Dark Tort

“What do you mean,” I prompted him, “until everything fell apart?”

“Okay,” he began, after taking a preliminary slurp, frowning, and dumping in another dose of the sweet stuff. “You have to remember, this was before teachers started being held accountable if they had sex with students. It’s hard to think of a time when the student got blamed, but that’s exactly what used to happen. Anyway, that’s certainly what went down at Elk Park Prep when Dusty had an affair with the drama teacher, Mr. Ogden. Ogden was totally pathetic. He kept moaning about how his acting career was being foiled because his wife was so jealous of the time he spent on his work. Everybody felt sorry for him. Or at least, the girls did.”

My stomach churned, and it wasn’t from the espresso, which was actually excellent. Men could be just as manipulative as women, thank you very much.

“Nobody felt sorrier for him than Dusty,” Julian went on. “And then she got pregnant, even though Ogden told her he’d had a vasectomy! Dusty told me later that she really had thought Mr. Ogden would leave Mrs. Ogden and be with her, but forget that. Next thing anyone knew, Ogden was going to the headmaster, claiming Dusty was a slut who was falsely accusing him of fathering her child, which he could not have done, because he’d had that vasectomy. And also, Ogden insisted, Dusty needed to be expelled because she was with child, and that had violated the terms of her scholarship.” Julian finished his coffee and made a face. “Anyway, that lily-livered son of a bitch headmaster did expel her. Ogden’s version of the story came out in the papers. You didn’t see it? Dusty had falsely accused a teacher of impregnating her, blah, blah, blah.”

“No, I never saw that. Poor Dusty. Couldn’t she have insisted on a paternity test?”

Julian held up a stubby finger. “While Dusty was studying for her GED, she had an early-term miscarriage. This was while the Habitat house was being built. Then Dusty’s family moved in across the street from you, and she started to work for Mignon Cosmetics. She was determined to put Ogden behind her, and she became really focused on getting ahead, being ambitious. Remember?” I nodded. “After another cosmetics company hired her, she thought she was on her way up, but that cosmetics company went belly-up. So then Dusty got her associate’s degree down at Red Rocks. It just took her eighteen months, if you can believe it. And then Dusty’s uncle, Richard Chenault, joined the law firm in Aspen Meadow, and felt sorry for his niece. Supposedly. Anyway, he hired her and is paying for her tuition bills at the Mile-High Paralegal Institute.”

I sipped my coffee. “Do you know anything about this brother, Edgar?”

“Just that he died in custody after being picked up on a DUI. He got beaten along the way, but nobody seems to know exactly what happened. Yeah, right. When I was going out with Dusty, Mrs. Routt could not stop talking about Edgar’s death. She was, like, obsessed. Then one day, she said she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, because it was making her totally nuts, and she needed to pay attention to the present. She didn’t tell you about that either, did she?”

“No, she didn’t.” I stared out the window at aspen leaves being blown off the trees at the side of our house. “Still, no wonder Sally Routt hates the police and the press.”

Julian said, “Yeah, no wonder.”

CHAPTER 7

Julian offered to clean up. He said it would help him deal with how ticked off the story about Dusty always made him feel. When I thanked him, he nodded, his face still flushed from his outburst detailing Dusty’s problems. Even though the lovely scent of baked cake was a tempting reason to stay and try to chat some more, I thought it better to make a quick exit. When I stood up to help Julian gather dirty bowls, beaters, and pans, he stopped me.

“C’mon, let me do this by myself. You remember I’m cooking dinner for Marla and spending the night over there, right?”

Right, right, he had told us this. Marla was, in fact, Julian’s aunt by blood, and I was always happy to see them getting together. Julian promised to be back in the morning to help me finish the prep for Donald Ellis’s birthday party.

That was the thing about Julian, I reflected, as I bounded up the stairs to wash my hair. He was reliable and he was kind. And there was something else. There’s a stereotype embedded in people’s mind, and it runs through literature, movies, and TV. And that is that men are unemotional, logical, and analytical. Living with Arch, Julian, and Tom, I’d concluded that nothing could be further from the truth. Okay, so none of them was prone to teary outbursts. But they felt injustices, cruelties, and loss just as severely as any female I’d ever met.

I thought about poor Dusty as the warm water poured over my scalp. Everything she’d tried to have—a career, money, a relationship, a good education—all these had come to naught. And then she’d been killed.

A rock formed in my throat as I blew my hair dry. After I pulled on a sweater and denim skirt, I felt dizzy, and sat on Tom’s and my bed. I was severely sleep-deprived. But I was also suffering from finding a corpse the previous night.

Work, business, activity, forward movement—all these were needed to help me get going again. I had to pick up Marla at the Creekside Spa, then dash down to Denver to collect Arch and Gus. And I was determined to grab a recipe booklet and look at the collection of Charlie Baker’s paintings at CBHS. Were all of his recipes screwed up, or just Nora’s? I wanted to know, doggone it.

I headed up Main Street, now festooned with crepe-paper ghosts, skeletons, and pumpkins. Ordinarily, I loved Halloween, chiefly because it marked the beginning of the big party season. Most caterers—and I was no exception—made the bulk of their profit during the two months between Halloween and New Year’s. I already had a slew of events scheduled to take place at the Roundhouse, which was situated beside Cottonwood Creek several miles before the spa. If I could ever get the doggone plumbing completed…but I veered away from that thought.

I had already booked a designer to come in and decorate the Roundhouse for Christmas. My throat again closed up, thinking of the five thousand dollars it was going to cost me to transform the place into a garlanded indoor forest twinkling with “millions”—so said the decorator blithely—of tiny colored lights. But that was what well-heeled clients expected these days for a Christmas party, and I’d transferred the cost of the decorations into the contracts for office parties, wedding receptions, family-and-friends dinners, and ladies’-clubs holiday luncheons. So far, the only one who had blinked was yours truly, and that was because the plumbing was running me another ten thousand bucks.

When I passed the conference center, I steeled myself to have a look, since the head contractor had told me firmly not to come by anymore, as all my questions slowed down his workers. Happily, despite the cold weather, I saw half a dozen men in heavy work outfits plodding across the ground outside the hexagonal building. Several trucks in the lot were parked at odd angles, and one of them boasted a winch. Did that mean pipe was being laid? I certainly hoped so. I hadn’t had an event for the last couple of weeks, as people didn’t seem to want to get married or be otherwise festive in the latter part of September and early part of October. Up until today, I’d been thankful for my breakfast-meeting contract at Hanrahan & Jule.

Yes, I thought as my hands gripped the steering wheel. Up until today.

At twenty past two I pulled into the parking lot of the Creekside Spa and eased my van with its painted logo “Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right!” between a gold Mercedes and a black BMW. I waited in fear for a slender, imperious receptionist to come out and tell me to move my vehicle to the service entrance! Now! This had happened more often than I cared to remember. But I still wasn’t quite used to it.

I turned off the van’s engine. It grumbled and shook, then sighed to silence. Across the street, Cottonwood Creek, swollen with snowmelt from the first mountain storms, surged over a clump of rocks, then flowed placidly farther on. On this side of the road, I could just make out the grumble of earthmoving machines and the beep-beep-beep of tractors in reverse. Peering to the edge of the parking lot, I saw tractors and dump trucks moving and smoothing dirt, one more example of the relentless construction that always seemed to envelop Aspen Meadow.

My skin prickled with gooseflesh. This was the first time I had been alone, really alone and able to think, since I’d tripped over Dusty’s body. I swallowed. Then again, maybe I didn’t want to think. Maybe I didn’t want to get myself all depressed. After all, I still had to pick up Arch and Gus.

Gus. The story of Gus, Arch’s half brother, was what made the memories of death