The ringing phone ticked me off. I was ravenous, finally able to indulge my appetite, and now somebody wanted something. The interruption was more than I could bear, so I took a big bite of my slice of bread.
“Better let the machine get it,” Julian advised, grinning.
But I peeked at the caller ID anyway. Audrey Millard? After what she’d told me this morning, there was no way I was going to refuse to take her call.
I picked up the receiver, but only managed to say, “Mmf,” before being relieved of the phone by Julian.
“This is Goldilocks’ Catering,” he said. He gave me a wary glance and then said, “No, she’s eating lunch right now—” But I’d already swallowed and grabbed the receiver.
“Hello there, Audrey. Did you tell the sheriff’s department what you told me?”
“I did. They asked me if, besides Father Pete, Holly knew about it, about him. But I really couldn’t say. I certainly didn’t tell Holly. Now I’m scared to death that the department will go pick . . . him . . . up, and then he’ll come after me.”
“Sergeant Xavier?” I asked. “Is she with you?”
“Yes.” She did not sound reassured.
“Audrey, you’ll be okay. The department will have someone stay with you for as long as you need it.”
“Yes,” she said again. Then she didn’t speak for such a long time that I checked the receiver to make sure we were still connected. “I remembered something,” she went on, her voice cautious. “When the investigators were here about Father Pete, I was so upset I forgot to tell them. Sergeant Xavier said I should call the sheriff’s department to tell them, and an investigator is on his way up now.”
Another long silence. “Audrey?” I said.
“It may not be important. But my birthday was the sixth of June. D-Day. Anyway, I’d been asking Holly for years if I could buy one of her homemade jigsaw puzzles for my nephew. But she never seemed to have time to make one. I thought with all she’d gone through with the divorce, with Drew, with trying to establish a new career, well . . . I’d always thought she’d forgotten. So I stopped bugging her about it. You know, she was becoming famous for her collages. Who cared about the jigsaw puzzles? But I thought they were charming. Then, when she came for her confession on Friday, she surprised me with a belated birthday gift. She said because I was a Gemini, I wouldn’t mind. Which made no sense to me, as usual. But then I opened it and it was a jigsaw puzzle.”
I waited through all this, wondering why such a present should occasion a call to me, or to the sheriff’s department. I remembered the unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the table in Holly’s living room. “And . . . what was the puzzle of?”
“It’s a map. I don’t know why Holly thought my nephew would enjoy a map of Asia, but it is pretty, I suppose.”
“A map of Asia?” I repeated dumbly. “Is your nephew . . . interested in Asia?”
“Not in the least. But here’s the part I thought was bizarre. She asked if I had a security system. I said I did . . . I mean, you know, I’m a woman living alone. She seemed relieved. Then she said I needed to open the box at my house. After that, I absolutely had to keep what was inside at home. I could not leave it at the church.”
My heart rate quickened. “Did she say why?”
“She did not. She also said I should keep its existence to myself. The puzzle, I mean. I said, ‘Well, I guess my nephew won’t be getting it, then.’ And she said, ‘No, Audrey, I want this just to be for you.’ She really emphasized those words.” Audrey hesitated. “I still don’t know what’s going on.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither did I. I said to Holly, ‘Why is it just for me? Why can’t I show it to anyone?’ And she laughed. But then she got serious again. ‘Okay, Audrey, listen carefully. If something happens to me, please give it to Father Pete.’ ”
“What?”
Audrey was crying. “And now I can’t. Oh, the policewoman says the investigator is here. I’m going to give him the puzzle from Holly. Do you want to talk anymore? You made me feel so much better this morning.”
“Could you photocopy the puzzle and bring it to the dinner tonight?”
“Yes, I’ll bring you a copy of this map puzzle. I hate to give it up, but Holly was so odd about it, I thought you all should know. I . . . just don’t understand why any of this is happening.”
16
I closed my eyes. All my energy and ability to think were draining out of me. A map. Of Asia. And if something happened to Holly, Audrey was supposed to give the puzzle to Father Pete. But Father Pete lay in a coma. Maybe Holly had told him what all this was supposed to mean: the notes, the jigsaw puzzle, somebody who knew. “Thanks, Audrey.”
“You will find out what happened?” The anxious tone made her voice rise. “I mean, to Father Pete? And . . . and . . . to Holly? You’ll figure out what this important puzzle means?”
“I’m trying,” was all I could manage to say. Maybe it means nothing, my mind unhelpfully supplied.
Marla rang our doorbell—she didn’t bang, for which I was thankful—just as Julian, Boyd, Armstrong, and I were once more trying to sit down to lunch. Still, relief washed through me. Maybe she would be able to figure out what had happened to our friend, and why.
“You look like hell,” Marla said.
“Thanks. You look great.” She had changed into a hot-pink blouse and lime-green pants, with a pink-and-green-paisley sweater to match. She wore twinkly diamond-and-gold earrings, with a necklace and bracelet set. I said, “Come have some lunch.”
As I walked down our hall, my leg began to ache again. I resolved to put the mysteries of Holly, Father Pete, Kathie Beliar, and Audrey Millard out of my overstimulated brain. I was thankful when the chef salads plus homemade bread revived all of us.
As we did the dishes, Marla insisted that she was still helping out with the fund-raising dinner. She dutifully washed her hands while I told Boyd, Armstrong, Julian, and her about Holly’s giving Audrey Millard a gift for her eyes only, apparently—a jigsaw puzzle that was a map of Asia.
Boyd and Armstrong exchanged a glance. Despite the fact that a sheriff’s department investigator was on his way to Audrey’s house to hear this story at that very moment, Boyd took out a notebook and wrote. Marla dried her hands and shook her head.
“Goldy? That makes no sense whatsoever. Holly’s parents were of British and French extraction. I never even heard Holly mention Asia.” She sighed. “Maybe it’s a really pretty map of Asia? I mean, since she was an artist?”
I said, “Holly gave a puzzle of a really pretty map of Asia to Audrey, so close to when Holly died? And Audrey was supposed to give it to Father Pete if something happened to her, that is, Holly?”
Marla’s brow crinkled. “What does Father Pete care about Asia? Was he a missionary there or something?”
“I don’t think so.” I didn’t say, If and when he wakes up, we’ll have to ask him.
Julian said, “You know, sometimes when we cook, you get ideas, Goldy. No matter what, we need to get started. Sorry.”
So we got down to the prep. Marla followed Julian’s instructions for washing and spinning dry the heads of romaine, which then had to be separated into leaves, rinsed, spun, and dried again. It was my bet that Marla had never cleaned a head of lettuce in her life, but on this subject I stayed mum. To their credit, Boyd and Armstrong offered to assist us. Julian and I assured them we were doing fine. The two cops gratefully headed for the living room. A moment later, I heard Boyd on his cell phone.
Julian, meanwhile, laboriously pureed the vichyssoise and stored it in the walk-in in small covered containers. Storing the soup in one big vat never would have gotten the concoction cold. I sliced loaf after loaf of Dad’s Bread. Colorado’s weather was so dry, in elementary school Arch had actually done a science experiment that involved leaving corn chips out overnight, to see if they became more crisp by morning. Unfortunately, he’d left the plate of chips on our back deck, where they’
d proven to be too much temptation for the neighborhood squirrels, and maybe even a bear, because I found the empty metal pie plate halfway across the backyard. I remembered how furious Arch had been. “What am I supposed to say?” he demanded. “The wildlife ate my homework?” Then, as if guilty, he’d added, “I suppose those animals were really hungry.”
“I suppose so,” I whispered, as I had then. To keep the bread slices moist, I carefully stored them in zipped plastic bags.
Marla startled me out of my reverie. “Didn’t you say Holly had installed a security system in her rental because she claimed to have lots of valuable antiques? On which she had an insurance policy that nobody seems to be able to find?”
“That’s what Drew told us.” I put the bags of bread into one of the boxes we were taking. “But then they had that break-in.”
“When was that again?”
“June sixth,” I said. “Which was also Audrey’s birthday. This past Friday, Holly gave Audrey a jigsaw puzzle, which she said was a belated gift. Think those two events are related?”
“I don’t know. On that day, though, the sixth, nothing was stolen from the house except files,” said Marla.
“Nothing that she told Drew or the cops. A file cabinet was broken into.”
“No antiques missing,” said Marla, working hard at the logic, as was I.
“None that we know of.” I tried to recall the interior of Holly’s cluttered living room. There had been all that statuary, all those crosses. The collage of Drew had hung on one wall. Three oil paintings of landscapes, which even my untrained eye dismissed as copies, also graced the walls. There were the threadbare love seat and wingback chairs, along with the cherry furniture that Holly had inherited from her parents. This included the hutch containing lots of dishes, including her grandmother’s Limoges . . . and plates with yet more religious symbols.
A square mahogany table sat in the corner, with the unfinished jigsaw puzzle on top. Maybe it was a map of South America.
“Nothing that looked to be of value jumped out at me,” I said finally. “Then again, I didn’t go upstairs, where there might have been valuable stuff. Still, Tom’s the expert on antiques. We should ask him.”
“Still.” Marla frowned at the first bag of lettuce leaves nestled in paper towels. “The sheriff’s department hasn’t mentioned finding anything worth a lot of money, right?” When I said they had not, she went on: “Forget the break-in for a minute. If you were having severe money problems, and you had so-called valuable antiques, so costly that you had an insurance policy on them, so precious that you installed a fancy security system, why would you even hold on to your stuff? Why not sell the damned antiques?”
“That’s what Julian thought.” I recalled my assistant’s pride when he’d shown me the mismatched cups and saucers he’d bought at the yard sale in Maplewood. That owner had been a hoarder, though, which I didn’t think Holly had been, in spite of her desire to collect religious figurines. I pulled the butter out of the walk-in, unwrapped it, and carefully began slicing the stick into tablespoons. “I’m no expert, but it didn’t look to me as if there was anything of extraordinary value in that house.”
Marla tucked the last lettuce leaves into a plastic bag before turning to me. “Then why take out an insurance policy that the department cannot find? Why install a security system?” She paused. “And here’s what bugs me most of all. If our friend, who was generous in every way, was having money problems, why wouldn’t she accept financial aid from me? Call it a bridge loan, or whatever you want. That’s what really sticks in my craw. She would have helped us. Yet for whatever reason, she wanted to keep her money problems secret. Why?”
I shook my head, and posed a few questions of my own. “Why schedule a quarterly confession with Father Pete, and never tell us when she was up here to visit? Why give Audrey Millard a birthday puzzle, which was a map of Asia? Why say you had a studio in Cherry Creek, when you didn’t?” Marla groaned at the obvious implication, but I soldiered onward. “How much did we not know about Holly? How much did her own son not know about her?”
“Maybe it’s not really a map of Asia,” Marla said hopefully. “Maybe it’s a map to where her stuff is.”
“Then why not tell Drew about it?”
Marla shrugged.
Julian, meanwhile, was heating stockpots of water and herbs, for poaching all the shrimp. He gave us worried glances, as he quickly brought out the bags of jumbo raw shrimp. “Why don’t you two go back downstairs and read some more of your notes? I mean, from your meetings. Maybe that will help you figure out . . . whatever. Here,” he said, handing a bag of brownies to Marla, “take some low-carb treats. I thawed these this morning. It says on the label that my boss here used almond flour and sweetener that isn’t sugar for them.”
“Low-carb brownies?” Marla asked as she clomped ahead of me down the stairs, clutching the bag and plates Julian had given her. “You made these and didn’t tell me?”
“They were an experiment that didn’t turn out very well. I was also making Spicy Brownies, with crystallized ginger and ground ginger. Those came out pretty well. I wasn’t crazy about another attempt at adding spice to brownies—chipotle chile powder. Those burned out the inside of my mouth.”
“But I’ll bet Arch loved them,” said Marla.
“You got that right.”
“Why did you discard the low-carb ones?” Marla wanted to know as we settled ourselves at the long table with the Amour Anonymous notebooks.
“I didn’t discard them. I tasted them. They didn’t seem like the kind of thing that adults at a catered dinner would enjoy.”
“Mmm,” said Marla, once she’d taken the first bite. “When you don’t eat sugar, you don’t mind the fake stuff so much. Okay, before we start, have you figured out what you’re going to say to Warren Broome tonight?”
The despondent expression on Warren Broome’s face floated in front of me. He had not been at church, but he and Patsie were supposed to attend the fund-raising dinner tonight. I’d tried to lure Warren into telling me something about Holly before I’d found out that Audrey was the second woman he’d victimized. Had Holly, who supposedly had had an affair with Broome, possessed that tidbit of knowledge? Had she been blackmailing Warren Broome?
Presumably, Tom and his crew now knew all about Warren Broome and Audrey. I wondered what the fallout from that would be.
“I very much doubt Warren will talk to me now, even if he’s at the dinner tonight.”
“All right,” Marla said resignedly. “Let the department handle him.” She shook her head at our spill of papers. “Where were we?”
I told her about my attempt to make a time line of my relationship with Holly. Marla’s enthusiasm bounced back. She eagerly took the legal pad I handed to her.
“So glad I don’t have to do this on a computer,” she said, munching a second brownie. “I tend to kill them.” I sat across from her and tried to concentrate on the notebooks. But my mind kept wandering back to my odd conversation with Audrey Millard. Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I got up and pulled down an atlas from our long shelf of books.
“Now what?” Marla demanded, without looking up.
“I’m going to make my own map of Asia, and compare it to the one Holly used for Audrey’s puzzle.”
As our copy machine was whirring away—like Audrey, I would have to do this in sections—I sent a text to Tom: H’s house broken into 6/6. Audrey M birthday = 6/6. A says H gave her jigsaw puzzle as belated gift. Is map of Asia. Meaning in any of this?
Don’t know. Deputy bringing puzzle from AM, Tom replied. Asia doesn’t compute in any way with investigation. No Asian suspects, etc.
Unfinished jigsaw puzzle on table in Holly’s living room, I tapped back.
Have it, Tom texted back. Also Asia. Hunan Province. No hidden code.
I wrote, Tonight, AM going to bring me copy of one H made for her. OK?
See no relevance to investigation. But OK. See you
at 6.
“Whoa!” Marla cried, and I jumped. “Here’s Holly saying she went to see her cardiologist! What cardiologist?”
I laid aside the map of Asia I had taped together and bent over the notebook in front of Marla. Holly visited her cardiologist, it said. He gave her a clean bill of health.
“She had heart problems?” I asked. “Did we know this?”
“No, definitely not,” Marla said. “Or if the group did know, it didn’t stick in my memory. I’m the one who went through cardiac arrest a few years ago, and I would have remembered. I think,” she added uncertainly.
I tapped out this news to Tom.
He phoned me almost immediately. “She had an issue with her heart? We did not know that. Okay, look. George Ingleby is a cardiologist. He must know about this. Whether he’ll tell us is another matter.”
“You can’t get around privacy regulations, even for someone who’s dead?”
“Don’t know. Before I go see George, I’ll call Drew in Alaska, ask him again if his mother had a condition he forgot to tell us about. We didn’t find any medications in the rental. But I’ll tell the deputy—the one bringing down the jigsaw puzzle from Audrey?—to detour over to Holly’s rental and look through all the cabinets again. Hold on a sec.” I waited while Tom talked to someone. “I need to go,” he said, his voice low. “But a guy just told me we tracked Holly’s cell phone, and figured out how someone could have spent a couple of hours planting a note on her deck, then sawing out the beams underneath, without anyone in the house noticing. Near as we can figure, no one was in the house.”
“No one was in it all day?” I said incredulously.
“Not for a couple of hours in the morning. The day of the birthday party, Drew was out with friends. Audrey Millard told us Holly was due to come to the church.”
I said doubtfully, “You’d still be taking a big chance that someone outside the house would see you.”
The Whole Enchilada Page 19