Double Shot

My guilt at pulling them from the scrimmage prompted me to buy a king’s ransom of soft drinks, chips, and candy bars, for which they were noisily thankful. The van chugged back up the mountain to the sound of ripping wrappers and breaking chips. By three o’clock, I had gotten Arch home and convinced him to take a very quick shower, while Todd played video games. After some searching, I laid my hands on a passably clean polo shirt and a pair of khakis. When I hauled out the golf clubs John Richard had bought for Arch, I marveled that they were immaculate, anyway, without a speck of mud or grass on them. By three- fifteen, we were off.

I dropped Todd at his house and thanked him for his patience. At half-past three, Arch and I toted the bags of almost-thawed brownies through the service entrance of the Aspen Meadow Country Club. Or as Marla and I referred to it, the so-called country club. If Aspen Meadow didn’t have inbred high society, and it didn’t, it also had nothing to rival the magnificent colonial clubs of the East. But AMCC’s big motel-like main building had just undergone an expensive remodeling, with new locker rooms, golf and tennis shops, a weight room, and a meeting room, where PosteriTREE, as the garden-club splinter group called itself, was having its bake sale from three to five.

Marla stood with some pals behind one of the three buffet tables girdling the crowded room. She bustled toward me. She was wearing her third lovely outfit of the day, this one a casual suit in a printed jungle-motif fabric.

“Cecelia is here,” she muttered, and I felt my eyes drawn to the Mountain Journal’s gossip columnist. Cecelia, her large pear shape not enhanced by a shapeless white man’s shirt and baggy black pants, was thrusting her bespectacled, shovel-shaped face into the middle of a conversation between Ginger Vikarios and Courtney MacEwan. Ginger immediately put her head down, turned on her heel, and walked away, while tall, gorgeous Courtney looked down her nose at Cecelia and said nothing.

“Oops, maybe Cecelia just insulted Ginger,” Marla said mildly. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Look, here are your brownies,” I said quickly. Arch had handed me the bags and scuttled off. He was in the process of admiring the cakes, cookies, and muffins being proffered by the women. If I didn’t get him out of there, he was sure to drop dollops of lemon curd onto his golf shirt.

But I was prevented from leaving by Cecelia Brisbane, who sidled up and pinched my elbow. Her bulging eyes were greatly magnified by her glasses’ thick lenses.

She said, “I hear your ex is up to his old tricks.”

Marla cleared her throat. I gazed innocently at Cecelia’s wide, wrinkled face and unruly gray hair, which was the color and consistency of steel wool. I said, “Oh, really? Where’d you hear that?”

Cecelia was genetically incapable of grinning. Her uneven, greasy gray bangs fell across her forehead and over the tops of her glasses. She pulled her lips into a serious scowl. “I heard you had a bit of an incident at the Roundhouse this morning.”

I smiled. “Define ‘bit of an incident.’ ”

“Who do you think hit you?” she pressed.

“Hey!” Marla exclaimed. “How do you know what happened—”

I held up a hand to quiet Marla. “Actually, Cecelia,” I replied, “you probably have a better idea than I do.”

“I have complaints about your ex on file,” Cecelia persisted.

“So do the cops, Cecelia.”

“Not the same kind of files, I bet.”

I tilted my head at her, curious. “You want to explain yourself?”

Cecelia straightened her glasses and squinted at me. She replied in a deadpan voice, “Not here. But I can, if you want. Especially if you can tell me what I want to know.”

Arch bounced up, chewing on a brownie. “Mom! I thought we were in some kind of hurry to get to Dad’s.”

“We are,” I told him. I bade Cecelia a polite good-bye, then hustled Arch out the service exit. Backing the van out of its narrow parking space, I came very close to whacking Cecelia’s battered old station wagon. I hit the brakes and did some maneuvering to wiggle the van clear, without incident. Cecelia wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to have as an enemy.

Zooming past the club’s mini-mansions in the direction of John Richard’s rental, I wondered what in the hell Cecelia had been talking about. There was Marla’s question: Now that the Jerk is out of jail, where’s he getting his money? He had no job that I knew of, or, more important, that Marla knew of. My best friend had also calculated that John Richard’s highly publicized sponsoring of a local golfing event—twenty-five thousand bucks—plus purchasing the Audi—another forty thou—plus rent must have been subsidized by Courtney, the newly wealthy widow. Lots of her money, apparently, had been lavished on the Jerk.

But John Richard had dumped Courtney, and according to Marla, he was renting in the club area while he looked for a big house to buy. In this, Marla had joyfully concluded, he would not be successful. While our ex was incarcerated and deprived of the Mountain Journal, he probably hadn’t heard that home sales in Aspen Meadow had virtually stopped. Fire insurers had refused to write new homeowner policies. This did not bring down the general anxiety level in the town. Was John Richard’s search for a house what Cecelia wanted to know about? Maybe. But I doubted it.

I whizzed into an area of extra-large houses: here a huge colonial, there a rambling contemporary, around the corner a Swiss-style chalet. Every few houses, there was the type favored by John Richard: a mock Tudor, with lots of plaster and crisscrossed exterior woodwork. One thing the houses in the club did have in common: They all boasted very green lawns. In town, rumors of how country-club residents managed illegal watering were rife. Some said hoses whistled across lawns at midnight. Others claimed that underground sprinkler systems hissed to life at three in the morning. Like the communists, residents were supposed to report infractions by neighbors. But in that department too, there were reports of deals—I won’t tell if you won’t. So much for community spirit.

When I piloted the van into the dead end that contained the Jerk’s current mock-Tudor domicile, another car was parked out front. I sighed and prayed that this was not a new girlfriend. Maybe that was why John Richard favored the architecture he did: He fancied himself a contemporary Henry the Eighth. Lotta wives, lotta girlfriends.

I parked the van behind the car, an older blue Chevy sedan that looked as if someone was in it.

“Okay, hon,” I said to Arch. He looked passably clean. He’d neatly parted and combed his wet hair after the shower, and he’d managed to lick all the chocolate away from around his mouth. “Just take your clubs and go to the door, do you mind? I’ll wait here until you’re inside.”

Arch pushed his glasses up his nose. “Okay, Mom. Sorry you had to go to so much trouble.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just hurry.” It was exactly ten to four, which meant Arch and his father didn’t have a whole lot of time to get down to the club for their tee time.

Arch let out a long, exasperated breath, hopped out of the van, and heaved the strap of his golf bag over his shoulder. Then he trudged up the driveway, turning left to go up the steps to the house.

A sudden rapping on my hood startled me. An older man, maybe in his mid-fifties, with a receding hairline, gray hair combed straight back, and one of those thin-skinned, skeletal faces, wanted to talk to me. I caught my breath and looked out the windshield. He’d left the door to the Chevy sedan open.

“Mrs. Korman?” he called.

I lowered the window. “Excuse me?”

“Dad!” Arch was calling. “Dad! Open the door!”

“Mrs. Korman, do you have my money?” the man demanded. He wore a plaid cotton shirt, brown polyester pants, and worn, mud-colored leather shoes. Definitely not a country-club type.

“I’m sorry, I—” I began.

“Please tell me you have my money, Mrs. Korman,” the man pleaded. “I was here when I was supposed to be.”

The van’s side door slid open. The clubs clanked ferociously as Arch threw them in the back. He banged the door closed, then opened the passenger door and hopped back into the front seat.

“Dad left without me! Let’s go!”