Tough Cookie

“Julian is—” Actually, where was Julian? This fall, our twenty-year-old family friend and boarder had transferred from Cornell to the University of Colorado. Julian Teller’s lifetime ambition, temporarily derailed owing to this change in colleges, was to become a vegetarian chef. Meanwhile, he was determined to pursue his B.A. no more than an hour away from us, his adopted family. “Julian is … let’s see … it’s Friday.” Julian apprenticed in a Boulder restaurant on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and his classes were … “Friday afternoons, he has film class. Then at night the class watches old movies. Afterward, he spends the weekend at a friend’s apartment.”

“Which means he won’t be home.”

“Look, Tom,” I replied impatiently. “Please. I’ll be fine. I’ll probably still be up cooking when you get back tonight.” I had lots of work to do at home, none of which required a commercial kitchen: preparing for an intake meeting with Arthur and baking cookies for a library party. The library wanted to throw a come-one, come-all holiday party for patrons. I’d offered to bring the Christmas cookies. I was doing this volunteer food service so people would know I was still out there. So people would not think I had quit the food biz altogether. And what a price to pay for the Sunday reception: missing the Broncos play the Kansas City Chiefs! But I was determined to be a caterer full of the holiday spirit. And, with any luck, I’d have everyone fed and the place cleaned up in time to catch the second half.

Tom snapped open his cellular and called Marla. My best friend was not home. Tom checked his watch and announced to Marla’s machine that she should cancel her plans for the rest of the day, drive to our house, and wait. “Goldy needs you,” he concluded.

In spite of all that had happened that day, I smiled at the thought of hopelessly busy-with-life, immensely wealthy Marla Korman careening her Mercedes to our curb to await my arrival from Killdeer. Maybe she’d do it; Tom’s message ensured she’d be eager for bad news. Meanwhile, I had Arch to speak to, a weekend crammed with nonpaying jobs, and looming questions about my former relationship with a parole board member, now mysteriously deceased.

Next Tom called Eileen Druckman’s condo and asked for Arch. He handed me the phone.

“Mom?” My son’s tentative, worried voice crackled across the connection. “Now can you tell me what happened?”

I told him a guy skiing Hot-Rodder was in an accident and I just had to talk to the patrol for a while. Was he sure he didn’t want me to come get him?

“I’ll be okay here, I guess.” He sounded uncertain. An adolescent boy wants to be with you and yet despises mothering; he wants to make sure you’re okay but doesn’t want to appear to care. “What happened to the guy? Where was all that money coming from? Did somebody try to rob him?”

“Honey, I don’t know. He died—”

“He’s dead? Did he run into a rock or something?”

“Nobody has a clue. And yes, he was carrying a lot of cash; he was our buyer for Tom’s World War Two skis. Listen, hon, I’ll be coming back to Killdeer in the morning to meet with a client. We could ski together in the afternoon, if you want.”

“Uh, no thanks.” Ski with someone as uncool as your mother? No way. “Look, Mrs. Druckman wants to talk to you. I told her you witnessed an accident.”

I groaned as Sergeant Bancock appeared at the door and summoned Tom to the outer office. Tom’s lips brushed my cheek before he left.

“Goldy, what’s going on?” Eileen’s husky voice demanded. “Arch has been awfully worried about you, and so have I. There was an accident on the slopes? Someone died? Was it near the bistro, or further down?”

“No, it was closer to the base,” I replied. “And I’m fine, thanks, there’s no need to worry. I think a skier was going too fast on a closed run. He had a terrible fall.”

“Arch said there was money all over the slope?”

“The man was carrying a lot of cash. It was disgusting. People were crazed, trying to grab it up.”

Eileen muttered something about drunk skiers, then said she and Todd were looking forward to having Arch for another night. After the lunch rush, Jack was coming home to make them homemade spinach ravioli stuffed with pine nuts, napped with a Dijon mustard cream sauce.

With my stomach growling, I hung up. Parole for The Jerk. How was I going to research that? Not at the Killdeer Ski Resort, that much was clear. Tom still had not returned. A new hubbub emanated from the front office. Now what? I ventured out in search of more info.

Surrounded by ski patrol members and uniformed sheriff’s deputies, my husband stood by a scarred oak desk. All the law enforcement folks seemed to be talking at once.

“Hello?” I called politely. “Would it be okay for me to take off?”

Tom murmured to a deputy and the deputy nodded. Then my husband turned and beckoned for me to come forward. When I joined them, Tom said, “Look, but don’t touch. Please.”

Perplexed, I stared down at the desktop. It was strewn with pamphlets, maps, memos, correspondence. Nothing on it looked especially unusual.

“Look at what?” I asked Tom.

With his fingertip, Tom carefully pushed back piles of paper, exposing an open greeting card. All the deputies and ski patrol folks craned down to make their own closer inspection. As a result, I couldn’t read the thing.

“Wait.” Tom’s ocean-green eyes regarded me solemnly; he spoke deliberately. “Don’t look at it yet, Miss G. I need to know precisely what Doug Portman said he had for me. Word for word.”

“Well,” I began. I shifted uncomfortably. “It wasn’t that memorable. He said, ‘I’ve got something for Tom in my car.’ That’s it. Why?”

Tom waved me forward. The crowd pulled back. As I leaned toward the opened card, Tom warned, “Don’t even breathe close to it.”

“What does the outside say?”

“It’s a congratulations card. The outside message reads: ‘Good Job!’”

Inside the card, an explosion of bright yellow stars was accompanied by the card’s own greeting: You’re a Star! Beside the yellow stars, where your thumbs grasp a card to open it, was something much more menacing.

Glued on both inside card edges were two perfectly round, filled pieces of plastic material. I frowned. From Med Wives 101, I recognized the plastic rounds as transdermal patches. Each was filled with a blue gelatinous substance. Patches of this type were usually used to administer pain or nausea medication through the skin, when the patient was unable to take a pill or give himself a shot. I looked more closely and saw a small, hand-printed message.

Thanks for nothing, Asshole! You’re dead!!! There was no signature.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded, mystified. “Was this card in an envelope? Was it addressed to someone?”

“It was in an envelope, an opened one, but there was no one’s name on it,” Tom said grimly. “This may be related to your coffee lady Cinda’s story. Maybe this is the threat the guy was bragging about making. Threaten a cop? Threaten a parole board member? Anyway, I have to stay here and talk to these people. Then I’m going to take this card down to the crime lab.” He shook his head. “If that blue jelly contains, say, anthrax, we could be dealing with something nasty. I’ve already called over to the coroner about getting the crime lab to run a couple of different drug screens on Doug Portman.”

“So you think he …” I couldn’t finish my thought.

“Might have been poisoned? Might have been close to dead before he hit that last mogul? Don’t know.”

My skin crawled. “Tom. Please tell me you didn’t touch those patches.”

“Nah. Sniffed ’em, though.” Everyone laughed except me.

Irritably, I said, “Cinda told me that her waiter, Davey, talked to Barton Reed, the guy who was making the threats. Last night.”

Tom riffled through the chaos on the ski patrol desk and unearthed a blank piece of paper. “Could you draw me a map to get to Cinda’s place?”

It was while I was doing this that Hoskins and Bancock appeared at my side and announced I was free to go. They might be calling me later, they said again. As I handed Tom my crudely drawn map, Marla phoned. She