Arch called the house line early. He, Gus, and Sergeant Jones were on their way out to the Pails for Trails site, but he’d forgotten to tell me that Bob Rushwood was going to take pictures of the guys—the trail builders—that day, to make into the annual school-year calendar the charity sold. Was that okay? He was supposed to get a permission slip signed, but had forgotten about it. He was wondering if Gus’s grandparents could sign his.
“Could you put Sergeant Jones on the line, please?”
“Mom.” But he handed the phone over.
“Jones,” came the clipped voice.
“Sergeant,” I said carefully, “I don’t want my son to know what we’re actually talking about.”
“Should I call you from my car?”
“Don’t think that’s necessary. Just act as if I’m giving you permission to sign that slip Arch has.”
“Go ahead.”
“Last night, I catered a party where Bob Rushwood was a guest. It didn’t end well.”
“I’m listening,” she said, her voice deadpan.
I gave her a quick rundown on Bob and Ophelia’s breakup. I told her about Bob’s spying on Ophelia and his seeing me introduce her to Brewster Motley.
“The main thing I’m worried about,” I concluded, “is that Bob was apoplectic with rage last night, and so I was hoping you would keep Arch as close to you as possible today. This is just in case Bob does indeed blame me, and he extends that blame to my son.”
“Done,” she said. “Anything else?”
“That’s plenty. Thank you.”
I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the note Tom had left for me, sweetly warning me again not to harass Yurbin. If I had Boyd and Marla with me, though, how dangerous could Yurbin be? It didn’t matter that he had a lawyer. Did it?
I didn’t have answers to those questions, but the diabetic issue had given me an idea. Yurbin loved sweets but couldn’t have them. So I would make him a rich, creamy, sugar-free gelato. I separated eggs, covered and refrigerated the whites, and whisked the yolks along with milk, cream, and sugar substitute in a saucepan. Once the custard was smooth, thick, and shiny, I removed it from the heat, added Mexican vanilla, and set it aside to cool. Luckily, I kept the inner container of my ice-cream maker frozen. When I was packing up the other components, Marla’s horn sounded from our street. I grinned.
Once Marla was up on our front porch, she called through the window that she was only wanting to announce her arrival to Boyd. I tried not to think about our neighbors and their children being awakened on a summer morning. Boyd opened the door and merely shook his head as Marla swept past him.
“I’m starving,” she said as she peered into the walk-in. She wore a black-and-white-checked top and white pants, along with jaunty red earrings, barrettes, and shoes. “Have any protein in here? Ah, cheese,” she answered her own question. She pulled out a wrapped chunk of Gruyère. I handed her a knife and plate. Before she could even ask, I pressed the buttons on the espresso maker to pull her shots.
“Where is everybody?” she asked, suddenly realizing that neither Tom, Arch, nor Julian was in the kitchen. Even Boyd had disappeared.
“Boyd’s in the living room, I think. Arch is at Gus’s. Tom, work. Julian, sleeping, I hope, although I don’t know how he could after your horn blast that I’m sure woke everyone in a three-block radius.”
She waved this away. “So,” she began around a mouthful of cheese, “I talked to a number of friends. The Athena Line. Heard of it?”
I closed the cooler with the custard, taped it shut, then did the same with the cardboard box. It took me a moment to shift mental gears. “The Athena Line?”
“Oh, Goldy, what we don’t know about international business! That’s one topic we didn’t discuss in Amour Anonymous.”
“Marla, I don’t—”
“So,” she interrupted, “fifty years ago, the Greek shipping magnate Alexander Alexandropolous, named his freight line after his only daughter and heir, Athena. Ring any bells?” When I shook my head, she continued, “Have to say, it was vague for me, too. Well before my time. Anyway, in school—a Greek school, let us remember—forget Homer, Socrates, and all those fellows, young Athena Alexandropolous fell in love with Shakespeare. No word on whether she tried to make it to England for her university years. Maybe she heard about the weather.”
“Marla . . .” I placed an iced four-shot latte at her place.
Marla held up a hand. “I’m getting there. Athena got a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctorate, in English literature, in California. She shunned her father’s fortune at first, insisting she would make her own way in the world. Unfortunately, she could only manage to find adjunct teaching gigs. In the summer, she worked as a volunteer for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. So that’s where you get her partiality to them. Along the way, she met our dashing Mr. Neil Unger. Maybe he used to be dashing, anyway. She was thirty-two. He was twenty-nine and—wait for it—acting onstage as a lark. I mean, he had the uniform business he’d inherited from his father, but he was able to take time off for the occasional play. He had a bit part in Measure for Measure. Now, remember that dashing thing. Athena already had the cancer that would kill her at forty-one. Neither she nor Neil knew this, of course. But when he found out she was worth very, very big bucks, he married her, and they settled in Boulder. And Athena became pregnant. Before she delivered, her father sold the shipping business, then died. Athena didn’t reject her inheritance. She left most of the fortune, thirty-plus million smackers, in a trust for her only child, whom she named Ophelia, after—”
“Thanks. I know my Hamlet.”
Marla sipped her latte and shot me a grateful look. “In their years together, Athena must have figured out that Neil was actually a jerk. Okay, he had the uniform business, but he was aghast when his wife left him a paltry two million. She didn’t have many friends in Colorado, and no relatives, so she made Neil and her lawyer, Quentin Laird, trustees for her estate, which she left to Ophelia. As we heard last night, Neil could—and did—charge the trust an annual percentage of the value of its portfolio. For management fees. So he got his best role ever: acting like a manager.”
“Who in the world informed you of all this?”
“I told you, friends.” She shrugged. “Before Neil married Francie, Ophelia’s stepmother, he got drunk one night and told her most of the details. The uniform business wasn’t doing so great, and he was tired of overseeing the day-to-day operations, dealing with factories abroad, the whole shebang. He could make a lot of money every year doing practically nothing, but only if his daughter never got her college degree, which was one of the provisions of the trust that you and I found out about last night. Neil needed to keep managing his daughter’s trust, and more important, managing his daughter, if he was going to hold on to those big fees.”
I sat down. “Neil is a jerk.”
Marla licked her fingers. “He is indeed.”
I lifted the cooler onto the kitchen table. “But getting back to Ophelia. She jumped from a guy convicted of being a thief to Bob Rushwood. That’s a big change. When do you think Bob started spying on her for Neil?”
Marla gave me one of those you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me looks. “From the beginning, probably. According to my sources, Neil apparently promised Bob that he’d invest in a chain of fitness clubs Bob wanted to start up once Bob and Ophelia got married. All Bob had to do was help keep Ophelia in line and report what he saw of her movements to her father. I mean, you got a look at that Mercedes convertible. You can’t afford that vehicle on a trainer’s salary.”
“If he was spying on her, how in the world did she finish her degree?”
Marla laughed. “Late last night? I was able to talk to a friend of Ophelia’s from CU. She’s the daughter of a club pal. Anyway, this friend told me that Ophelia scheduled all her classes in the mornings when her father would be at work. That’s also when Bob usually had most of his training sessions at the club gym. Plus, he
was always schlepping around to pick up the buckets for Pails for Trails. I mean, those buckets are all over the county, and probably beyond. That’s a lot of collecting. Ophelia didn’t know Bob followed her sometimes. She just felt that he was clingy and wanted to spend a lot of time with her. When she found out that he was after her money and taking dough from her father to get engaged to her, she had only two months until she graduated. At that point, Ophelia apparently told Bob that she thought they shouldn’t have sex while they were engaged, because of her father’s family values shtick with The Guild. But Bob would keep pestering her, saying it would be great if they had a kid. He thought her putting the brakes on sex meant that she might be pregnant, you know, and hormonal. Ophelia didn’t tell him that she was on the pill and knew she wasn’t expecting. Until yesterday, that is.”
“That young woman is smart.”
Marla sighed. “If you had a father and fiancé like that, and you were ambitious, you’d have to be wickedly intelligent.”
“And capable of being devious.”
“Well, that, too.” She tapped the table with her fingers. “This is all nice gossip, but it doesn’t really figure into our narrative with Holly—”
“But it could,” I insisted, as I had to Tom. “If Neil and Holly had a fling, and he got plastered with her and told her the details of the trust, then he could have been the one she was blackmailing.”
“True,” said Marla. “Is Tom going to talk to him?”
“The department is going to see if any leads develop regarding Neil. But getting back to Bob. If he was spying on Ophelia, do you think he could have seen something else—something recent, involving Neil and Holly, say—that would help solve the case?”
“I don’t know,” Marla admitted. “Holly never said anything to me about Neil, but she didn’t really name names, as you know. Still, no one I checked with knew of a connection between them. Bob’s task was only to watch Ophelia.”
“And Tom has told me absolutely to stay away from Bob.”
“What a spoilsport.”
Boyd said he would follow us to Denver. I gave him the addresses of Our Lady of Perpetual Grace and Clarkson Shipping, and told him what Tom had warned me about Yurbin: that we were not allowed to harass him. So, even if we found him, it could be a pointless journey. Marla promised Boyd a lovely lunch for being so accommodating.
“You know I can’t accept lunch from you,” he said. “It would be classified as a bribe.”
“It would be classified as lunch,” said Marla, with fire in her eyes. “And if you don’t come with us, we’ll give you the slip and—”
“Okay, okay.” Boyd held up his palms in a gesture of defeat. “Church, shipping place, lunch, crazy artist, if you can find him. Sounds like a plan.”
Our Lady of Perpetual Grace, located on Downing Street in Denver, was a Gothic-style building featuring large blocks of sparkling silver granite. The imposing façade was composed of three carved arches. Stained-glass windows soared two stories high. I wished we could have seen the church from the inside, but I didn’t want to alert any stray clergyman to our presence, much less to the questions we were hoping to pose about a former parishioner. Instead, we walked on a stone path beside the flying buttresses toward a separate wooden building with a painted sign that said PARISH GIFT SHOP.
I’d checked the gift shop’s website, and the place was supposed to be open. When we pushed into the cluttered space, though, no one was in evidence. About the size of the Ungers’ kitchen—big for a kitchen, small for a shop—the place smelled pleasantly of incense. Two long tables took up most of the floor space. They were stacked with the kinds of statues we’d seen at Holly’s, plus bookends, kitchen tiles, and other odds and ends. Bookshelves lined the walls. An elderly woman with her gray hair pulled back in a neat bun appeared just as I was perusing one shelf, which was given over entirely to the work of Henri Nouwen.
“Ah, Nouwen,” she said lovingly. “Do you admire his work?”
“I do,” I said. “Very much.”
She pulled down a copy of Life of the Beloved and put it in my hands. “This is my favorite,” she said, and looked at me sincerely from watery blue eyes.
“I’ll take it,” I said, even though I had my own copy, and the audio, to boot—read by Nouwen himself.
She walked over to the cash register—the old-fashioned kind, on which you pushed down on keys—and put the book next to it. “Would you like to look around a bit before buying?”
“Sure,” I said. Boyd and Marla were eyeing the statuettes of the Holy Family. I looked down into a case of rosaries and tried to think how to broach the subject of Holly. Maybe you knew my friend who used to be a parishioner here, but now she’s been murdered? Could I say that?
“We’re having a special on those,” the elderly woman, whose name tag announced she was Nan, said. She pointed at the rosaries.
“Well,” I said, waiting, hoping, that Marla would jump in. No such luck. I said, “Um, how about a Jerusalem Bible?” Nan thumped a paperback copy on the counter next to my Nouwen, and I blithely asked, “How about a CD of Taizé chants?”
From behind me, Marla said, “Goldy, for God’s sake, get to the point.”
Nan said with a smile, “Do you know which one you would like?”
“The most popular one,” I replied.
She brought me a CD of Taizé chants and asked if there was anything else I wanted or needed. I stared at my small pile of purchases, and again tried to think how to bring up the subject of Holly.
“You’ve been so helpful,” I said. “Really, I’ve never had anyone in a church gift shop be as . . . perfect as you.”
Her smile was genuine. “Thank you.”
I inhaled and quickly said, “We had a friend. Holly Ingleby. Did you know her?”
Nan was only momentarily taken aback. “Yes. She was a parishioner here.”
I nodded, hoping she would continue.
Nan shook her head. “Dear Holly, she used to say that I had good business acumen and I was helpful to others. She guessed I had been born in the north node of Cancer, and she was right.”
Now it was my turn to be taken aback. “Holly talked to you about astrology?”
“Oh, it’s not really heretical.” Thinking I was questioning her orthodoxy, Nan made a dismissive gesture. “Well, I suppose technically it is heretical.” She sighed. “Not that it mattered. Well, anyway. She was a parishioner here, but then she got married and moved to Aspen Meadow. She became an Episcopalian. But she obtained a divorce and moved back. She tried to return to Our Lady of Perpetual Grace. They wouldn’t let her receive Communion, though.”
“We were fellow parishioners of Holly’s up in Aspen Meadow.”
“Yes, the church beside the creek. St. Luke’s.” Her brow furrowed. “With Father Pete. How is he?”
I did not know how much information about the attack on Father Pete had been in the paper. I said simply, “He’s in the hospital. He needs some tests, and should be out soon.” Before we could detour into a discussion of his condition, I said, “So. When Holly was a parishioner here, you . . . were well acquainted with her?”
“Well enough acquainted to talk about astrology, I suppose,” she said sadly. “We met when she first attended, and then after her divorce, she did come back from time to time to visit me. I was so angry about her excommunication, I told her she could sell her jigsaw puzzles here in the shop. No reason why the priest should know about that.”
My heart jumped. “What kind of puzzles did she bring you?”
“They weren’t really religious. But they were very popular choices among the young parents. The children loved them.”
“I know,” I said. “Holly’s son, Drew, and my own son were in preschool together. She made them for the kids. They all loved Holly.”
“Well, that wasn’t hard to do.” Nan hesitated. “I did feel sorry for Holly. She and Drew just broke my heart.”
“Broke your heart? You mean, because
of the excommunication?”
“No, no.” Nan made the same dismissive gesture that I was becoming accustomed to. “When she moved back to Denver, she said she was in love, really in love this time. That was what she said.”
“Really in love?” Marla had sidled up beside me. “Sorry”—she read the name tag—“Nan. Holly was my friend, too. Who was she in love with? I mean, it seemed to us, after she divorced George, that she had one relationship after another. She never mentioned love. Who was the lucky guy?”
“I don’t know,” Nan said defensively. “I wasn’t going to ask. But I think he was the reason she had moved down here. To be near him.”
Marla asked, “Was he a doctor? An artist?”
“I don’t know. He never came into the shop with her.”
“She didn’t describe him?” Marla persisted.
“Good Lord,” said Nan, putting her hand on her chest. “No, she didn’t describe him. You two are making me nervous.”
“Welcome to my world,” said Boyd, from the back of the shop.
“Please.” I focused on Nan’s lovely face. “My name is Goldy Schulz, and my husband, Tom, works for the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. He’s leading the investigation into Holly’s death—”
“Investigation?” Nan asked softly. “Into what?” Boyd groaned so loudly I thought the statues in the shop quaked. Nan’s voice trembled. “I . . . thought Holly died of cardiac arrest. What is being investigated? Why would—”
“I’m sorry to have upset you,” I interrupted, cursing myself silently for not checking what had been released to the media. “Tom—”
“Your husband,” said Nan, her blue eyes turning steely.
The Whole Enchilada Page 28