Sticks & Scones (25 page)

“No more on the Jerk’s real estate deal, sorry to report,” she whispered, with one eye on the cake table. “The lunch was scrumptious. The only historic food
I
have is in my refrigerator!”

“Thanks. And thanks for checking on the town-house deal. I still think John Richard’s up to something.”

“He’s always up to something.” Then she hustled off toward the untouched cake that the guests were going to have after the slide show.

“Please, sir,” Marla whispered to Julian, “may I have some
more?
Or just a
nibble
, anyway?” Before I could protest, Julian had carved an enormous piece of cake, heaped it on a plate, and handed it to her.

“Call it reverse nepotism, Goldy,” she stage-whispered, fingering up a dollop of icing. Heads turned and I sighed.

Eliot had moved on to Before and After shots of the renovation of his castle. He ended with effusive thanks to the donors, and an invitation to have cake and to book their conferences into the castle next year. Then he invited them to quiet their souls and walk the labyrinth to arrive at their spiritual truth.

If the clapping from twenty-six people wasn’t thunderous, it was at least enthusiastic. Julian and I served cake and coffee, which I hoped would tame any aftereffects of champagne. When they finished their dessert, the guests began to process single-file through the labyrinth.

An eerie silence fell over the chapel as the silent
parade went back and forth over the stones, all the way to the end. The few people who spoke as they were leaving did so in hushed tones. By two o’clock, the crowd had dispersed. Wow, I thought. Next time I felt uptight, I would give the labyrinth a try.

The churchwomen gathered up their plates, silver, and glasses, to trek them back to the Saint Luke’s kitchen for washing. Eliot and Julian broke down the Hydes’ serving tables and chairs, and hauled them back to the storage area. Then Julian and I folded up the rented dining tables and left them in the gravel parking lot under a tarpaulin. Party Rental would return before four to pick them up. Sukie and Eliot conveyed their video equipment back to the castle. I emphatically told Julian that he was going to take the rest of the afternoon off. He’d earned it, I insisted.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, scanning the chapel interior, which still contained remnants of the party. “And what are you going to do if the Lauderdales show up again?”

“I’ll throw the bolt while I’m finishing up,” I said diffidently. “And I’ll park the van right next to the door.”

“Tell you what, boss, I’ll take the ice tubs, the chafers, and the last of the serving dishes. If you want, you can bring the platters and trash.”

“I’ll
be
okay.” I strode to the door and pointed to the dead bolt. “Chardé and Buddy, even Viv, might all have keys.
My
mistake was in trusting Eliot’s memory that we were the only ones who had one.”

“That guy’s nice,” Julian commented, “but he’s a birdbrain, for sure.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Julian still looked unconvinced. “All right, listen. I’ll take my load up while you finish here. You’re not back at the castle in an hour and a half, I’m coming back.”

I agreed. It would not take me more than twenty minutes
to load the platters, then pack the trash and toss it into the castle Dumpster, located on the far side of the moat by a service road. Each time Julian overestimated how long I needed to do a chore, I accused him of treating me as if I were old and decrepit. He never denied it, drat him.

I bolted the door and reflected on what I had not told Julian: that I wanted to have a good look at the chapel myself, as it was awfully close to the crime scene created by Andy’s body and Tom’s being shot. First I applied myself to finishing the cleanup, which took seventeen minutes. I scrutinized the interior space to make sure we had not forgotten anything. The chapel looked spanking clean. Even with Marla’s premature dive into the cake, the luncheon had been a success, and I was thankful.

At that moment I felt as if the shiny stones of the labyrinth were beckoning to me. Pink light from the rose window skipped across the marble, and my skin prickled. What had Eliot said?
You walk the labyrinth to arrive at your spiritual truth.
I hadn’t been doing too well in the truth department lately, so why not try it before I snooped around?

My mind dredged up a bit of Scripture:
I still my soul and make it quiet,/like a child upon its mother’s breast; / my soul is quieted within me.

After a few moments, I moved forward, feeling strangely hesitant. As I walked, concentrating on the tortuous path seemed to clear my mind of the questions currently plaguing me—who’d killed Andy and why, who’d shot Tom and why, who’d shot at our window and why, and who’d killed Mo Hartfield after he’d inexplicably stolen our computers. As I put one foot in front of the other, I felt a calming presence. I was moving forward—either into or away from my life, I couldn’t tell which.

Finally I arrived at the labyrinth’s center. I could have sworn I heard my heart beating. Gazing back at the swirls
and turns of the flat marble stones, I felt serenity—for the first time in a week. Outside, the sun emerged from behind a cloud and splattered pink light over the path. Eliot’s audiotape as well as his lecture had detailed the mystical significance of distances at Chartres. From the center of the labyrinth to the base of the portal was the same distance as from the base of the portal to the center of the rose window. I looked up at the rosy pattern of stained glass.

Now
there
was a surprise. Instead of Sukie-inspired cleanliness on the multicolored sections of glass, the center of the rose window looked as if someone had left a blotch of dirt….

At the center you will find God
, the tape had said.

Maybe what was up there wasn’t dirt. Maybe someone who knew the symbolism of the labyrinth had put something else there, something important. Or maybe my paranoia was kicking in again.

I checked my watch. I had thirty minutes before Julian would start to worry. Undoubtedly breaking all rules of labyrinth-walking, I sprinted across the tiles to the storage room and hauled out the ladder. It was one of those extension affairs that creak horribly and feel rickety as the devil. Nevertheless, after five minutes of struggling, I wrestled the thing open and laid the top just above the center of the rose window. I took a deep breath and started climbing.

Outside, the wind whipped around the chapel walls. As I ascended, I could hear the cold air whistling through tiny cracks in the glass. Finally I reached the fourth rung from the top. I peered into the center of the rose window, which was actually a pocket of pink glass soldered inside a metal circle. What I saw there didn’t make sense. I was looking at—torn tape, paper, and plastic.

I reached in and gently tried to remove the paper and tape. It was not easy. The paper had become wedged underneath
the soldering, and all my attempts to scoot it out were unsuccessful. At length, I had the bright idea to reach into the adjoining pocket of enclosed yellow glass and coax the paper the
other
way. Ten minutes of scraping and pushing later, the scrap of paper slipped free.

I examined it, hoping against hope that it wasn’t just an invoice from Bill’s Stained-Glass Repairs, left as a joke.

What I held in my hands was not a bill. It was the torn half of an envelope. I reached into the envelope and pulled out a small, plastic case. Inside the clear envelope was a stamp. I gasped and grabbed the rung to keep from toppling off the ladder.

The color: red-orange. The printing around the sides:
One Penny, Post Office, Postage, Mauritius.
And in the center, the profile of a woman: Chubby cheeks. Severe hair. Grandmotherly eyes.

Queen Victoria.

I
hastily tucked the paper envelope with the plastic case and its eight-hundred-thousand-dollar stamp deep in my apron pocket. After a few heart-stopping teeters on the ladder, I finally reached the bottom, rattled the ladder down, and scooted it back to the storeroom. Then I pulled out the envelope and dropped it into a clean brown paper bag—Tom had taught me a thing or two, such as,
try not to muck up evidence
—before serenely transporting it out to the van along with the trash.

No one was in the Hyde Chapel lot, but I tried to act normal anyway, just in case I was being watched from somewhere, anywhere. I relocked the chapel, deposited the key in the lockbox, and revved my van up the service road, to the edge of the moat, by the castle Dumpster. I heaved in the lunch trash, hopped back into the driver’s seat, and called Sergeant Boyd on my cellular.

“Part of the loot, eh?” said Boyd, who sounded either amused or skeptical, I couldn’t tell which. “In the middle
of a stained-glass window, way up high? Uh-huh.” Skeptical, definitely.

“Listen, would you?” I gulped down the impatience in my voice, trying to remember Boyd was just doing his job. “The Lauderdales and John Richard and Viv Martini all came into the chapel this morning right after you guys pulled off your detail. Maybe this is what they were looking for.”

“That’s an awkward place to check, without a bunch of witnesses noticing. You know—how do you disguise the fact you’re pulling out a twenty-foot ladder?”

“Sergeant!”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Stay where you are. I’ll send somebody up to get the evidence from you.”

“I’m not staying on this service road, thanks. I just finished a catering event and I’ve still got to prep for another one tomorrow. Tell your people to meet me at the Aspen Meadow Library in twenty minutes.”

“Gee, Goldy, our homicide guys will gladly work around your catering timetable. Especially since we’re dealing with evidence worth close to a million dollars and connected to three homicides and a cop-shooting.”

“One more thing,” I said, unfazed. “Did your guys find anything in Hyde Chapel, after you took Andy’s body from the creek?”

“Nope, it was clean. In fact, that chapel brought a whole new meaning to the word
clean.
” He sighed. “I thought you were in a hurry to get to the library.”

I signed off, realized I’d neglected to close the lid on the Dumpster, rushed out and whacked it down, then raced to the library to meet the deputy. A uniformed young man with red hair and a red mustache unceremoniously plucked the bag from my hand and roared away.

I waved at Julian in the castle driveway. He was
coming out as I was headed in. He rolled down his window and yelled that I was over my ninety-minute limit.

“I’m just an old lady caterer who can’t move as fast as you young folks!” I hollered back.

“As fast as us young folks?”
Julian yelled gleefully. “Check this out!” He clanked the Rover into reverse and
backed
up the icy driveway. As if that weren’t enough, he then gunned the SUV backward across the causeway, over the moat. I watched from the far side, shaking my head. One error of steering, and Julian would be sleeping with the fishes.

When I caught up with him at the gatehouse, I said, “That’s not a quick path home, Julian, that’s a quick path to drowning.”

He grinned and pressed the buttons for entry to the gatehouse. Once inside, I glanced overhead into the space above the murder holes. No one appeared to be in that empty room next to Michaela’s kitchen. But in the remote event that my paranoia was translating into imagining hidden electronic eavesdropping devices, I decided not to tell Julian about the stamp.

In the kitchen, a note from the Hydes was propped up against the toaster. The luncheon had been fabulous, Sukie wrote, but utterly exhausting. She went on to say that she’d felt so sorry for me, she’d washed all the serving dishes. Now she and Eliot were eating dinner out, and we were to feel free to scrounge whatever we wanted.

“Ah, speaking of going out to dinner, Goldy?” said Julian. “Arch asked me to take him to McDonald’s, after his fencing practice. I know, I know, even the salads aren’t up to your culinary standard. But I figured, what the heck, give the kid a break from the gourmet stuff for one night.”

I smiled, paid Julian for his afternoon of work, and
gave him some extra money to treat Arch and himself. Then I asked about Tom.

Julian shrugged. “I don’t know. When I looked in on him, he said he was going to change his own bandage. I have to run to Boulder to get some books before I pick up Arch, so I’m taking off. Why don’t you bring Tom some tea with fixin’s?”

Julian quickstepped away. I looked at my watch: just after three. Tea, goodies, and puzzling over an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar stamp I’d found in Hyde Chapel … was Tom up to it?

Half an hour later, I had baked a fresh batch of steaming scones and set them on a tray next to a plate of dewy butter slices, a jar of Eliot’s chokecherry jelly, and a pot of steeping English Breakfast tea. Making my way up to our room, I noticed that the courtyard looked magical under its fresh blanket of snow. If I lived here, I decided as I disarmed our door, I’d turn it into a school. A cooking school, where we ate our cookies and cakes out in the courtyard, while black-suited butlers served tea and sherry.

“I was just about to ring for all that,” Tom commented as I sashayed in with the tray. He was sitting in one of the wing-back chairs doing leg-extension exercises. “I missed you today, Miss G.”

I set the tray down and gave him a careful hug. “Poor Tom. Sorry I had to work. Want to hear about it?”

And so I ran through the whole thing for him, from the early intrusions of Buddy, Chardé, John Richard, and Viv, to discovering the stamp from Mauritius in the center of the window. He whistled.

“Tom,” I said when I’d finished, “I think
all
the stamps might have been there. They were all
in the chapel.
Then they were moved. By someone in a hurry.”

“Or by someone who didn’t know he’d left one behind.” He gazed into the cold fireplace. “The chapel has
that big storeroom. If you were a crook trying to hide something in the chapel, why not put it in the storeroom? Especially since Ray Wolff was arrested while scoping out a storage area?”

“Because it’s too obvious?” I replied. “There’s
something
we’re missing.” I followed his line of sight to the hearth. “I keep thinking about Andy. Did he find the stamps after they were stolen and hidden away? He indicated to you that he knew where they were, so what’s the deal? How was he electrocuted? If he was shot in the chapel, why couldn’t the sheriff’s department find any evidence there? The stamps were
in
the chapel, and he was dumped in the creek
by
the chapel. But the crime scene itself was clean.” I paused, baffled. “I just don’t get it.”

“Here’s one more thing,” Tom commented. “The ballistics report came in on the bullet they took out of me. It came from the same gun that killed Andy and Mo Hart-field. The bullet that shattered our window came from a different gun. No match.”

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Would anything in this case ever add up?

Tom surveyed the tea detritus. “Know what? That just felt like an appetizer to me. Let’s go see what we can find in that big kitchen.”

Delighted to see that his appetite was back, I followed him down to the kitchen, where we feasted on leftover meat pie, reheated green beans, manchet bread, and labyrinth cake. Arch and Julian came home, as did Sukie and Eliot. My son joyfully announced that because tomorrow, Friday, was a half school-day, and this Saturday was Valentine’s Day, the teachers were assigning no homework for tonight or the weekend.

“That calls for a toast,” decreed Eliot. “To our successful donor lunch, and to no homework.” He breezed out of the room and returned with a bottle of port.

“I think we have something special in the refrigerator, too,” murmured Sukie. Sukie brought out a chilled bottle of bubbly nonalcoholic cranberry stuff. Arch rewarded her with a murmured thanks and one of his suppressed smiles.

While we were sipping our drinks and nibbling on cake, I guiltily remembered Michaela. Shouldn’t we have invited her to join us?

But when I suggested it, Eliot waved this away. “Sometimes you see Michaela. Usually you don’t.”

Sukie added, “We don’t try to force it.”

I nodded and didn’t pursue the question. I wondered if I’d ever figure out the dynamic between Eliot and Sukie on the one hand, and between Eliot, Sukie, and Michaela on the other. Was she sort of an employee, sort of a tenant, sort of a neighbor, sort of a pain in the behind, or all of the above?

I didn’t know and was too tired to try to find out. We all loaded our dishes into the dishwasher, said good night, and headed our separate ways.

Before we went to bed, Tom told me we should be back in our own house by Sunday. “They put in the glass, finish the cleanup, fix our security system, and we go back.”

“Uh-huh. And what about the person who shot it out?”

“They’re still working on it,” said Tom. His green eyes sought me out. “I’m not feeling up to seeing Sara Beth at the dentist tomorrow.”

“Whatever feels right to you,” I said stiffly, as I snuggled into bed. He told me he loved me and that he hoped I slept well. I guess he wasn’t in the mood for one-armed lovemaking.

I lay there, staring at the dark ceiling, and made a decision. Sara Beth O’Malley may have been expecting Tom. But she was going to get me.

Friday the thirteenth dawned very cold and bright. I moved through my yoga routine while Tom slept. In the kitchen, Michaela and Arch were having miniature sugared doughnuts and tiny cans of a chemical concoction that claimed to be better than chocolate milk.

“Don’t get upset, Mom,” Arch begged as he stuffed a doughnut into his mouth. “Julian let me get these goodies last night. He was up late studying, and said you should wake him when you need help this morning. Otherwise his alarm is set for eleven. Julian is great, man. I can’t
remember
the last time I had two junk-food meals in a row.”

Michaela’s indulgent smile stopped me from scolding. At least Arch was amusing someone.

When they left at a quarter to eight, I made a swift overview of the fencing-banquet preparation. I’d already baked the plum tarts. The veal had only to be rubbed with oil, garlic, and spices, then roasted just before the banquet. The potato casseroles I could easily put together in the afternoon. That left the molded salad, shrimp curry, and raisin rice. I looked over my recipes. If I moved ahead with the salad and curry sauce, the former could jell while the latter mellowed before the arrival of the shrimp. With any luck, I could finish those dishes and take off for the dentist ahead of schedule.

While the pineapple juice for the gelatin was heating, I sliced bananas and more fat, juicy strawberries—bless Alicia—and reflected on everything I knew about the events of the past week. There were those acts someone—or ones—had committed.
Shoot out our window. Kill Andy. Shoot Tom. Steal the computers. Murder the man who steals the computers. Somewhere in there, hide a multimillion-dollar stamp haul in the center of a rose window. Then move the loot. But accidentally leave one behind.
The
sequence
of those acts, I realized, had to be part of the solution to the puzzle.

I wondered about Sara Beth. If jealousy were the motive
for all this activity, could you remove shooting out our window and shooting Tom as being related to the stamp theft? If so, then how could you account for those acts being done by two separate guns?

You have to think the way the thief does
, Tom was fond of saying. In this case, you had to start with the facts you knew, try to extrapolate the thinking behind them, and from all that, deduce the identity of the thief.

Yeah, sure. My mind was as clear as … well … unmolded salad.

I mixed the gelatin into the boiling juice, added chilled juice, then folded in all the fruits. Unlike my mother’s generation, I never waited before mixing ingredients into gelatin. No one ever seems to notice if the fruits sink or float, do they? Sinking or floating in real life, on the other hand, is another matter.

In an oversize Dutch oven, I gently sautéed chopped apples and onions in melted butter, then stirred in curry powder, flour, and spices. I shelled, deveined, and cooked the shrimp, then dropped the shrimp tails into bubbling chicken stock. Finally I stirred the stock, vermouth, and heavy cream into the sauce. The mixture gave off a divinely pungent scent.

Once the salad molds and shrimp were chilling in the refrigerator, and the curry sauce was cooling, I powered up with a double espresso, two reheated scones, two thick pats of unsalted butter, and generous dollops of blueberry preserves.
Yum.
Why Arch preferred chalky, store-bought doughnuts to homemade baked goods was one of the mysteries of the ages.

At quarter to nine, I was seated in my van, sipping another double espresso, and eyeing the front of Aspen Meadow’s endodontist office. What I was actually going to say to Sara Beth O’Malley I had not worked out yet. Of course then again, last time, outside my home, she hadn’t allowed me to say much.