Dying for Chocolate

cautiously rolled down my window.

“Do you want me to stay or not?” he demanded. Heat and anger had made his face shiny with sweat.

“Not, thank you,” I sang out, and accelerated up the driveway. I don’t know why I had called him in the first place. In any given situation The Jerk was more liability than asset.

When I opened the doors to the garage I saw only the general’s Range Rover. I eased the van in alongside. When I alighted I noticed something was missing from the walls. I looked around. The snow shovels were in place; ditto the garbage cans, tool shelves, and all the attendant tools. The mulcher, fertilizer, gardening equipment—all were where they belonged. But there was a gap, an empty space usually occupied by. . . I looked around carefully, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine the garage as it usually was.

The camping equipment. I reopened my eyes and scanned the left wall. No tent, no cooker, no backpack. I let out a sigh. Even if running away was his objective, he never would have taken all that paraphernalia. Arch hated to camp.

I pulled the Mace out of the van and went through the door to the kitchen. With my free, trembling hand I used the intercom and heard my voice crackle throughout the house—Anybody here?

Sometimes you just feel someone is there. In the meantime, I began a room-to-room search.

I found General Farquhar sitting on the covered porch. He was gazing out at the mountains. In front of him was a bottle of scotch. A half-full glass of whiskey shook ever so slightly in his hand, like a bell that had only just stopped ringing. I put the can of Mace on the table.

“General Bo!” I said, and shook his shoulder. “Are you all right? Where is everybody?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side.

“Gone,” he said in a low voice. “All gone.”

I came around in front of him and got down on my knees. I wanted to get some visual contact. His face looked terrible. The circles under his eyes were darker than usual, and his air of dejection made him seem older.

“Where’s Arch?”

“Gone!”

“Gone where?”

He closed his eyes, whether to get me out of his sight or search his mind I knew not.

“Where is Arch?” I demanded, more loudly this time. I put my hands on his free one. “Where is Julian? Where is Adele?”

He winced. My heart said, Talk, talk. Please.

He opened his eyes. Liquid brimmed out.

“Gone, gone, gone,” he said.

“Gone where?”

He sighed, reached for the scotch, shakily poured some. “The camping equipment is gone.” He sipped, then slugged it down. “They didn’t leave any written indication of where they were going. There’s nothing on the tape. Your ex-husband came, but I didn’t let him in. I could see with the scope he didn’t have Arch.”

I got up. My knees cracked. I was having a hard time not losing my temper.

“Could you please tell me,” I said evenly, “what has happened since the police left? Is everyone out shopping?”

“They’re not out shopping. Adele said her back was bothering her and she was going to lie down. I went out to look for that damned detonator in the storage area. When the garage door opened I saw Julian headed out with all the camping equipment. I called after him. He ignored me, started running down the driveway.” His forehead was a mass of wrinkles; he shook his head. “It was almost as if he couldn’t hear me or he was ignoring me. I kept hunting for the detonator, between the boxes—” He broke off and emptied his glass. “Later I heard the car starting. I looked out and there were Adele and Sissy. They were getting into the Thunderbird.”

“Did you see Arch?”

He wrinkled his brow, his eyes unfocused in my direction. “No. Did I call? Yes. Did I ask where they were going, when they would be back? Yes. Did they answer? No. It was the same hurry routine.”

“I don’t get it.”

The general refilled his glass, sipped the scotch, and looked out at the mountains.

“Snap out of it,” I ordered. “Did you and Adele have a fight, or what? Where would she go with Sissy?”

He tipped up the glass and drained it. He asked softly, “Where’s the detonator?”

“I don’t know,” I said firmly. I picked up the bottle of scotch and walked out to the kitchen. I tried the intercom again. Arch? Arch? My voice echoed through the whole house. There was no note on the desk, the refrigerator, or anywhere else that I could see.

I ran up the stairs. Up, up to the third floor, my heart thudding in my chest the whole time. Arch’s room was a wreck. Nothing unusual about that; he had been a neat child until this past year. I went into the bathroom. No note. But his bathing suit was not hanging on the shower curtain rod where he usually left it.

I called Andrea’s house. Was Arch over there, had he called, had they seen him? No to all of the above. What was I getting upset about? He went places all the time without telling me. But not the day of a drowning, and especially not when I had told him specifically to stick around. Where would he have gone?

I looked around my room. No note on the mirror. No note on the bed. I allowed myself to collapse on the comforter. I looked at my watch. It had been three hours since I had left him here.

I tried to focus on a mental image of him. My heart said, Where are you?

It was then that I looked down at the rug, a warm speckled mix of Easter egg hues—purple, pink, green. The pattern swam before my eyes.

Near the edge of my bed was a playing card. I bent over to look at it. I had not brought a deck of cards when I moved into the Farquhars. Where had it come from? I stared at it in disbelief.

Someone had been with Arch. Someone had been watching him. Someone had prevented him from leaving a note. But like a magician, he had used sleight of hand, distracting his watcher so that he could surreptitiously drop a card, a careless act, apparently unnoticed.

A note. A card. A signal of distress. I lifted the seven of spades from the floor.

27.

I called Schulz. “Arch is gone,” I heard my disembodied voice saying. “I can’t find him. I’m losing my mind.”

He said, “Back up. Begin with when you left the parking lot.”

“John Richard couldn’t get Arch because the security gate was locked and the general wouldn’t let him in. He said he could see through his scope that Arch wasn’t with him. Which was true. Tom. I know Arch is in trouble. He left our old danger code.”

Schulz was calm. He asked questions: about the card, about Bo, about when everyone had disappeared, about where Julian could go, about Sissy.

He said, “I’ll call the girl’s parents. If we haven’t found him by tonight I’ll put out an APB. You call Arch’s friends, Adele’s friends, see if you can come up with anything.” He hesitated. “Something you should know. It’s been six hours since they got Harrington’s body out of the pool. I had the coroner make a preliminary check for what I suspected, and it looks as if it was there.”

I struggled to focus back on the floating body of Brian Harrington. “What?”

“He didn’t drown. There wasn’t any water in his lungs. But his insides were burned up. My guess would be by cantharidin.”

I was numb. I said, “I’ll make those calls and drive around to look for Arch. Think I should go talk to Weezie Harrington?”

“We already did. She said Brian was restless last night, told her he was going out for a walk to look at the stars.”

“And?”

“That was the last time she saw him. She says. The guys believed her.”