Tough Cookie

“My guests are due in ten minutes,” he said hurriedly. “I have my wines ready. Your wonderful food is heating. Thank you for everything,” he gushed.

“No problem, Arthur.” Compared to his attitude that afternoon, he sounded suspiciously mellow.

“I feel awful for not paying you. We’re still on for lunch Wednesday?”

I felt a frisson of unease. “You bet—”

“Wednesday will be three years since Mother’s funeral,” he interrupted dolefully. “I … I want to show you the spot,” he said quickly, then hung up.

Show me what spot on the anniversary of his mother’s funeral? The spot where she was buried? The place where she died? Now there was a cheerful incentive to join the man for lunch.

“Tom,” I called downward, “may I talk to you about this Killdeer mess?”

“Yes,” came his echoing-inside-the-pipe voice.

I started filling bowls with sour cream, chopped peanuts, chutney, coconut, pineapple chunks, chopped hard- cooked egg, and more raisins. “Doug Portman was about to leave for Puerto Escondido before he died. It’s a small town on the Pacific coast of Mexico. I, uh, I found his plane ticket hidden in Arthur Wakefield’s wine cellar. So I’m a tad concerned about having lunch with Arthur on Wednesday.”

“What?” Banging on metal was followed by a groan as Tom worked to extract himself again. By the time I’d finished setting the table, he was leaning on the marble counter and giving me a skeptical look. “What did you do, exactly?”

I checked the refrigerator for beer—our preferred drink with curry—and soft drinks for the boys. “Look, I know I wasn’t supposed to snoop around Arthur’s place, but the man is obsessed with the Portman case.”

“I know, I know, everybody in the Department of Corrections is sick of Arthur Wakefield and his letters about Portman. But you’re the one who decided to go through his stuff.”

“I didn’t steal anything.” Tom grunted and I went on: “Look, he’s got nineteen million dollars at stake. My best guess is, when you’re trying to get a will set aside because you think someone exerted undue influence over your rich mother, you try to make that influential someone look bad. Very bad. In this case, that person is Jack Gilkey, who was granted parole by Doug Portman. So you also want to find out everything negative you can about Doug Portman. If Arthur can prove Portman took a bribe to grant Gilkey parole, he’d be in better shape to have his mother’s second will overturned. Of course he’d steal Portman’s mail, if he thought it might help him find out exactly what Doug was up to. If you want to get a warrant,” I added hastily, “the ticket-issuers were Copper Mountain Worldwide Travel.”

“Oh, Miss G., why do you do this to me? Tickets don’t prove anything by themselves. You want to lose your bonding? Did you think about that?” But he was reaching for the phone.

“I didn’t take the ticket,” I repeated stubbornly.

Tom did not reply. He was using his answering-machine voice to ask Marla if she could meet me at eleven o’clock on Wednesday at Killdeer, to ski for a couple of hours and have lunch. He’d phone again later to confirm.

“What are you doing?” I demanded of him. “Marla hates skiing.”

Tom hung up and regarded me intensely. “Yeah, but she’s a good skier, I’ve seen her. I want her there.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want Arthur Wakefield to make any unexpected moves on a caterer who’s broken into his wine cellar and riffled his papers. You better pray he didn’t discover what you did,” Tom commented as he moved off to clean himself up.

“Arthur will never know if you don’t tell him,” I shot back.

Discouraged, I scraped the moist, tender raisin rice onto a heated platter and covered it. Then I stirred the shrimp into the curry and called Todd, Arch, and Tom, who emerged showered, dressed, and smelling as sweet as ever. He seemed to have forgiven me for my morning’s escapade at Arthur’s. Or if he hadn’t, he was letting it go for now.

Everyone busied themselves with the condiments. I sprinkled peanuts onto my chutney-topped bowl of curry and took a bite. The crunch of nuts combined with the succulent shrimp robed in its spicy-hot, luscious sauce was out of this world. Tom winked at me in thanks. Somewhat dramatically, Arch announced that he and Todd would like to recite their Spenser to us tonight. They were, he informed us, splitting a stanza. I looked at Tom and he grinned. They would begin right after dinner, Arch concluded. They’d have their backs to us, though, as they couldn’t yet handle an audience’s faces.

When we’d finished, Tom scraped the dishes and insisted on washing them in the bathroom. Pretending to be flipping through a cookbook, I took surreptitious delight in watching Todd and Arch huddle over Spenser’s Complete Works.

Todd had stuck by Arch during the worst of my trials with The Jerk; in return, Arch had invited Todd to sleep over numerous nights after Eileen kicked her husband out. Todd, shorter than Arch but heavier, still had endearingly cherubic cheeks that were now deeply flushed at the prospect of performing. His unevenly shorn black hair had nothing to do with style and everything to do with his unconscious habit—developed after his father’s troubles were exposed—of tugging out his shiny curls. But he’d stopped pulling his hair out, Arch had assured me. I stared down at the cookbook, then peeked back up. Even though the two boys had gone from bikes to fantasy-role-playing games to snowboarding, they were still best friends, and I was glad of it. Friendship was a great blessing; we all needed to remember that. With a pang, I thought of Rorry.

Tom returned. The dishes were soaking in the tub. Arch announced that they were ready to begin.

“Book Five, Canto Two, Stanza Thirty-nine,” Todd began stiffly as he faced the convection oven. He cleared his throat twice, then woodenly recited:“Of things unseen how canst thou deem aright,Then answered the righteous Artegall,Since thou misdeem’st so much of things in sight?What though the sea with waves continualDo eat the earth, it is no more at all.…”

He turned and nodded uncomfortably at Arch. I held my breath and glanced at Tom. Should we be encouraging and clap at this point? Tom gave a tiny warning shake of the head. Arch stood facing the stove and began:“Nor is the earth the less, or loseth ought,For whatsoever from one place doth fall,Is with the tide unto another brought:For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”

   “Excellent, Arch! Todd, wow! Fantastic!” Tom and I gushed, clapping wildly.

Todd reached up to scratch his fuzzy scalp, then remembered not to. Instead, he nabbed the Rockies baseball cap he usually wore, but had politely removed for dinner. “Thanks, Mrs. Schulz. My mom liked it, too. She said I didn’t need to work with Arch tonight, but I told her I did.” I suddenly remembered Arch’s remark—made when Jack had fixed us dinner at Eileen’s condo—that Todd spent tons of time at our house because he didn’t like Jack Gilkey. How would Todd fare if Eileen married Jack? If they did tie the knot, I only hoped poor little Todd would do better than Arthur Wakefield had.

The boys clattered off, promising to practice in front of each other. Tom disappeared, then reappeared carrying clean dishes, which he dried and clanked back onto shelves. Then he pulled out invoices to check that he’d received all the plumbing supplies he’d ordered. I stared at our shiny silver-and-white marble counters, darkly glowing cherry cabinets, and butter-golden oak floors. I had no more professional cooking to do until this week’s final PBS show.

I sighed. When I had a big event to prepare for, I always complained. Without work, I ached for it.

I quickly fixed myself a cup of cocoa. Unfortunately, the hot, creamy chocolate drink did not stave off the sudden pangs of emptiness. No work felt like no life. Whenever I was up to my elbows in coulibiac and flourless chocolate cake, I fantasized about the crocheting I would one day do, the beaches Tom and I would one day stroll. But here I was, as free as I had ever wanted to be, and my big worry was whether eight-thirty was too early to go to bed.

Outside, snow had begun to fall. I gathered my ski equipment, packed it into the Rover, and said goodnight to Tom. The boys—who had traded Elizabethan poetry for rock music—thanked me for dinner, swore they had their verses nailed, and promised to go to bed soon. I took a long, hot shower and fell into