Killer Pancake (16 page)

"No, no," he said angrily as he measured ground cloves. "I've got the whole day mapped out. All I need is some fucking electricity."

"It'll come back on just when I'm leaving," I told him as I opened the refrigerator. "It's called Murphy's Law of Food

Preparation."

"Huh?"

"Oh, nothing." I got out the covered containers of ribs, salad, bread, and cookies. The walk-in refrigerator would stay cold for several hours if the door was not opened too often. Lucky for me the organizers of the fair were providing butane burners and grills for heating food. I couldn't imagine serving - much less eating - cold barbecued ribs at ten o'clock in the morning.

Julian set aside the spices and began to dice the onion. "Coronary Care Unit visiting hours are the first ten minutes of every hour," he continued in a clipped, controlled tone. "I'm going down when I finish the chamber shindig. Is the hospital staff going to give me a hard time? Should I tell them she's my aunt Marla? That sounds kind of funny, I've never called her that before.

I mean, really, I've been on my own for quite a while."

"As long as you're there the first ten minutes, you'll be fine. I was there yesterday, and the receptionist guarding the doors to the CCU was like a female Doberman. But Marla's doctor's pretty nice, although she treats him terribly." Julian shook his head morosely. I continued. "The doc wants her to have as much emotional support from visitors as she can get. Why don't you come get me at the mall? My time at the food fair will be up by then, and we can go see her together."

He set aside the onion and washed his hands. "Okay. I have the chamber brunch, then cleanup, then drive down and pick you up at the food fair, then go see Marla. Does that sound okay? I wanted to take Arch with me, but he said he promised Todd they could go to a record swap this afternoon. The thunder woke us up last night, so we talked about his plans." His words were still coming out fast, much faster than usual. "Arch wanted to help me today too. But I said no. I asked him if I could help him find some sixties albums." Julian took a breath and poured sugar into a measuring cup. It cascaded over the top and he cursed softly.

"I mean, I've been promising him all summer that I'd help him with his new hobby and I haven't done any of it. Plus I was going to take him to some veterinarian's office yesterday." He reached for the cider vinegar and measured it carefully. "Now I'll have lots of time. I guess. We can go to the animal hospital. I don't know much about sixties music, though, like Jimi Hendrix - " He broke off, slammed the bottle of vinegar on the counter, and clasped his arms around his shivering body.

"Julian, don't - " I put my arms around him. I couldn't bear to see someone so young in such pain. I murmured to him how sorry I was, that the whole situation was awful, to go ahead and cry all he wanted, that he should forget the damn chamber brunch. I'd order everything in from the Chinese place.

"If I just knew why," he sobbed into my shoulder. "If I just knew who would do this! God! What is the matter with the world?"

"I know. It's screwed up."

"I feel as if - " He choked on his words, then said, "Life is so stupid. It is just dumb, that's all. When something like this can happen and people just go on... Oh, what's the point?"

Again I replied that I didn't know. My heart felt painfully heavy. Would he please take a day off, I begged. But Julian merely shook his head, and said he was doing the brunch. Just could I stop talking about it, he asked me. He looked disconsolately around the kitchen and then began to arrange frozen rolls on a rack to thaw.

The phone rang. A woman from the church was volunteering to contact an excellent private nurse for Marla. I thanked her and said that would be wonderful. Would I be at the early service this Sunday to tell the parish how Marla was doing, she asked. I replied that I would.

When I hung up, I touched Julian's arm. "Will you call Tom today and check in occasionally? Please? I won't be near a phone, and I'm going to be a wreck worrying about you - "

"Sure, of course." He managed a mirthless smile. "When we were talking during the storm, Arch told me - real serious, you know how he is - that he was going to stick to me like epoxy all morning while I was cooking. He swore he'd call an ambulance if I went into shock." Julian chuckled morbidly. I sighed. "So I told him to concentrate on the Mothers of Invention and

I'd worry about the fathers of commerce. Tell you what, Goldy. I didn't want to mention that even if he finds some of those old LPs, he's never going to get hold of a system that'll play them."

"Who's fighting?" demanded a sleepy Arch. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen. "I heard you guys."

"Nobody," I assured him. This morning, my son was wearing an oversize black T-shirt that said GO PANTHERS! on it.

Looking for memorabilia from the civil rights movement, Arch had been overjoyed to find the tattered thing at the Aspen Meadow secondhand store. I hadn't had the heart to tell him it was the booster uniform from the Idaho Springs High School football team.

He pushed his glasses up his nose. His straw-brown hair stuck out in all directions, like a game of pick-up sticks. "Don't you need to leave, Mom?"

"Yes, yes." But I didn't move.

Arch turned to Julian and frowned. "Okay, here I am. Why don't you give me something to chop for the brunch you're doing?"

Julian said, "Why don't you sit down and have breakfast, Eldridge, and then I will."

Arch plopped into a kitchen chair, caught my eye, and gave me a nodding scowl: Everything's going to be okay here, his look said. Sometimes our clan felt like a pride of lions, everyone protective of everyone else. I scooped up the first chafing dish and walked outside.

With all their more harmful consequences, at least the storms had brought a welcome break in the weather. A breeze ruffled my chefs jacket. I hustled past Tom's garden. Cabbage butterflies and iridescent hummingbirds flitted from red dianthus to purple Corsican violet. Aspen leaves that had stirred so languidly on their pale branches two days before now quivered, as if in anticipation of a change in season. In Aspen Meadow, fall usually begins in the middle of August, which was just six weeks away.

In the distance, patches of brilliant sunlight on breeze-rippled Aspen Meadow Lake quilted the water with sparkles.

When I came back in, Arch was eating one of the cranberry-orange muffins Julian had made on Wednesday. I packed the food and the second chafer into the van. Julian insisted on hauling out the dry ice and the speed cart, where the cups of salad would stay cold. At the last moment I remembered the bleach water. The vat of bleach water is a necessary hygiene element for utensils when no running water is available. I packed the closed chlorine-smelling vat in last. With a coffee-deprivation headache percolating, I fervently hoped that one of the food fair booths would offer espresso, and plenty of it.

The van choked, coughed, and wheezed before moving unenthusiastically out of the driveway. An inch-thick spew of stones and gravel covered our road and Main Street. When I exited Interstate 70 and moved into the heavy stream of summer-in- the-suburbs traffic, my temperature gauge flickered upward ominously. The first surge of Denver's hot air filled the van, and I thought of Julian, with us for a year, part of the family. After his outburst in the kitchen, he had warned me brusquely to have something to eat before I started working. He'd said, You don't want to faint in that heat. I took a bite of one of the muffins he had placed on a napkin in the passenger seat. The tart cranberries and Grand Marnier combined for a heady taste. I remembered how energetically Julian had banged the tin into the oven before Claire arrived. And then his agonized questions from this morning echoed in my ear: Who would do this? Why...

I put on the turn signal to go back to Aspen Meadow. Turned it off. Turned it back on. Leave him alone, my inner voice warned. If you do the chamber brunch, you'll only be saying you think he's incompetent. Reluctantly, I turned off the ticker and resolved to stick with the day's plan. After all, the mall opened at eight for special sales in all the stores, and folks were going to come up to the food fair famished from shopping. At least, that was my hope.

"Hey, lady! Make up your mind! The light's gonna change!" came a shout from a convertible behind me.

When the light turned, I gritted my teeth and urged the van forward. I decided to concentrate on the morning ahead. But I had never done a food fair before, and the idea filled me with unhappy anticipation.

Booths at A Taste of Furman County were much sought after, although it was hard to figure out why. Great publicity, I guessed. The big beneficiary of the event was Playhouse Southwest. For the hundreds of servings the playhouse auxiliary told the food folks to provide each day, none of us was compensated. Visitors to the fair, though, paid forty bucks a pop to obtain the official bracelets that allowed them into the tent-festooned roof of the mall garage. The open air was necessary for ventilation, and the roof provided views of Denver's suburban sprawl to the east and the Front Range of the Rockies to the west. Once inside the roped-off area, tasters were promised that horror of horrors, all you can eat, which to food people translates as until we run out.

There had been so much demand for booths from local restaurateurs, chefs, and caterers who wanted to offer their wares, the organizers had even split up the serving times into two-hour shifts. I did not know whether potential clients would be likely to shop or eat during my daily slot from ten to noon. I certainly hoped that they'd stop by my booth, be enthralled and enchanted, and whip out their calendars - and checkbooks - to sign me up for all kinds of profitable new bookings. Otherwise, I was going to be very upset. Not to mention out about a thousand bucks' worth of supplies.

My van sputtered and slowed behind a line of traffic crawling toward the mall garage entrance. After a moment I saw what was once again causing the slowdown. At the side of the parking lot, by the elegant marble entrance to Prince & Grogan, a crowd of animal rights' demonstrators waved placards that read MIGNON COSMETICS BRING DEATH - DEATH TO MIGNON

COSMETICS! Shaman Krill, arms outstretched, hair wild, was leading the crowd in a chant that I couldn't quite make out. The row of cars stopped. I reached across and gingerly rolled down the passenger-side window.

"Death on your hands! Death on your face!"

A uniformed officer was directing traffic. The van crept forward. As I neared the shouting demonstrators, my hands became clammy on the steering wheel. Three parked sheriff's department vehicles seemed to indicate that the police weren't just there to head cars up the ramps.

"Death isn't pretty! Death's pretty gritty!" Maybe there were other cops I couldn't see who were keeping an eye on the activists. Or perhaps the officers were there as part of the continuing investigation into Claire's murder. From the small crowd of people pushing through the nearby door to Foley's department store, it looked as if shoppers were avoiding the protest. This, undoubtedly, was the deterrent the demonstrators wanted, since Mignon was carried exclusively by Prince & Grogan.

"Food fair or shopping?" the policeman asked when my van was finally first in line.

"Food fair." He pointed to the far right side of the ramp, where a food service truck was lumbering up to the top level.

When I slowly accelerated away from the cop, there was a thud on the side of the van, and then another. Frantically scanning the mirrors, I thought I must have been hit by a car backing up, when Shaman Krill's face leered at the partly open passenger-side window.

"Hey! Caterer! Going to throw any more food around today? What're you serving, slaughtered cow?"

I leaned on the horn with one hand and rolled down the driver-side window with the other.

"Help!" I yelled. "Help, help!"

The policeman hustled over. By the time I could tell him one of the demonstrators had harassed me, Shaman Krill had disappeared. Even when I stopped the van and hopped out to look where he'd gone, I couldn't see the activist's dark, bobbing head in the crowd. The policeman asked if I wanted to file a report. I said no. I quickly told him that Investigator Tom Schulz was my husband, and that I'd tell him all about it, but that at the moment I was late to set up for the food fair. The officer reluctantly let me go, with the admonition to be careful.

I climbed back in the driver's seat and pressed firmly on the accelerator. The van whizzed up the ramp of the parking garage. Yellow police ribbons around the place where Claire died came into view. I averted my eyes.

I pulled into a parking space, pinned on my official Food-Fair Server badge, and glanced at my watch. Eight-thirty. A little over an hour remained to get everything set up on the roof before the inspector showed up with his trusty little thermometer to see if my hot food was hot enough and my cold food sufficiently chilly. The diagram of food fair booths showed my booth was next to the stairway up from the second-floor garage entrance to Prince & Grogan. A stream of weight-wielding walkers impeded my schlepping the first load of boxes to the elevator, but I finally made it. Within thirty minutes I had wheeled, carted, and hauled my stuff into place. I put out my ads with sample menus and price lists, fired up the butane burner, and waited for the grills to heat.

And then, oh, then, I thanked the patron saints of cappuccino that right across from the spot allocated to Goldilocks' Catering was a booth with the sign PETE'S ESPRESSO BAR.

I slapped the first batch of ribs on the grill and dashed across the makeshift aisle to the deliciously appetizing smell. With more success than I would have thought possible, Pete had been running a coffee place at Westside Mall since the shopping center had been refurbished. He'd taken it upon - himself to run a wonderfully inventive promotional campaign, including taking nighttime orders for hot coffee drinks delivered first thing in the morning to nearby businesses. He called it Federal Espresso.

Today, Pete, a thirtyish, dark-haired fellow who had managed both to transport and get a power source for an enormous steam- driven Rancilio machine, was wearing a T-shirt that said NEED COFFEE DELIVERED? USE ESPRESSO MALE. He instantly recognized the symptoms of latte-deprivation and fixed me a tall one with three shots. I sipped it gratefully while looking eastward off the garage roof. A beautiful old neighborhood called Aqua Bella was not half a mile away, and the rooftops of the large, older homes were just visible - the turrets of a pale Victorian, the chimneys of an Edwardian. It wasn't as good as looking at the lake and the mountains with my morning coffee, but it was okay.