I repressed the greeting on my lips. The walls had been cleaned of the cocoa powder thrown by the Jerk, and lump crabmeat glistened invitingly on the countertop next to a tall green bottle of white wine. A seasoned crepier waited next to a wide saute pan, where butter for a sauce sizzled in a slow, circuitous melt. Tom relished cooking even more than gardening. I happily let him do both. I’d take crapes stuffed with crabmeat in white wine sauce any day. Especially when it was made by somebody else.
As I watched, Tom leaned over the crabmeat and methodically nabbed and tossed bits of shell and cartilage. I felt a surge of pleasure. It was not only that I now lived in a household where people vied to prepare the food. Nor was it, because of the day’s events, that I’d developed a sudden appreciation for life. This unsettling joy surfaced because I still didn’t know why I’d been so reluctant to marry the man who now stood in what used to be my domain and was now
I watched the butter dissolve into a golden pool. Of course, my hesitancy stemmed from all that bad history of my first marriage. After I’d left the Jerk I’d come to relish those years of single motherhood and solitude. Except for the celibacy, which I kept telling myself I’d get used to, being single constituted the perfect life for me, I’d decided. Until Tom.
Nevertheless, transition from my fiercely maintained aloneness to daily companionship did have its glitches. There had been the financial questions. Years ago, the divorce settlement from Dr. John Richard Korman had paid for the expensive retrofit of my kitchen for commercial food service, and I couldn’t leave it and still maintain my business. So Tom had moved in with Arch, Julian, and me, and found a renter for his cabin in a remote mountain area. He insisted on putting the rent money into a vacation fund for the four of us. Of course, as a self-employed woman with the only catering business in town, I’d forgotten what the word
These and other material aspects we’d been able to work out fairly well. Our biggest problem was anxiety. Tom worried about me and I returned the favor. Tom had seen some of the damage done by John Richard Korman before our split. He knew my left thumb didn’t bend properly because John Richard had broken it in three places with a hammer. Tom had examined the hutch glass I’d never replaced after John Richard had shattered it in one of his rampages, and the buffet permanently dented from the Jerk’s repeated kicking when I’d been hiding behind it. After Tom moved in, one of his first acts was to replace the hutch glass and sand and refinish the buffet’s dents.
My apprehension over the dangers of his job were legion. Whenever I heard over the radio of a shooting, whenever a midnight phone call brought him out of our warm bed, whenever that midnight phone call meant that before he left he was cinching the Velcro bands around his white bulletproof vest, my heart ached with fear. My anxiety had not been eased when a murderer had kidnapped Tom for four days this spring, just as we were about to be married. He scoffed and said that had been a bizarre event. He hadn’t even believed it himself.
Nor did Tom and I quite know how to talk to each other about our work. Tom claimed he enjoyed discussing investigations with me as long as I wouldn’t get upset. Or worse, tell anybody what he or I had uncovered. To me, Tom always appeared either in control: when he was surrounded by his team in an investigation, or in relaxed good humor, when we were together and he was telling me about bloodstain patterns or check-kiting. I, on the other hand, did not relish rehashing the trials of cooking for, serving to, and cleaning up after the rich and shameless. Occasionally I would regale him with stories about the Thai guest at a reception for two hundred who’d insisted on giving me his recipe for whole baked fish—in Thai, or about the drunk Polo Club host who fell off his horse before eating one bite of the vegetarian shish kebabs.
Reflecting on all this, I’d failed to notice that Tom had stopped cooking and was staring at the cupboard above the kitchen counter, his face twisted with pain.
“Tom! What is it?”
Startled, he dropped the shell bits he was holding. I apologized and helped him wipe them off the floor. By the time he straightened up, he had assumed his normal end-of-the-day relaxed look. Still, I was taken aback. In the two months that we’d been married, I’d never seen him look agonized. Until now. Despite his disclaimers to the contrary, the job did take its toll, after all.
He forced a wide grin. “Hey there, Miss G.”
“What’s wrong?”
“No more than usual.” He rinsed his hands and dried them on a dish towel “Julian’s okay, he just needs to rest. I think he’s asleep. Did you get
I hugged him briefly and murmured that I had. Which reminded me. I phoned the St. Luke’s answering machine and left a brief message about Marla’s condition, then left another message for a woman in the parish who had once hired a private nurse. Did she have any recommendations? I asked her tape. Then I washed my hands and glanced at the recipe before retrieving some fresh garlic. Alas, the Jerk had carried off my knives somewhere.
“Marla was very angry. Claimed she hadn’t had a heart attack,” I commented over my shoulder as I looked around the dining room for my knifeblock. This seldom-used space was a monument to my former life as a doctor’s wife. It looked like a furniture store. I’d bought the solid cherry buffet, hutch, and dining room suite right after my first wedding. Then I’d feverishly crocheted an enormous tablecloth and undertaken the tiresome needlepointing of floral covers for the chair seats. I should have been taking a karate class. Better yet, shooting lessons. I hefted up the knifeblock from the table and brought it back to the kitchen.
“I’m guessing Marla will be home at the beginning of next week,” I told Tom as I sniffed a clove of garlic. The garlic was fresh and juicy; its pungent smell filled the air. I told Tom what the cardiologist had told me about Marla’s condition and her upcoming angiogram and potential atherectomy. “I’m going to go in and see her every day,” I added defiantly as I minced. But of course Tom wouldn’t be jealous if I made a daily visit to a friend. I shook my head and reached for another clove of garlic. Old reactions died harder than I thought.
Tom turned back to his recipe card and abruptly changed the subject. “How did Korman get through the security system?”
“Look, it was a fluke … I was in the middle of undoing the dead bolt, and the phone rang, and he hollered that there was some bad news … and before I knew it, he was right beside me … I just wasn’t careful.”
“Are you all right?” He glanced up from the recipe card, his mouth in a thin line.
When I said I was, he frowned disbelievingly.
“Sorry,” I amended, “it won’t happen again.” And there went my summer breeze through the unsecured upstairs windows, I thought. “What did the hospital say about Julian? Is there any special treatment?”
He dropped ingredients into the melted butter. The delectable scent of crabmeat and garlic rose from the pan. “He just needs to rest. We probably shouldn’t talk about the accident around him. Not just yet, anyway, although we’ll have to eventually.” He reached for a wooden spoon and stirred in flour to make a roux.
“Why not talk to him about it? And why will you have to eventually?”
Tom exhaled deeply. “Goldy, he looked god-awful coming home from the hospital. I just don’t want to upset him anymore. He cried off and on all the way up the interstate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kid in tears.”
“Maybe if he talks about it he’ll feel better.”
Tom stopped stirring and gave me a half-grin. “Well, Miss Psych Major, I know that’s true. But we’ve got a lot of unknowns right now, and I’m not sure Julian should hear about them just yet.”
“Unknowns?”
He whisked broth into the sauce, set it to simmer, and then trundled over to the walk-in refrigerator. A moment later he emerged with two bottles of carbonated apple cider, one of Arch’s favorites. He opened a bottle and poured us each a glass full of spritzy gold bubbles. The icy drink was heavenly after the heat of the day.
Tom said, “This mess with Claire Satterfield looks real bad. I’m going to be tied up with it for the foreseeable future.”
“But I thought the state patrol handled traffic accidents—”
“It wasn’t an accident,” he said curtly. He drained his glass. His deep green eyes regarded me grimly. “The patrolman and I saw
“You mean you can—wait! Acceleration? Somebody saw her? Somebody saw her and … sped up? Oh, my Lord—”
He nodded. “And our one eyewitness,” he said, “or the one person who
