Crunch Time

sober and I had a heart attack, and that was the end of that.” She reflected a moment. “I hadn’t seen him in a while . . . and now you say—” She stopped talking, shocked into silence.

Tom mildly asked Marla, whom everyone in Aspen Meadow would agree was the most reliable source of town gossip, if she had any idea whether Ernest had any enemies.

Marla twisted her mouth to one side. “Well, let’s see.” Then her eyes twinkled. “I heard from a source at the church that he was investigating Brie Quarles.”

“The junior warden?” I asked, incredulous. Brie Quarles, a short, slender lawyer, had a head of wavy blond hair, light blue eyes, and porcelain skin. She was thirty but looked twenty, and she had separated from her husband . . . but then I’d heard they were getting back together. They did not have children. So, Brie was being investigated? “Why would Ernest be interested in her?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Marla said matter-of-factly. “And no, I don’t know who the client is. Maybe Father Pete. I’m sure he doesn’t want his vestry doing things that could get the church bad press.”

Ferdinanda had blanched. At the possibility of wrongdoing in the church? Sad to say, Episcopalians didn’t have the market cornered on that one. Tom, meanwhile, had furtively taken out his notebook and written down a few words that I was sure included Brie Quarles.

“So anyway,” I said, groping for any topic beyond the ecclesiastical, “Yolanda and Ferdinanda will be staying with us for a little while. Tom? Will you and Boyd put in a ramp for Ferdinanda?” I asked brightly, nestling a second juicy piece of ham beside a heap of applesauce.

“Tomorrow morning,” Tom replied, not at all fooled by my digression. “That was Boyd on the phone. He’ll be here at seven.”

“But,” said Marla, also one not to be put off by conversational diversion, “you don’t think Brie had anything to do with—”

“We don’t know yet,” Tom said. “We’re open to all theories. Who was your source on that piece of information?”

It was rare to see Marla blush, but this was one of those times. To hide it, she again turned to Yolanda. “Do you know if Ernest had any enemies?”

“We’ve already questioned Yolanda,” Tom said firmly. “Who’s your source of information?”

Marla closed her eyes and sighed. “My cleaning lady, Penny Woolworth. If you talk to her, she’ll never tell me anything again.”

Tom made another mark in his notebook. He said quietly, “We won’t mention you.”

Marla scowled at him, then smiled at Yolanda. “So, when did you move out of Kris’s?”

“A few weeks ago,” said Yolanda before Ferdinanda could offer another opinion of Kris Nielsen.

“That bitch,” said Marla.

“What bitch?” I said. “Who are you talking about?”

“Penny Woolworth, my cleaning lady! I share her with Kris Nielsen and a couple of other people,” Marla said. “She’s the bitch. I pay her extra to keep me up-to-date on the romantic affairs of all her clients.”

“A cleaning lady sharing dirt,” I observed drily.

“I remember Penny,” Yolanda said weakly, looking into her wineglass. “She used to clean Kris’s house once a week. She was nice. It was too bad about her husband going to prison.”

Marla went on. “Yes, well, our little mountain town doesn’t keep secrets all that well. This not-keeping- secrets is something Kris should have known, or at least have figured out. Penny Woolworth, as you know, is a young woman who’s fallen on hard times, since somebody”—here she looked at Tom—“got her husband sent to prison for car theft.”

“Zeke Woolworth,” Tom said matter-of-factly, “stole not just one or two ultra-expensive cars, but more than thirty, which he eventually sold to chop shops. Unfortunately, before he sold the cars, Zeke would speed all over the place. Sometimes he even crashed into something, usually a pylon, or a street sign, or sometimes a lane divider. He got caught not just once, but eight times. He served short stints, but when he stole a Ferrari and sped up the interstate to Aspen Meadow at more than a hundred miles an hour, he was, yes, finally sent away for two years. He’s getting out soon, but in the interim we’ve all been a lot safer.”

“Maybe so,” said Marla. “But with no income, Penny’s had to work for me and four other people.”

“Marla,” I interjected, “it’s really not right for you to pump Penny for information on her clients—”

Marla waved this away. “How do you think I found out Ernest was investigating Brie? She cleans Brie’s next- door neighbor’s house, and Brie told the neighbor she thought someone was following her. The guy was driving a red pickup truck. I got the neighbor to ask Brie the license plate of the truck, which Brie told her, and Penny got it from the neighbor, who told me. I recognized the license plate as the one Ernie had on his old pickup. You see, Goldy,” she said triumphantly, “you’re not the only one in town who can figure things out.”

Tom shook his head. “Did you tell Brie or her neighbor it was Ernest who was doing the following?”

Marla frowned at Tom. “What do you think I am, nuts? No, I wanted to call Ernie first, but then I forgot.”

Tom wrote in his notebook. Marla turned her scowl to the notebook, then raised her eyebrows at me.

She went on. “Anyway, Penny did tell me that Kris Nielsen’s huge house in Flicker Ridge cost over a mil. But he can afford it,” Marla said. She took a sip of wine. “Penny says that she had to work there late one night, because it had snowed in the morning, and she couldn’t get through until the late afternoon. By the time she left, Kris had had more than a few drinks. While Penny was waiting to be paid, she asked him if he knew about expanding a business, because she had more clients than she could handle, and she wanted to hire some more people. She figured he would know the answer, because supposedly he was a successful businessman. He said he wasn’t a businessman, and did she want a drink. She said yes, drank with him, and he ended up telling her that he’d inherited all his money from his dead mother.”

“What?” exclaimed Yolanda. “He told me he’d started a company in Silicon Valley and sold it, and that was how he made his money.”

“What was the name of the company?” Tom asked mildly.

“I don’t know,” said Yolanda, dumbfounded. “I didn’t ask.”

“Hmm,” said Tom, in a way that showed he would look it up.

“Well,” said Marla, “I guess sharing the ‘I inherited all my money’ tidbit with his cleaning lady made her recoil in horror. She said, ‘You don’t have to work?’ And he shut up about it. The next time she cleaned, she pressed him again on the business thing. He said he’d turned over all his hiring to the human resources people at his company.”

I said, “For crying out loud.”

Marla beamed. “Penny thinks that Kris should be serving time for being lazy. Penny says it’s not fair that poor dear can’t-keep-from-boosting-cars Zeke is in prison.”

“I agree that Kris should be serving time,” said Ferdinanda. She squinted at Marla. “Does this woman have any real dirt on Kris?”

Marla regarded Yolanda somberly. “Did you know he was, ah, being unfaithful to you?”

Yolanda’s voice was weak. “Yes, I did know that. I mean, I figured it out.” She knew that if she mentioned the venereal disease to Marla, it would be in next week’s Mountain Journal.

“And you know how he did it?” asked Ferdinanda emphatically. “While Yolanda was working at the spa, Kris hired a nurse to take me out for a drive. Every day I had to go out with that woman so he could have some ‘free time.’ Free time to do what? I always asked that nurse. He’s not going to a job. But she never told me.”

“Do you remember the name of the nurse?” asked Tom, as mildly as before.

“Just her first name,” Ferdinanda replied. “Patty. I called her Pattypan, because she squashed any chance I had to take a nap.”

“Ferdinanda?” I said. “You didn’t protest? You just made a joke out of it?”

Ferdinanda pulled herself up tall. “I tried to protest, but I didn’t have a weapon. That’s why I had Yolanda buy me the baton, when we moved out of Kris’s.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Marla finally said, “Penny doesn’t know anything about this nurse, at least not that she told me. She claims Kris drives her nuts because he’s in the house a lot, not out