“Schulz, you’d better come take a look at this.”
Tom Schulz stood up and walked out of the kitchen. This reminded me of the many calls John Richard had received at home, always from females in one sort of pain or another, and only rarely, I found out from the hospital, actual patients.
I shook this off and went out to the living room. The guests had left and two fellows, presumably from the Health Department, were labeling everything and packing the containers into boxes. Schulz was in consultation with his man, their voices lowered.
Outside I could hear Patty Sue laughing, so I went to investigate. She was seated on a wooden bench next to the cluster of aspens in Laura’s front yard. Next to her was Pomeroy Locraft.
He was grinning. Seeing him with Patty Sue did not make me feel great. Last spring I had dropped several hints that Pom and Arch and I all go out for pizza or a movie after their worktime. Perhaps I was too subtle. Perhaps Pom was dense, uninterested, or both, which was the way he had acted today. Now he was engaged in a lively conversation with Patty Sue. I had the uncomforting thought that she was at least ten years too young for him.
I walked in their direction through the long dry grass, which the summer heat had burned to gold. Here and there bushes reduced by the fall sun to thorned sticks snared my stockings. Above, fluffs of cloud sailed across a deep blue sky. The air was thick with the sweet mixed smell of decaying aspen leaves and smoke from a wood fire, probably built during the early morning chill. But the day had turned out warm and beautiful, and the calm was disorienting after the turmoil in the house.
“Hi, Mom!” yelled Arch from somewhere I couldn’t see.
“Where are you?” I called back.
“Here!” he hollered triumphantly from the middle part of a lodgepole pine near the bench. I absolutely hated seeing Arch climb those feeble-branched evergreens. As if in answer to my worries, he let out a shout.
“Help!” he cried. “I’m falling!”
I could see his body toppling, hear branches snapping. I was too far away but my feet darted forward anyway.
With startling swiftness Pomeroy ran to the bottom of the tree, where he caught Arch by the arm and broke his fall. By the time I got to the pine, the two of them were laughing. I was not amused, as this was the second time in one day that I’d come close to coronary arrest worrying about my child’s welfare.
I said, “Thanks, Pom.” He had handed Arch his glasses and was brushing bits of bark off Arch’s formerly white shirt.
“It’s okay,” he said, as much to Arch as to me. “Can’t blame a kid for wanting to climb a tree, right?”
“No,” Arch said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, Arch and I are buddies,” said Pomeroy with that half smile. “Right, bud?”
Arch nodded and started toward the chokecherry bushes that lined Laura Smiley’s driveway.
“Thanks for being nice to him,” I said. “Thanks for being a good catcher.”
“I like kids.”
“So I see.”
Pomeroy gave me another embarrassed look—not the pink-red of shyness, but a black-red that glowed from underneath his skin. I could not imagine what was bothering him, so I let it go.
Pomeroy sat back on the bench, then turned to me and smiled. He had recovered his composure, and the impish smile and splatter of freckles over his pale cheeks gave him the look of a child. But the dark good looks and brown mustache were unmistakably adult, as was the lanky body that spilled over the bench’s slats. His brown eyes held mine, and I could not think of what to say next.
He said, “Before we were interrupted, Patty Sue here was telling me she can’t drive.”
“She’s made a few attempts with her father’s pickup, I believe,” I said.
Patty Sue groaned.
“I was thinking,” said Pomeroy. “Maybe she could come to one of my driver-ed classes. At the high school.” He gave a slight grin. “There’s not much money from the county for this type of thing, and some of my cars are pretty old, but she could still learn.”
“Sounds marvelous,” I said with false cheer. My ex-husband might have been able to mine the high school faculty for dates. But with Pomeroy stuck on my housemate, it looked as if my chance to find social life from the same place was collapsing with the rapidity of a souffle. Schulz appeared at the end of the driveway and motioned me back down to the house with that thumb.
I said, “I have to go.”
“I’ll check on the liability and what not,” Pom called after me. “Are you all free Friday afternoons?”
I turned around and put my hand on my hip. “What do you need
He grinned again, wide and sheepish, and I felt some of the frost in my heart melt. Maybe there was hope. He was still good-looking and single. Perhaps his ability to get along with children, witness the relationship with Arch, was merely extended to Patty Sue.
He leaned toward me and said, “Somebody’s got to get her a learner’s permit and bring her to the high school.”
I nodded and traipsed back toward Schulz, who had gone inside.
“Look familiar?” he said as he pointed to one of my Styrofoam cups. “Don’t touch,” he admonished. “Just peek inside.”
I did as ordered and saw an almost empty coffee cup with what looked like about twenty little green pellets on the bottom.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Schulz grinned at me, a wide face-breaker.
“Miss Goldy,” he began. “Excuse me,
“For God’s sake,” I protested, “what’s in the cup?”
He had begun to walk away, but at my question turned back. “Oh,” he said, “you just flunked Detection 101. Dr. Korman drank that coffee, but he didn’t know what was on the bottom. Looks to me like whoever tried to do him in was using rat poison.”
Saturday ended with a whimper after the day’s bang. When Pomeroy left, I outlined our suddenly disastrous finances to both Patty Sue and Arch. Patty Sue’s rent was her ability to work for the catering business, and without the business both of us would have to do whatever work we could find just to buy groceries and make the November house payment. Arch accepted the suspension of his allowance with a grim silence.
Even our dinner that night was-a problem. I reminded Patty Sue and Arch of this as we pulled into our driveway. After a job, we usually feasted on leftovers and odds and ends. Now the leftovers were being analyzed down at the Department of Health.
Arch offered to heat chili in the microwave. I didn’t think things could get a whole lot worse until he pointed to an enormous bouquet of dried flowers on our deck. Damn. One of the arrangements for the funeral or reception had been delivered here by mistake.
But no. The envelope was addressed to me. Inside was an unsigned message.
“Don’t worry about Fritz, sweetie pie. He deserves it.”
CHAPTER 5
How’d you do it?” my ex-husband demanded over the phone the next morning, Sunday. “Get your dumbass roommate to drop the stuff in? You tell her they were sweetening capsules?”
“Oh stop,” I said. “Just tell me how Fritz is.”
“Not until you answer my question.”
“My roommate is a patient of your father’s,” I reminded him, “and she is living here at your mother’s request. She’s a lovely girl who respects your father, and does not deserve to be maligned by you.”
