ask for “blue cheese.” Jack had piled up a month’s worth of trash waiting for municipal trash collection, until I told him waste services were privately contracted. Most of all, he’d been stymied by our postal service. Everyone in Aspen Meadow was on a rural route, we’d finally informed him. Either you maintained one of a row of boxes near your residence, or, if you were very lucky, the mailman put your correspondence in a single box near your house. Otherwise, you were stuck with renting a receptacle at the post office. Jack’s days of waiting for the mail to be delivered through a slot in his front door were over. Jack had just shaken his head and installed a box at the end of his driveway, like the rest of us on our street.
And then Jack had become friends with dear, kind Doc Finn, whose sharp intellect and compassionate heart, as well as his affinity for fishing and drinking, made him the perfect companion for my godfather.
But something had gone very wrong. Doc Finn had saved little Lissa O’Neal, that much I’d learned from her grandfather Norman, who I sincerely hoped was in rehab at this very moment. Perhaps the Druckmans had told Finn about Todd’s rotator cuff. And then…had some patients suffering from withdrawal come to Finn, too?
At that point, Doc Finn had gone digging. Was this a big assumption, or not? Had Doc Finn known he was in danger? He must have, or he wouldn’t have given Jack the piece of paper with the list of names, the one I’d found in the golf club locker. But the last part of the puzzle, this damnable small key, was something Jack had not been able to figure out. So he’d left it for me.
I drank some more of my coffee and ran everything I knew about the case through my mind once more. And then I had an idea. It was crazy. Or was it? Jack hadn’t known what the key went to because he wasn’t used to having this kind of service.
But I did.
What I had in my apron pocket was the key to a mailbox. And not one at Aspen Meadow’s main post office, because I knew what those looked like. But where? Doc Finn had given Jack the key, or maybe Doc Finn had left the key where Jack could find it…
And then I knew.
“I need to drive somewhere,” I announced suddenly to Boyd. “I’ll be back in less than fifteen minutes.”
“I’m coming with you,” he protested. But before he could insist further, an absolutely horrible sound came through the screen door to the kitchen. It was the sound of people vomiting.
Vomiting and screaming and puking some more.
“What the hell…?” asked Julian as he raced in from the dining room, where he’d been setting up for breakfast. He ran out the door ahead of Boyd and me.
The women I had given cookie sandwiches to were holding on to their stomachs and throwing up. The remains of some of the food were on the grass. There wasn’t a person out there who had not received a dessert from me. I thought I was going to be sick.
“What have you done?” Victor Lane, who had suddenly appeared, shouted in my face. “Why are these women sick?”
“I don’t know!” I said.
“Leave her alone,” Boyd said, interposing himself between Lane and me.
“This isn’t anything from our menu!” Victor cried, looking at the remains on the grass.
“Somebody call for help,” I commanded Julian.
But Boyd said, “It’ll be faster if it comes from me. Stay with her,” he said to Julian, and then he rushed in the direction of the trees, where, up high, he had said, he could get a cell phone signal.
With Boyd gone, Victor Lane could walk right up to me again, too close. His skeletal face loomed next to mine. “You are fired from here forever and ever, do you understand?” And then he smiled at me, and turned away.
Julian and I tried to help the women on the lawn, who were quite ill. What ever had happened to them? And had Victor gone to call for help?
“Goldy?” said Isabelle from beside me. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Could you help me get these women some ginger ale? Do you have any? I think that would help them. Do you keep any antinausea medication around here?”
“No,” said Isabelle, “but we have diet ginger ale. I’ll get it for them.”
I looked at the women holding their stomachs, at Julian talking to several of them, trying to determine what had made them sick, and at Isabelle, who’d just banged into the kitchen to pour glasses of ginger ale. I knew I was not being paranoid when I reached the painful conclusion they’d been given something to make them sick. And I hadn’t done it. But I now had a pretty good idea who had.
“Let me help you,” I said to one of the women as I knelt beside her.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “What did you put in those cookies? Why did you try to poison us?”
“I didn’t!”
“Go away,” she said fiercely. “Leave us alone until a doctor can help us.” Then she rolled away from me.
All right, what ever you want, I thought. Julian was talking to a woman who was lying on the grass. Boyd had disappeared into the trees.
So I walked quickly back into the kitchen, grabbed my keys, revved up my van, and accelerated out of there.
25
The OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE sign in front of the old Spruce Medical Group building was creaking as it swung in the mild breeze. I ignored both the wind and the sign, and hopped up to the entrance, which, as I recalled, had a row of locked mailboxes out front. Jack hadn’t thought to look here when Doc Finn had given him the small key, because Jack didn’t connect the key with rural mail delivery. But I had that knowledge, and I prayed it was going to help me.
I certainly hoped I wasn’t chasing a wild hare. But I had to know.
Only two of the mailboxes seemed to be in use: Front Range Drains and a lawyer’s office. Still, there was an old, battered sign over the boxes that read, THIEVES WANT YOUR MAIL! REMOVE EVERYTHING EVERY NIGHT! Well, I certainly hoped a killer—I still had only an inkling of who it could be—would not have thought to come out here to try to steal mail…or what ever.
It suddenly occurred to me that in my haste, I had not checked to see if I had been followed. I peered into the parking lot, but saw only my van and the ones belonging to Front Range Drains.
I took the key out of my apron pocket and gingerly began trying it in the locked boxes. There were a dozen of them, most of which were unmarked. The little key went into the first seven just fine, it just didn’t
A pile of wet circulars fell at my feet when the door creaked open, proving that retirement, and even death, couldn’t keep the junk mail away. Who was still paying rent for this box, a year after Doc Finn had retired from Spruce Medical? Maybe Doc Finn had been paying it.
I went through every ad for roof repair, every credit card offer, every discount card for oil changes. Nothing. I sighed.
But something had made Finn give Jack this key, as a kind of insurance policy, in case something happened to him. What? I felt inside the mailbox: the top, the bottom, and then the sides…wait.
There was something small and rectangular taped on one side of the mailbox. With infinite care, I peeled the sticky stuff away, and then stared, with only dawning comprehension, at a…flash drive? Doc Finn, Tech Boy? I groaned.
I was twenty-five minutes away from home, and I had a load of women getting sick from food I had given them—but had not put anything bad into—back at Gold Gulch Spa. I’d left Julian wrestling with the problem, and Boyd in the woods, trying to get a cell signal. Once the cops and ambulances arrived, I was going to be at the spa all night, answering questions and allowing food to be packed up and taken for analysis. I couldn’t abandon Julian and Boyd; I had to go back.
After all, I told myself, Yolanda kept a computer in the spa kitchen, and I could plug the flash drive in there. Plenty of people were milling around, like rubberneckers trying to get a look at an accident. And then the cops would be here again.
And so I went back. The scene had not changed much. Victor Lane was yelling at Julian, who was ignoring
