I was once again ripped up with worry: this time over whether my son was at the bottom of the pile of bodies.

  But Arch was not there. Other mothers fretted over offspring, brushing off snow, checking for sore spots, and casting murderous glances at the woman who’d been skiing so wildly. Still flopped on her backside in the snow, she was sobbing uncontrollably. Perhaps she hadn’t injured anyone but herself.

  Beside the prone figure, a mother was clutching her son to her. He looked about ten, and seemed more curious about what had happened than he was hurt. Still, the mother hollered at the woman, “The ski patrol should yank your ticket for the rest of the season! You don’t belong on the slopes.”

  “That’s enough,” I told the angry mother. I leaned over the crying woman. “It was an accident.” Oh God. The skier was Roberta Krepinski.

  I looked around. The angry mother was stomping back to her car. Farther away, there were mothers tending to their kids and members of couples assuring one another that they were okay. Alas, there were never more than two members of the ski patrol on duty at RRSSA, and neither one of them was anywhere in sight. I slipped through the white stuff until I got to a snowboarder, and asked him to see if there was an extra person mannin
g the lift who could come over and help us. Then I knelt down next to Roberta.

  “It’s Goldy.” I kept my voice low. “Tell me if you think anything’s broken. Only don’t move.”

  “Oh God, Goldy, I’m so sorry.” Roberta grunted and tried to right herself.

  “Stop! You’re only going to make yourself feel worse.”

  “I’m okay, really. It was so stupid.” She began blubbering again. In spite of my warnings, she rolled over on her right side and cursed her skis as she released them from her boots. With a terrific moan, she heaved herself into a sitting position. “Did I hurt anybody? Oh God, please say no.”

  I glanced around for any lingering mothers or injured skiers. “I don’t think so. Not seriously, anyway.” She moaned again and tried to get onto her hands and knees. “Please don’t try to get up, Roberta, you’re just going to—”

  “I’m fine!” She collapsed clumsily onto her backside, then put her head in her hands. She’d lost one of her gloves in the collision, and her hair was hanging in wet clumps.

  “Roberta, come on. How about some aspirin? I’ve got some in my car. Come to think of it, I’ve got some hot—”

  “I don’t want aspirin…Please don’t go to any trouble. I just felt dizzy again, the way I did this morning when I fainted. I…lost control of my skis. I’ve never been a good skier. I shouldn’t have come here. I was trying to get my mind off everything that’s happened.”

  “Okay, lady, calm down.” The stocky, red-suited ski patrolman had schussed up so quickly, I hadn’t even heard him. He released his skis and bent down. “Be quiet for a minute while I check you out, okay?”

  “No!” she yelped. “I don’t want—”

  “Does this hurt?” the man asked, grasping Roberta’s ankles.

  “Please, I’m okay. Just let me go home. Okay, my toes are frozen. But if you’ll just get me to my car, I’m sure they’ll thaw and—”

  “How about this?” The patrolman, undaunted by Roberta’s protests, continued his probing until he had thoroughly checked her for injuries. Once he’d determined nothing was broken or sprained, he helped Roberta to a standing position and requested that I take her skis and poles. “Can you get her warmed up before she tries to drive her own car?” he asked me. For the first time I saw his deeply lined, tanned face. “I don’t want her to drive when she’s shaken up like this.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  The patrolman’s expression was one of relief. When he’d skied away, I picked up Roberta’s skis and poles and helped her to my van, which I’d left running, thank God. Once I’d moved the drinks tray and situated a shivering Roberta in the passenger seat, I handed her the mocha, now just warm instead of boiling hot, and ordered her to drink it. She took a big swallow and put the mug back in the holder.

  “I’m really much better now. I think maybe I’m coming down with something, a cold or the flu. I should just go home and go to bed.”

  “This has been difficult on everybody,” I commiserated. “I was just at the jail, where I saw Patricia Ingersoll—”

  “Do you think she killed Drew?”

  “No, and the police don’t either. She’s been released. The evidence they had against her proved to be a nonstarter.”

  Roberta reached for the mocha and drank some more. Her face looked troubled. “I know she’s kind of a friend of yours, but…she may not be as nice a person as you think she is.”

  “Oh? What do you mean?”

  “She’s at the library an awful lot. She’s even held some Losers meetings there. And I would see her talking with her hairdresser nearly every week or so, and I don’t think it was about her coiffure.”

  “Really? How do you know the person is her hairdresser?”

  “I know because she’s my hairdresser, too. Although you could never tell it now,” she muttered as her fingers attempted to untangle the masses of curls. “There are a lot of rumors that my hairdresser may also sell prescription drugs, like Ritalin, on the side. People take Ritalin illegally, as an energy booster or to help them concentrate, or to lose weight. Exercise and diet sometimes aren’t seen as enough, if you want to be really thin.”

  “You’re saying Patricia buys Ritalin from her hairdresser in the library?” I asked, incredulous.

  “I don’t know that that’s the case for sure, or I’d call the police. But it does seem rather strange that they’re always meeting there, isn’t it? I mean, especially since they aren’t checking out any books.”

  So there was drug dealing in the library, in addition to murder. The world was going to hell in a handbasket.

  I checked my watch as Roberta continued to drink my mocha. I didn’t mind. Arch and the boys were due at the van in ten minutes. Roberta seemed to have calmed down, and a question was gnawing my brain. Had Roberta ever seen Sandee at the library? In any context? Sandee was a former stripper, and I wouldn’t have put it past her to deal drugs—or anything else, for that matter.

  “Roberta, were you in town when my ex-husband was found murdered last summer?”

  She sipped the mocha. “Yes. Why?”

  “Do you know,” I said slowly, “or did you know Sandee Brisbane? She was Cecelia Brisbane’s daughter.” When Roberta didn’t say anything, I swallowed. “Sandee confessed to murdering my ex. Then she disappeared into that big forest fire we had last summer, up in the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve.”

  Roberta shook her head. “I knew Cecelia. Not Sandee, or Alexandra, as Cecelia called her. I read that Alexandra—Sandee, that is—had been burned to death in that fire. If she’s dead, why are you worrying about her?”

  I bit my lip. “There’s a possibility she’s still alive. Patricia thinks Sandee was following Drew and her. You know the young woman who was sending hostile e-mails to Drew Wellington from libraries, whom the police were looking for? It might be Sandee.”

  Roberta gave me a dubious look.

  “Listen, Roberta,” I plowed on. “I’m convinced I saw Sandee at the library yesterday afternoon, right before you found Drew. She…it looked as if she might be watching him. Or maybe she was meeting with him, or planning to, I don’t know. Sandee scares me, Roberta. She killed John Richard. She could be after Arch. Or me. Maybe you saw her and didn’t know it, or noticed something relevant. Some little thing that you wouldn’t think was important at the time? It could help me figure out why Sandee was at the library and what her interest in Drew Wellington might have been. She’s a young woman, slender build, with long brunette hair. Please tell me if you think you might have seen her.”

  Roberta exhaled a long stream of air and looked out the windshield. “No, I haven’t seen her, Goldy. One of those threatening e-mails did come from our library, though. Unfortunately, our surveillance system is digital, and doesn’t keep more than the previous two days of images. So we don’t have a face to go with the use of the computer that day.” She bit the insides of her cheeks. “There was something else strange that happened yesterday afternoon. Around half past three, Drew Wellington apparently staggered up to the checkout desk. The librarian who was manning the desk thought he might have been…hurting in some way. But Drew didn’t check anything out, and the librarian got distracted, and next thing you know, he was gone.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t check out a book? Did he return one? Did he talk to anyone?”

  “No, nothing. That’s all I know. Look, I should go. Thanks for being so nice and helping me out. And for the mocha. I’ll find a way to pay you back, Goldy, I promise.”

  “You don’t have to pay me back, and you don’t really have to go,” I assured her. “You’re not bothering me in the slightest.” I felt as if I was clinging to her, my source of information, my reference librarian. Maybe, in spite of what she said, she’d seen Sandee eyeing Arch. Maybe she was the one person who could help. “Roberta, please don’t leave!” But she had already slid her lithe body out the door, which she slammed behind her. She took a moment to retrieve her skis and poles, mumbled her thanks
again, then took off. In the distance, a muffled gong sounded for the ski lift to close, which meant no more up trips, just down ones. I watched Roberta’s red hair, the ringlets now hanging like seaweed, bob through the crowd of skiers. I hit the dashboard with my fist.

  “Hey, Mom, chill!” Arch opened the passenger door, but his voice sounded far away. I glanced over at him. Arch, with his goggles on top of his head, had drawn his sweaty, impatient face into a mass of wrinkles. “We need you to push the button for the side door, okay?” I whacked the dashboard again. “Mom? What’s the matter, anyway?”

  “Nothing!” I cried as I banged the steering wheel with both hands.

  “Do you have a lot of stored-up anger?”

  Dear God, I thought, deliver me from a tenth grader taking an elective in psychology. “I’m fine.” I hit the button to release the side door. “Just put your snowboards in the back and hop in.”

  “Right, Mom. You just smacked that dashboard and the steering wheel ’cuz they were pissing you off.”

  I took a deep breath. Arch worried about me endlessly, and occasionally covered up his concern with brattiness. “Sweetheart, I’m fine. Look. I’ve got cocoa for you, Todd, and Gus, and it’s getting colder every second you leave that door open.”

  Arch muttered, “Oh, Mom.” Still, he quietly acquiesced, and within five minutes the snowboards were loaded and the boys had stowed the rest of their gear in the back of the van. I handed the boys their drinks, and there was a chorus of thank-yous. My tires crunched over the packed snow of the parking lot as we joined the long line of cars. Ahead of us, clouds of exhaust crystallized in the freezing air. As we headed home, the boys sipped their hot chocolate and talked in excited tones about shredding, cruising, and having yard sales, which had nothing to do with domestic decluttering and everything to do with what my generation called wiping out. Well, at least they were happy.

  I joined another string of cars on the interstate, their bright brake lights already illuminating the tarry dusk. When my cell rang, I slowed and tentatively answered. I didn’t like the idea of trying to talk while I was on a snowpacked interstate, with white stuff still coming down and three boisterous teenagers in the backseat.