Prime Cut

“Aha! I’m so glad you worked in that museum, Miss G. I never know when I’m going to learn something.” He paused. “Anyway, I’m off the Eliot case. I told them my wife’s friend was arrested, so if they’ve got anything, to let me know. How’s that?”

“Thank you. For everything. And especially for not staying mad at me.”

“You need to stop worrying, Miss G.” He pondered the gap above our kitchen sink. Just as he’d done at the cabin, Gerald Eliot had glued plywood over the plaster crevice. He’d certainly never be back to repair the damage. “Think Arch would like to join me for a trip to the hardware store? Better yet, would you like to join me?”

I took another bite of muffin. Was I in the mood to look at galvanized nails after I’d just seen a corpse defiled by them? No. I urged Tom to go and take Arch with him. They could do some male bonding. Tom grinned.

Arch, wearing a faded yellow T-shirt and a pair of too-large red Cornell sweatpants—gifts from Julian— warned that they might be out for a while. He needed to be dropped at the Druckmans’ house so he and Todd could finish their conversation on the subject of sending encrypted messages.

“Can you tell me what these messages are?” I asked mildly. “Or would that destroy the reason for the encryption?”

Arch opened a new bag of kibble for his bloodhound. “It’s no big deal,” he replied in a bored tone. “But if you want to come outside while I feed Jake, I’ll tell you.” I poured Arch a glass of o.j. and followed him through the back door to the deck area designated for his dog. I tried not to glance up at our roof, where the remains of Arch’s ham radio—his attempt to communicate long-distance with Julian in the Navajo language—lay like the spokes of an abandoned umbrella. Arch had been fascinated with learning the language because Navajo radiomen had foiled Axis cryptanalysts in World War II. But Julian had only succeeded in teaching Arch Ya’atey— hello—when a fierce windstorm had split the radio antenna in two.

Now Arch scooped nuggets into Jake’s bowl and began explaining the latest reasons for his interest in encryption. Jake kept his eyes on his food bowl. “School starts in a couple of weeks. Todd and I are wondering which eighth-grade girls will be available to be girlfriends, and which ones will just make fun of us.”

“The girls have high-tech equipment on their phones?”

“Nothing would surprise me, Mom.”

From the deck railing, Scout—a cream-and-chocolate stray cat we’d adopted several years ago—kept a watchful eye on Jake and the speed with which he was emptying his bowl. Arch ignored the animals, drank the juice I’d brought him, and checked his appearance in the reflection in the window overlooking our backyard.

The comforting noise of Tom’s revving Chrysler floated out of the garage toward us. Jake raised mournful eyes to Arch: leaving so soon? “I’ll be back,” Arch consoled him. “Look, Mom, double- check the gate, okay? Yesterday, Jake got out somehow. He was barking at elk and got out of control.”

“Okay, hon,” I promised. Arch hopped down the deck steps. The Chrysler roared away, carrying my family. As if on cue, a sudden cracking noise indicated a dozen elk were shattering branches underfoot as they plodded through our neighbor’s yard. Jake, of course, instantly began to howl.

“Stop, Jake. Come on, boy, come in.”

But the hound would not budge. Nor would he be quiet. I went inside, closed the door against the canine uproar, and shook my head. In late summer, the huge dun-and-brown elk herds flood through Aspen Meadow, fleeing the first wave of hunters. No respecters of property lines, the elk leap fences, use their powerful necks and big tongues to tear out strawberry plants, strip fruit trees, devour flowers, and gobble bushes. Then they defecate happily and plod on. Our neighbor occasionally bags one with his rifle, hunting season or no.

Only Tom had managed to outsmart the marauders. With great care, he’d lofted nets over our Montmorency cherry trees and tied the nets to the trunks. While awaiting his captain’s call the previous night, Tom had patiently salvaged the last of the scarlet fruit. Through the back window, I watched the elk quizzically appraise our trees. Nothing there, boys, time to move out.

I crossed to the counter, moved the faxed map showing the location of Eliot’s body, and surveyed with a sinking heart the clutter of glasses, plates, and measuring cups. Before Gerald Eliot had revved up his saw, he’d asked me to empty the cabinets on the left side of the window. Then he’d crashed through the window and the right-hand cabinet, and the contents of those shelves had ended up in smithereens.

The next day, Eliot had bounded up my front steps all smiles, sketchy plans for a new kitchen tucked under his arm. He’d claimed he could have my new kitchen done before the first snow. Ha. Although it was always difficult for me to believe that people could so heartlessly try to take advantage, I’d been forced to accept Tom’s assessment of constructor sabotage. I’d stonily told Eliot to fix the window; my husband would repair the cabinet. Now my remaining glasses teetered in stacks; the broken cabinet stood on its side in the hallway. How many other people had Eliot tried to cheat this way? And had any other clients wanted to strangle him the way I’d longed to?

I took a steadying breath of the sweet, fresh air pouring through gaps in the dusty plastic. With The Jerk and his violent nature temporarily locked up in jail, I had taken for granted the fact that we could finally relax with our windows open. Or rather, relax with our windows missing. I refilled my espresso machine with water, ground a handful of fragrant coffee beans, and rinsed Tom’s bowl of homegrown cherries.

As the water gushed over the fruit, my mind snapped back to the traumas of the last two days. What would happen to Cameron now? Had Cameron murdered Gerald Eliot? What could I do? Interfere and you’ll get Cameron, Tom, and yourself into more trouble, my inner voice warned.

I sharpened a knife, started pitting the cherries, then washed my hands and put in a call to Lutheran Hospital to check on Barbara Burr. I was told she could not be disturbed. Next I phoned the sheriff’s department to see if they could tell me anything about Cameron. Burr was being processed, I was told. Like liverwurst? I longed to ask.

I energetically mixed the pitted cherries with sugar and cornstarch. I loved the Burrs; both had been extraordinarily kind to Arch when he was eight and I was doing my docent work. Cameron, then president of the county historical society, could talk about Aspen Meadow’s history the way some people can croon show tunes. The times I’d had to take Arch with me to the museum, Cameron had kept my son spellbound with stories of local outlaws, ghosts, Indians, and untold, priceless treasure buried in Aspen Meadow. Arch had been rapt. I hadn’t been immune either.

I laid the fruit in a buttered pan and thought back to the photos on the Burrs’ guest house walls: Cameron and Barbara with shovels and maps. In the thirties, Cameron had told Arch, Aspen Meadow and Blue Spruce had been aswarm with treasure hunters. A persistent Depression-era rumor held that a stagecoach robber had buried a coffee can chockful of gold pieces in a mine shaft in Aspen Meadow or Blue Spruce. Forget that there was no mining in Aspen Meadow or Blue Spruce; Arch had subsequently insisted we follow a trail that—legend had it—led to the gold at the top of Smythe Peak. We’d dug for hours, to no avail, and our only company had been Steller’s jays squawking at us for invading their domain.

I beat butter with sugar for the cobbler topping, and recalled Arch’s wide-eyed plea that we visit a local ranch where longhorn steer were raised. There, contrary to recorded history but according to Cameron Burr, Jesse James and his gang had buried fifty thousand dollars at the foot of a lodgepole pine. The trick was finding the right tree. Jesse James himself had supposedly pointed a knife downward to the treasure, and embedded the weapon in the pine tree’s trunk. If he had, both the knife and the fifty thousand were still there, because Arch hadn’t found them.

I measured flour with baking powder, remembering the time Cameron and Barbara had accompanied us on one of the many treasure hunts Cameron had sparked in my too-imaginative son. The Burrs, Arch, and I had crawled through the crumbling Swiss-built inn west of Aspen Meadow where the Bund— Nazis and their sympathizers, posing as bicycling tourists, the story went—had allegedly met during the Second World War. The inn, empty for years and recently renovated as apartments, had given us permission to search the place while the construction crew worked on new plumbing. Alas, to Arch’s intense disappointment, we’d uncovered no stash of deutsche marken below swastikas carved—by squatters? Or by frustrated treasure seekers?—on closet floors.

Now, at fourteen, Arch didn’t drag me out on treasure hunts anymore. Instead, he listened to pounding rock music, worried intensely about his appearance, and yearned for Julian to move back. And though he would never admit it, the only thing Arch truly wanted was a girlfriend.

I stirred egg into the cobbler dough and dropped spoonfuls of the thick, golden batter on top of the glistening