“I was just bringing in the bread ingredients,” I explained to him ten minutes later, once we were headed up the interstate, back toward Aspen Meadow. A blanket of clouds now obscured the moon, and the night was once again impenetrably dark. A chilly wind slapped the dark sedan and swirled up flakes of ice from the roadway. I went on: “When I went in, I tripped over her. It took me a few minutes to realize Dusty was just lying there…and that she wasn’t moving.”
Tom drew his mouth into a frown and concentrated on keeping the car from swerving out of the lane. “First tell me how you’re doing. Then we’ll get to Dusty.” He flicked me a quick glance, which seemed to tell him I wasn’t doing very well, as a matter of fact. He turned his eyes back to the road and held out his right arm. “Come here.”
I leaned in to his embrace. My seat belt cinched my torso and I unbuckled it. What was he going to do, arrest me? I was numb, cold, unable to feel anything. The reassuring way Tom tugged me into his warmth, the way his strong hand held on to my right shoulder…these were what I needed, and he knew it.
“Did you get somebody to go over there, to be with Sally?”
“I called Father Pete. I know he’s recovering from that coronary, but I also knew he’d probably have another one if I didn’t call him about this.”
“Will I be able to see Sally when we get home?”
“Nope. You’re a witness, and they’re going to try to keep you apart.”
“But she’s my friend,” I pleaded. “A neighbor, Tom. Please. I just feel responsible, dammit. I keep thinking, if I’d only arrived on time—”
“Stop. Look, let me see what I can do. Father Pete should be there, and our team is probably finishing up at the Routts’ house. Then the victim-assistance people will go in, try to be helpful, that kind of thing.”
I shuddered. I didn’t want to picture the victim-assistance team, with their quilts and their counseling.
“I want to be there for Sally. Her family has been through too much.”
Tom’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “I’ll talk to my people. Don’t worry. Knowing you, you’ll be there, Miss G.”
I snuggled into Tom’s side, closed my eyes, and thought about the Routts. I liked them. And I felt empathy for Sally, since I’d spent quite a few years as a single mom myself. But life had been much more challenging for her than it had been for me. When Colin’s father had skipped, Sally had told me she’d been forced to patch together funds for food, clothing, and shelter from a variety of government agencies. Our parish, Saint Luke’s Episcopal, had coordinated with Habitat for Humanity to chip in with materials, muscle, and weeks’ worth of meals, coordinated by yours truly, to help build Sally, her father, Dusty, and little Colin a modest, two-story house across the street from us.
But there had been other disasters, like Dusty’s pregnancy and loss of her scholarship. Dusty had told me she wanted the baby. She’d been excited. And then she’d miscarried. On and on it seemed to go for the Routts. Now gossip in town would center on how “the welfare people” were clearly unwilling or unable to break out of the pattern of screwing up their lives. Unfortunately, Dusty’s murder would appear to be confirmation of this cruel judgment.
I opened my eyes. Had I slept? I thought so. What time was it? The dashboard clock said it was half past three. The road was now cloaked in a frigid fog that promised snow. Despite the icy slick that was glazing the roads, I wanted Tom to drive faster. I wanted to get home, take a shower, and get into bed. I wanted my dear warm husband to lie down beside me, wrap his arms around me, and tell me everything was going to be all right. Which, of course, it wasn’t.
The sedan crested the hill and I pulled away from Tom. The dark cloud surrounding us obscured the mountains of the Continental Divide. There, the peaks had been iced with snow since the beginning of September, and I suspected they were now getting a fresh dumping.
“So,” I asked Tom, “what are the cops doing at the Routts’ house now? I mean, right this minute?”
Tom exhaled. “The usual. If the mother’s not a suspect—”
I snorted and checked the rearview mirror. Pinpricks of snow were tapping on the windshield. “Of course she’s not a suspect.”
“They’ll ask if anyone else has rights to the house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Miss G. Let me finish. Our guys don’t want anyone to be able to go into the Routts’ house and plant things.”
“Plant things?”
Tom’s voice turned weary. “Put things in there that would tend to implicate someone else. Or indicate suicide.”
“Tom, for God’s sake. There was redness around her neck and on one of her cheeks. Her face had been bashed into a glass-covered picture.”
“Okay then, look at it from another angle. The department doesn’t want anyone entering and removing incriminating evidence. Once our guys have those two things established—that is, nobody strange can come in, and nothing can be taken out—they’ll talk to the mother, see if she knew anything suspicious going on with her daughter. Threatening phone calls, that kind of thing. Then they’ll ask permission to go through Dusty’s stuff. Drawers, pockets, correspondence, you name it. They’ll be seeing if they can come up with some clues as to what happened to her, and why.”
We headed past the closed shops on Main Street, where the fog softened the smiles from the merchants’ electrified jack-o’-lanterns. When Tom pulled into our driveway, I glanced at the two police cars parked outside the Routts’ house. When we finally stepped carefully across our ice-crusted deck, I began to shiver.
Coming into the chilly house did not help. With fall temperatures fluctuating from thirties in the mornings to the eighties in the afternoons, we kept the heat off in most of the rooms. And despite the absence of the Jerk, all the windows remained closed and security wired, unless we were home. The reason for this was simple.
Roger Mannis, our arrogant, creepy county health inspector, was the prime suspect in a head bashing I’d received before a June catered event at the Roundhouse, a catering-events center by Aspen Meadow Lake that I’d opened last spring. The center, too, was finally fully wired for security. Now, unfortunately, the Roundhouse was having a whole set of pipes replaced, and the trenches dug around the former restaurant made it look like a giant prairie-dog village.
I’d expected that Roger was still plotting against Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! until Tom explained to me that he and Roger had had a
So here we were, unfortunately, with the October chill permeating the shut-up house. Arch, who had his own thermostat, had kept his room positively balmy when he was younger. But now that he was involved in sports, he liked his own cold. If he became chilled, which was rare, he tucked himself inside a sleeping bag on his floor.
The clock indicated it was four o’clock. Arch would be getting up in three hours. With Tom always involved trying to solve murders, how would I tell Arch that our lovely friend from across the street had met such a fate? I did not know. I couldn’t even remember whose turn it was to drive carpool.
Tom turned off the security system, then announced he was bringing in firewood from the pile he’d stacked next to our deck. I moved, zombielike, through the house to the living-room windows. Several neighbors had leashed their dogs and were trailing behind them up the sidewalk, ever curious about what new crisis was overtaking “the welfare people.” Anger prickled my skin, but there was nothing I could do. Maybe I was wrong, anyway; maybe they wanted to help. The police cars were still parked outside the Routts’ house, and Father Pete’s car was behind them. There was no movement from within.
“Goldy, go get in bed.” Tom’s voice was tender. Down on one knee, he was carefully laying pine logs on top of kindling he’d meticulously stacked. The sound of the match igniting startled me.
“Miss G. Please.”
“All right, all right.” I moved up the stairs, dropped my clothes spattered with bread sponge into the hamper, and eventually found my way into the shower. I let steaming water run over my aching face and body and tried not
