Killer Pancake

boxes to go into the van. He said, “I’m the calmest person I know. Also the most depressed.”

“Oh, Julian, what can I—”

“Nothing. And don’t ask me again if I want to stay home, because the answer is no.”

Resigned, I again decorated the Vanilla-iced fudge cookies by lightly dusting them with cocoa powder. While I took a quick shower, Julian finished packing the van. As we drove in silence to the Aspen Meadow Country Club area, I sneaked a glance at Julian’s pale, exhausted face. I thought of all my friends who’d tried to fix me up with their single male neighbors, cousins, colleagues, coaches, and postal workers when I was divorced. Now, finally, I understood their impulse, because more than anything I wanted someone for Julian to find comfort from, as I had with Tom. But no friend can force that loving other person on you, I’d learned. If I hadn’t stumbled into Tom in the course of my catering business, I’d probably still be the woman with a chip on her shoulder who refused to be comforted by anyone.

The stone entryway to the country club area had been draped with swathes of red, white, and blue fabric. I swung the van past an exuberant group of kids with sparklers and up toward Aspen Knoll.

“What was it exactly that Babs’s parents did to earn their fortune?” Julian asked as we passed hillocks of elegant, showy landscaping that featured lush sprays of pampas grass, miniature aspens, iris of every conceivable hue, and masses and masses of pink and yellow perennials.

“Butter,” I said.

“And here I thought all the money in this part of the country was tied up with oil.”

I was still laughing when we pulled around to the back entrance of the colossal contemporary-style house. Neither Charles nor Babs was in sight. We didn’t have any luck at the garage door, so we tried the front. A maid directed us to deck stairs that led to the side door to the kitchen. After we’d trekked up and down those stairs eleven times to unload our supplies, I began to wonder how much the Braithwaites had to pay someone to bring in the groceries. I also wondered about my boxes: They all said “Fourth of July party at the Braithwaites.” I hadn’t labeled the cartons, nor had I noticed that Julian had labeled them earlier. Well, he had to have taken them out of the refrigerator, so I knew they had to be right.

We were running slightly behind schedule, so the first order of business was to scope the place. The living room, where Julian and I would serve the soup and skewers as hors d’oeuvre, had a bar at the ready. It was an enormous room decorated in an Oriental style, which meant lots of heavy mahogany tables, silk screens, and low- slung silk-covered couches and chairs. Bowls of white and red peonies graced the mantelpiece and bar. The maid had already set the dining room table for twelve. A lovely floral arrangement of red roses, white lilies, and blue gladiolas carried out the July Fourth theme for the evening. Each place also boasted a miniature American flag with the name of the guest engraved on its flagpole. We circled the table under the maid’s watchful eye. I saw what I was hoping for. Mr. Reginald Hotchkiss was indeed one of the invited guests.

I sighed and tried to think of a strategy for asking him a few questions. Or for doing any sleuthing around this immense estate. When I was back in the kitchen, I looked out the window at Charles Braithwaite’s greenhouse. With little actual cooking ahead, I’d surely have time to sneak down there while it was still light outside and look for a blue rose or two. The curry was done, all it needed was reheating. Ditto the rice. I knelt and opened the first carton, then stared at the contents. My eyes aren’t working, I thought. Something’s wrong. I leaned back on my heels, suddenly dizzy. What were the symptoms of heart attack? Indigestion, cold sweat, feeling light-headed. This isn’t happening, I thought. Maybe I’m going into cardiac arrest.

I looked back inside the box. There was no curry. There was no raisin rice. There was no vegetable slaw. There were neatly packed boxes of arborio rice, lowfat chicken broth, even several large bags of slightly thawed shrimp. And a note to me, in Tom Schulz’s unmistakable scrawl. I opened it with trembling hands.Dear Miss Goldy,Sorry about this, but I really don’t want you snooping at the Braithwaites’ place tonight, and knowing you, that’s precisely what you have in mind. You didn’t tell me someone hit you with bleach water and wrote you a threatening note, Julian told me. You are in danger, dear wife. The only way to prevent you from getting into more trouble is to switch food on you so that you have to spend all your time cooking instead of sneaking around getting you—and me—into trouble. So: attached is my recipe for Shrimp Risotto. I had a Denver chef prepare all the ingredients for your menu. It perfectly meets Babs Braithwaite’s requirement of being lowfat. And you can tell her it’s even low-cost, since the shrimp is being donated by your local homicide investigator. She should be pleased as punch to be getting large shrimp for the price of ground turkey. And we’ll all be pleased to eat turkey curry every day next week.Don’t be mad at Julian. I asked him to pick up the boxes and told him it was a nice surprise for you. I know you won’t be pleased, because risotto is time- consuming and demands that the cook be there every second to attend to it. But that’s what I want, Goldy. You doing your job and me doing mine. Don’t be too mad at me. I’m just trying to think of both of us.—Tom

“Brauuugh!” I hollered. Don’t be too angry with him? I was going to kill him with my bare hands. “Julian!” I roared. “How the hell could you do this to me? How could you let him do this to me?”

“Let him do what?” Julian bounded over and picked up the note. As he was reading it, the maid appeared in the kitchen.

“The mistress would like to see the two of you when you have a minute,” she announced.

Well, that was just great. I looked at all the food—the new food—that had to be prepared.

The maid cleared her throat. “The mistress—”

“Right now?” I demanded. “Does she have to see me this very minute?” I didn’t have a speech ready yet.

“Yes,” replied the maid. “First bedroom at the top of the stairs.”

My stomach made an unexpected growl, no doubt caused by hunger, apprehension at seeing “the mistress,” and worry about preparing the accursed risotto. Julian, reading my mind, told me to go ahead. He’d read the recipe and start setting us up. No wonder he’d given me that guilty look at the house, and packed all the boxes so efficiently into the van while I was taking a shower.

“You and I are going to have a talk,” I told him. “I won’t be long.” I marched out of the kitchen. I had my teeth clenched so lightly and was moving so fast, I failed to see that the next surface after the tiled kitchen floor was a slick green marble foyer. I avoided breaking my derriere by springing for the winding staircase. I landed facedown on the fourth stair up, and saw from very close range that the stairs were carpeted with a thick white wool weave, the kind you see either in ads or in houses without children. I stood up and walked more cautiously past two large silk screens showing carp floating in an ocean of gold. Again I felt my jaw clench with anger, and I averted my eyes. Carp made me think of bodies of water, and thinking of bodies of water made me think of shrimp, and thinking of shrimp in general and shrimp risotto in particular renewed a fury that was rapidly becoming volcanic. When I came to the top of the stairs, I took a deep breath and sat down facing the upstairs hallway. Relax, I told myself. Think about something else. How much you love preparing labor-intensive Italian food, for example.

When that didn’t work, I took a few deep yoga breaths. I should go see Babs, I thought. Maybe I can get her to tell me something I don’t know about Claire. Or about Claire and her husband.

But I wasn’t ready. I let air out of my lungs and stared at two portraits hanging on the opposite wall. The one on the left was of Babs, flatteringly painted with a somewhat slimmer face than the actuality. But the artist had been right on target with wide pink brushstrokes that had frozen Babs’s girlish-insecure smile permanently into place. The other painting showed a bespectacled Charles looking somber and resigned, even a trifle defeated. Here, too, however, the painter had found the single feature, that which spoke volumes about the personality he sought to capture. In the painting, Charles’s long, unruly pale hair said, I want to be wild, so that the effect he conveyed was a cross between a college professor and Harpo Marx.

From behind a door just down the hall I heard laughing and light rock music. I felt a surge of impatience. I had work to do. Oh, man, did I ever have work to do. But I had to go in and tell “the mistress” what was going on. My knuckles rapped on the cold white wood.

There was a giggled “Come on in!” and I pushed the door open with dread. Sometimes—especially in the summer, for reasons I did not understand—clients started the party early by beginning to indulge in alcoholic beverages long before their guests arrived. The results ranged from enthusiastically kissing someone else’s spouse to falling into their own swimming pools.