Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series)

happened at her house. Sorry,” I said again. I thought I was going to faint from the heat and humidity in the small dark room. The ambient temperature must have been a hundred and twenty. But instead of leaving I cleared my throat and said, “Have you thought any more about coming to our group?”

She moved around on the tiles.

“Tell me again when you’re meeting.”

“Next week, Thursday, and also Friday night, October thirtieth. I just thought you might enjoy it.”

“Well, at least I can enjoy the food, right?” She gave a harsh laugh. Then, “The thirtieth, I guess.”

“You’ll be glad you did.”

She said, “I guess,” and stood to leave. The door slammed behind her.

Twenty minutes later I was dried and dressed but still full of questions. While Trixie worked on her hair and makeup I tried to bring up the subject of Laura again, to no avail. When I asked if we could get together before the meeting on the thirtieth she gave me a curious look.

“Just to chat,” I said.

“No,” she said, then picked up her gym bag and swept out.

The locker room was empty. I groped around in my handbag for the key to Laura’s locker. L221. The L stood for Ladies; that much I knew. I wouldn’t get over to do the M side until I did my first cleaning job here. For that I could wait.

There was a sudden hush in the locker room. Saturday classes were over before noon. Everyone had left to chop firewood or shop for groceries. This set burgling into high relief, morally speaking.

I put the flat metal key into 221 and turned. Gooseflesh crawled up my neck. The key wouldn’t budge. I jiggled it and tried again. The door clanged open.

The inside of the locker door was plastered with homemade signs, and I began to wonder if Laura had a fixation with slogans. “You Can’t Find These Muscles on the Seashore.” Too much. The uppermost sign was a copy of the Serenity Prayer. She had underlined to change the things I can.

On the top shelf was the usual array of female bath accessories, shampoo, rinse, body lotion. Still no razor, I noticed, and made a mental note to tell Schulz. Not that he would care. My ideas didn’t seem to carry much weight with the local constabulary. Behind the toiletries was a paperback, which I imagined from its brittle condition to be reading material Laura took into the sauna. It was a day-by-day meditation book, advocating strength and courage and calm. For what?

Underneath her name in the front of the book were the words Sundays, noon, Episcopal church. Thinking of my old parish, I tried to remember what went on at noon on Sundays, after everyone had left. Several times I had stayed to clean the Sunday school room while Arch threw stones into Cottonwood Creek. One time I had gone into the ladies’ room to cry when John Richard slipped out with the choir lady. Arch had thrown enough stones into the creek to qualify him for dam construction by the time I came out, red-eyed and sniffly. And there had been a meeting going on, where I remembered several of the people had also been red-eyed and sniffly. What was it? Memory failed.

My hand slid across the cool metal of the shelf. In the far corner there was a piece of paper that was stuck. Perhaps Laura had put a wet bottle of shampoo or damp washcloth up there. It was probably just an old label from soap. Without thinking I pulled, and half of whatever it was came off in my hand.

The torn paper was not a label, and I cursed myself for not trying to extricate it more carefully. It was part of a yellowed article from an old newspaper with a scrawled note: Show P.S. and T. I tried to release the rest of the stuck paper from the shelf with my fingernail, but got only illegible bits.

The torn part read:

The upper left-hand corner said October 6, 1961.

I put the book with the notation about Sunday meetings, as well as the article, into my gym bag and headed for the front desk. In 1967 John Richard had been ten years old, so that even if he would be willing to explain this, he probably wouldn’t remember. If I could get Vonette sober, she might tell me more. Maybe Schulz had already found out what this was about, though I doubted that. Like the book of advice or the church meeting, or the fact that Vonette had said that Laura had been a nanny for them, I did not know how this fit.

At the desk I received a note telling me Arch’s teacher had tried to reach me at home and had been told to call here, and would I please call her at home during the weekend. Nothing urgent, she’d said, just call at your convenience.

You bet, I thought, but first I had some other business to attend to. I dialed the number for the office of Korman and Korman, asked for an appointment, and was informed that the doctors had left for the weekend. Would I like to see Dr. Korman senior on Monday?

“Yes,” I said. “I have to bring Patty Sue Williams in anyway; maybe you could fit me in around that time.”

There was a pause.

“I only need to see him for about ten minutes,” I said.

“Oh? And what is your problem, Miss Bear? Are you in pain?”

“Chronic. Lower abdomen. I know he’ll be able to help me.” I said, “There’s just so much I can’t digest,” and hung up.

CHAPTER 12

Show P.S. and T.

Why had Laura Smiley made that note on an article about a mistrial? It had been in her locker; one had to assume that P.S. and T. were available in the athletic club. It was an article about Dr. Fritz Korman, something from two decades before, something which, for a reason I did not know, had relevance for P.S. and T.

I put the article down and tried to call Arch’s teacher, Janet Heath, but got her answering machine instead. I stared at the article again.

Trixie (T.?) had said that she and Laura had talked about Korman in the steam room after exercise class. She also had said that Laura and Patty Sue, of all people, had had a tete-a-tete in the same steam room. Time for me to have a little chat with P.S. myself, especially since she was the only woman I knew who was a current patient of Fritz Korman’s.

But Patty Sue was out running when I arrived home. When she came back Arch was in and out with Todd so that it was impossible to ask questions. Then she went to bed after we finished the dishes. What was the point of all that exercise if it rendered you constitutionally incapable of staying up past nine at night?

Well, we still lived under the same roof. Sunday morning would do for questions. I dialed Janet Heath again and got her machine again. Another chat set aside for the next morning.

As usual I awoke early. Sunday, with its inevitable doldrums, is the bane of the single person who has been married. For couples and families it is a day of church, picnics, fishing, football games, pizza, and movies. Now the emptiness descended like one of the cold fogs that go creeping through the mountain valleys in winter. The frigid moisture is almost invisible, but you can see the way the icy clouds turn green pines to silver; you can feel the chill seep into your bones.

So I followed my routine. Cooking was the cure for loss. The candy for Arch’s Halloween party at Furman Elementary was the next order of business.

A batch of my Terrific Toffee would do for the sixth graders. The candy would keep in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks. I buttered two nine-by-thirteen-inch glass pans and started to melt butter with brown sugar in a big pot. I rummaged through my knife drawer for the candy thermometer, then snapped its long bulb onto the side of the pan.

I stirred, and remembered when Arch was five. We had spent a lot of time playing the game Candyland. This had led to long discussions about how they made all the sweets for that place, which Arch believed existed outside of the game board. The Candyland cement mixer trucks were full of toffee, he insisted, because they could keep it moving all the time. Car engines had little blades to chop up peppermint drops so you could stir them into Christmas fudge. Two years later John Richard moved out, and two months after that dismal Christmas I found a hoard of old