The phone.
I sat up. My right toe was throbbing. What Laura would have said: Call a toe truck.
The clock read ten-twenty. I’d gotten home at two-thirty, I remembered, after finally driving an exhausted Trixie home. Except for this ringing, my house was quiet—a sure sign that everyone had decided to let me sleep after my wee-hour janitorial stint. Everyone, that is, except this nut calling me.
I said into the receiver, “This had better be good.”
“Ho-ho!” came Tom Schulz’s too cheerful voice. “In your usual good mood, too. What’d you do, tie one on last night?”
“Please.”
He said, “I thought you might be interested in helping us investigate that scalpel. Because that’s what it was, you know.”
“A scalpel. I told you it was a frigging scalpel. I passed Med Wives 101, you know. Did you have a blood match?”
“Easy now. They’re working on the blood match. It’s coming. Right now I need more to go on than what you’ve given me. Including why your son would have that scalpel stashed.”
“I told you. He found it in the Kormans’ car, and my theory is that someone put it there after using it on Laura.”
“Theory?” Tom Schulz yelled. “That’s what I’m supposed to go to the DA with? A caterer’s theory?”
“Seems to me, Tom,” I said, “that you need to find out who would have access to Just One Bite.”
“That’s easy. Anybody can get it to kill rats.”
“Lots of folks think Fritz is just that. A rat.” I told him about the creekside activity with Patty Sue.
“Incredible,” said Tom Schulz. “He’s irresistible even to a woman with a broken arm.”
“You don’t understand,” I said in Patty Sue’s defense. “My housemate respects authority with a capital R. That’s how people like Fritz get their power.”
Schulz asked again, “Are you going to tell me what your kid was doing with that scalpel?”
“I don’t know what he was doing with it,” I replied truthfully. “I’m going to try to find out. But there’s more. I got into a mess with Trixie last night.” I told him about the intruder, the mirror, and the Volvo.
“Trouble just follows you around, you know? Be careful. Because whoever our guy, or gal, is, they’re going to try again to do in Fritz. You don’t want your kid to get in the middle. And chances are our culprit won’t mess with a few pellets of rat poison this time.”
“Why not?”
“Bright little Goldy can’t figure that one out?”
“Excuse me. Let me go get a cup of coffee and my brain will get into gear.”
“Our murderer will probably use something else, and there will be a next time,” Schulz said, “because the first time, he or she flunked Poisoning 101. Just watch it.”
“I plan to,” I said, and hung up.
I spent the next day hustling around the house to get ready for the Amour Anonymous meeting. Looking at the treats from the pastry shop made me wonder if we might need more. I could always use any surplus from today on the Halloween party. I slathered fudge frosting on brownies for Patty Sue. I stuffed crepes with sugared ricotta cheese and smothered them with apricot sauce for Marla (“I spent the last two days in Vegas,” she’d called that morning to tell me. “I thought it would be a good break. Ended up spending the whole time with a glass of Jack Daniel’s and bag of peanuts in one hand and a roll of quarters in the other. Pretty soon the coins sounded like peanuts and the peanuts smelled like coins and I thought, now I’m really crazy. Guess I need the group, Goldy, don’t you think? I’ll bring the dessert sherry, you just make lots to eat.”)
The phone rang again. Alicia couldn’t come: she’d had a blowout on I-70. Her load of pumpkins had exploded like grenades when they hit the concrete. Two dozen cars had spun out in orange slime … no one was hurt … the road was closed so it could be cleaned … traffic had backed up for six miles. With significant understatement, she added, “You can’t imagine the mess.”
A couple of other women called with excuses, none so spectacular. When I finally got back to cooking I melted sugar into a dark syrup for Vonette’s favorite, Burnt-Sugar Cake. Pondering what Trixie would fancy, I decided she could manage with cookies. Marla would finish them if Trixie was holding out for health food.
And speaking of which, I could use Pomeroy’s honey to make my marvelous Honey-I’m-Home Ginger Snaps. This was my very own tasty invention. They were popular with the station-wagon set. Plus, they kept well.
The spicy scent of baking cookies filled the kitchen. When I was done I surveyed the spread. If we were going to be involved in telling all our sad stories we could do with a few sweets.
Marla arrived first. She swept in wearing a bespangled tent-type dress and a long scarf that said Club Mediterranee.
“God,” she fumed, “I’m exhausted. It’s a good thing I don’t take drugs. Someone could have sold me some speed and I would have spent another six hundred bucks on those slot machines and put Planter’s out of business. Tell me you’ve made something fabulous to eat.”
“In there.” I gestured toward the dining room.
“Where is everybody?”
“Coming. They’re eating dinner.”
“I ate dinner,” she said as she picked up a dessert plate and attacked the brownies. “I just saved room for dessert.”
“Did I hear someone mention dessert?” asked a yawning Patty Sue as she descended from upstairs, where she had been napping.
“You bet,” said Marla, “come quickly before I eat it all.”
Running suit–attired Trixie trotted in carrying hand weights. I begged her to leave them by the door, which she did.
“Hoo-hoo!” yodeled Vonette from the front door. She was already tipsy. Her orange hair looked like an abandoned robins’ nest.
Honey-I’m-Home Gingersnaps
2 cups all-purpose flour (high altitude: add 1 tablespoon)
2 teaspoons baking soda
? teaspoon salt
1? teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
? teaspoon ground cloves
? teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
? cup solid vegetable shortening
? cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
? cup honey
? teaspoon finely minced lemon zest
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Butter two cookie sheets.
Sift together the flour, soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Set aside.
In a large mixer bowl, cream the shortening, butter, and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and the honey until well combined. Stir in the flour mixture and the zest, stirring until well combined, with no traces of flour visible.
Using a 1-tablespoon scoop, measure the cookies onto the cookie sheets, keeping them two inches apart. Do not attempt to make more than one dozen per sheet. Bake the batches one at a time, until the cookies have puffed and flattened and have a crinkly surface, 10 to 12 minutes per batch.
Cool the cookies completely on racks.
