When Tom showed up with an investigative team at the department store, I was being discharged from the hospital across the street. I’d been given charcoal tablets, which I dutifully swallowed. The year before, I’d had an unpleasant encounter with the highly toxic—not aphrodisiac—substance known as Spanish fly, and I knew you had to get your system filtered, and quick. I wasn’t going to have to stay in the hospital, the ER doc told me, but he repeatedly remarked how lucky it was I knew the antidote for hemlock and was able to get it so quickly. I couldn’t agree more.
Tom scooped me up in his arms and hugged me long and hard. Julian had returned home and found Arch had already returned from Keystone. They’d called Tom on his cell phone and said they were on their way to see Marla.
“Sounds good to me,” I said as I got into Tom’s car.
He told me they’d found Harriet’s body behind the security room door. Self-inflicted wound, but I knew that already. I didn’t want to hear the details.
“She couldn’t stand the competition,” Tom observed. “I guess Claire was just too successful for her to deal with. After all, Harriet had been Mignon’s number-one salesperson for years, and now Claire was about to surpass her effortlessly. Surpass Harriet, that is, unless Harriet could relentlessly charge returns to her competitor’s number. And I’ll bet Harriet’s cash-receipt scam is what Claire was helping Gentileschi with.”
“You bet, huh?” I said. “Why don’t you bet with something I really want?”
“Oh, woman,” he said laughingly as we pulled into Marla’s driveway, “you are going to regret those words.”
Marla was walking very tentatively down the rock steps by the entryway to her house. Her skin was still sallow. She wore a brightly colored muumuu and her normally frizzy hair was pulled back into pigtails held with sparkling barrettes. The clothes and hair were courtesy of the nurse, no doubt. As she moved haltingly forward, Julian held one of her arms and Arch the other.
Four days ago, while I was preparing food, I’d reflected that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. It was something I’d always said, sort of offhand, the way the mind runs over a cliche without ever really examining its meaning. And yet if what was visually appealing did depend on what the beholder valued, who set the standards? How were the values determined?
In the past five days I’d seen and felt more pain than I cared to contemplate. John Routt had spent the best decades of his life blind. Nick Gentileschi’s twisted desire to capture voluptuousness had gotten him killed. The Braithwaites’ unhappiness with each other had led both to pursue goals of beauty that were unattainable, or easily destroyed. Reggie Hotchkiss had stolen and plotted and intimidated, trying to sell women expensive products that promised everything and did next to nothing. And Claire had been so gorgeous, so enthusiastic in her selling of overpriced, worthless goods, that it had gotten her killed.
Marla arrived at the bottom of the stone staircase. She let go of Arch and Julian and sank to rest on one of the steps. I rushed over.
“You’re here!” she squawked. “I can’t believe it.” She held out her arms, and I scooted up and sat on a cold stone to embrace her. She murmured, “I feel like hell. And I look worse, I know.”
“You look absolutely wonderful,” I said, and meant it. “You look like heaven.”
INDEX TO THE RECIPES
Hoisin Turkey with Roasted Pine Nuts in Lettuce Cups
Grand Marnier Cranberry Muffins
Vanilla-Frosted Fudge Cookies
What-to-Do-with-All-the-Egg-Yolks Bread
Lowfat Fettuccine Alfredo with Asparagus
Fudge Souffle
Killer Pancakes
Turkey Curry with Raisin Rice
Lowfat Chicken Stock
Shrimp Risotto with Portobello Mushrooms
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DIANE MOTT DAVIDSON lives in Evergreen, Colorado, with her family. She is the author of ten bestselling culinary mysteries and is at work on her eleventh,
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Success can kill you.
So my best friend had been telling me, anyway. Too much success is like arsenic in chocolate cake. Eat a slice a
These observations, made over the course of a snowy March, had not cheered me. Besides, I’d have thought that Marla, with her inherited wealth and passion for shopping, would
Frankly, I was worried about me, too.
In mid-March I’d invited Marla over to taste cookies. Despite a sudden but typical Colorado blizzard, she’d roared over to our small house off Aspen Meadow’s Main Street in her shiny new BMW four-wheel drive. Sitting in our commercial kitchen, she’d munched on ginger snaps and spice cookies, and harped on the feet that the newly frantic pace of my work had coincided with my fourteen-year-old son Arch’s increasingly rotten behavior. I knew Marla doted on Arch.
But in this, too, she was right.
Arch’s foray into athletics, begun that winter with snowboarding and a stint on his school’s fencing team, had ended with a trophy, a sprained ankle, and an unprecedented burst of physical self-confidence. He’d been eager to
