Crunch Time

her cot, I looked around our guests’ temporary bedroom. Years ago, when I’d done the minimal amount of decorating required for a house, I’d only put up sheer curtains over the long mullioned windows. But the sun was not up yet, thank goodness, and the room remained dark. Yolanda, inert on her cot, had pulled the sheet up over her ears.

With a sigh, though, I realized that I had also awakened the puppies. This was becoming the opposite of a quiet morning of relaxation.

I crept back to the pet-containment area. Scout the cat was nowhere to be seen. Jake was asleep with four of the puppies leaning up against him. I picked up the two whining puppies and carefully snuggled one against each shoulder. Then I rocked them until they went back to sleep. With as much care as I would have used handling newborns, I placed them next to Jake’s warm back. He did not open his eyes, but his tail thumped twice in acknowledgment.

Finally I retreated to the kitchen, where I washed my hands and put on a clean apron. I hadn’t remembered whatever it was that had awakened me, and with all the commotion and no caffeine, I sure couldn’t bring up the thought to net it.

What kind of cooking would aid my thought process? And could I work in the kitchen so quietly that Tom, Yolanda, and all the dogs would be able to sleep?

I fired up the espresso machine, ground freshly roasted beans in my new burr grinder, and cast my mind over things we’d eaten lately that we’d enjoyed. There was the toffee Tom had bought. I decided to make another cookie for the high school buffet: a conglomeration of sweet, tangy, and crunchy ingredients that I would call Crunch Time Cookies. In the walk-in, I nabbed unsalted butter and a couple of eggs. I thought the cookie should not be too sweet, so I picked up some cream cheese to add tang. I gathered oats and other dry ingredients, plus our favorite Mexican vanilla, from where Ferdinanda had moved them in the pantry. I looked around at the mess in there. When was I going to get this all cleaned up?

While the cookies are baking, my mind supplied. And after you have some coffee.

I made myself a quadruple-shot cappuccino, then sipped it as I measured brown and regular sugar and sifted together flour and leavening agents. I was making toffee cookies, so I thought I could use semisweet chocolate chips as well as toffee bits. Pecans have always been my favorite nut, so I thought, To heck with almonds and tradition, I’m going to add the crunch of toasted pecans.

The nuts tapped against the side of the saute pan as I heated them oh-so-quietly and took tiny mouthfuls of my luscious coffee. Think, I ordered myself.

Tom had said that someone had set Ernest up, by arranging, or, to be more precise, rescheduling, a dental appointment that he wasn’t due to have for two weeks. The dentist, in Hawaii, didn’t know anything about it. But he wouldn’t have been the one to attend to the calendar; his secretary would have. But Drew Parker, DDS, didn’t have a full-time secretary anymore, and he claimed Zelda, his temporary secretary, was a ditz. Had anyone else done his office work? Dr. Parker himself said he used a service, the name of which he could not remember. And it was that aspect—the service—that had awoken me that morning, full of curiosity concerning an idea that was just out of reach of my mental net.

After ten minutes of stirring the pecans, I turned them out onto paper towels to cool. I softened the butter and cream cheese a bit in the microwave, then emptied them into the mixer bowl and let the beaters rip. Next I combined the sugars and slowly added them to the mixing bowl, continuing to beat until the mixture was ultra- creamy and very soft. Next came the eggs, then the vanilla. While that mixture melded, I sifted the dry ingredients; combined the oats, chocolate chips, and toffee bits in a bowl; and roughly chopped the pecans.

Okay . . . I’d repeatedly heard about people like Dr. Parker, who’d let secretaries and other assistants go. Sometimes they said all the business could afford was a temp. My cynical view was that usually the business was trying to rid itself of the cost of providing benefits to a full-time employee. But never mind that; what had I been thinking?

The sheriff’s department, going into Parker’s office that day, ought to be able to locate the name of the temp service he used in his Rolodex or in his files. The temp service. What temp service?

I stared down at the chopped pecans. They smelled so good, I couldn’t resist popping a still-warm nut into my mouth. It was crunchy and sweet.

Finally, something about a temp service swam toward me. I could see a face; I could recall a vaguely unpleasant personality.

I stopped the mixer and stirred in the flour and leavening agents, plus the pecans, chocolate chips, and toffee bits. I figured the cream cheese would ripen the flavor of the batter if I let the batter chill for a while. It would have been better if I could have let it sit overnight, but I didn’t have overnight. I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the walk-in.

Then it was time for a little CPR on the old memory bank. I pulled out the phone book and searched through the yellow pages until I came to “Secretarial Services.” Some in Denver, Lakewood, and Littleton had advertised there, but . . . there was only one in Aspen Meadow. It was called Do It! and their slogan was “Secretaries Do It Behind the Desk.” Right. I looked closely at the proprietor’s name. Finally, I snagged the thought that had awakened me at half past four.

The owner of Do It! was Charlene Newgate. And I knew her. For crying out loud, of course I knew her. I fixed myself another cappuccino and sat down at the kitchen table.

I’d met Charlene, who I thought must now be in her fifties, when I was doing outreach work at St. Luke’s. At that time, our parish had had the only food pantry in the mountain area. Back in the dark old days before the government had more resources to track down deadbeat dads, Charlene’s husband abandoned her and her daughter. Habitat for Humanity built Charlene and her daughter a house, but Charlene also had a series of live-in boyfriends. They, too, packed up and shipped out. All this left Charlene with only the barest welfare income. She came into the church from time to time for tuna, peanut butter, canned ravioli, and breakfast cereal. Unfortunately, Saint Luke’s hadn’t offered free counseling sessions to people coming for food, or I would have suggested them to Charlene.

As a teen, Charlene’s daughter got pregnant. She gave birth to a son, but shortly thereafter went to prison for dealing drugs. One time when Charlene had come in and asked if we had SpaghettiOs, she’d shared with me that she was determined to raise her grandson, little Otto, by herself. Otto, who loved SpaghettiOs, was a year younger than Arch. In elementary school, Otto had been even more uncoordinated than Arch, and my heart had bled for them both.

When the Jerk had finally popped for tuition money for Arch to go to Elk Park Preparatory School—a disaster of monumental proportions—Charlene had complained bitterly to me that she was unable to afford such opportunities for Otto. I’d wanted to say, You want your son to be ostracized for not having money, not belonging to a country club, not being athletic, and not going to Europe for the summer? Be my guest. But I’d said nothing. After one year of hell, I’d quietly taken Arch out of Elk Park Prep and put him into the Christian Brothers High School, which cost half as much as Elk Park Prep and had none of the aggravation. Charlene somehow found out where Arch was and told me that she wished she were rich—!—so that she could send Otto to a Catholic school like the one where Arch was.

I finished my coffee and cleaned up the mess of eggshells, butter wrappers, beaters, and measuring cups. Then I thought, Oh, why not make a batch of those cookies right now? They would probably be better if I baked them later, but I wanted to see what I’d invented. Delayed gratification had never been my thing, and anyway, the cookies had oats in them, so they were sort of breakfasty. I preheated the oven, slapped a silicone pad on a cookie sheet, and tried to remember more about Charlene Newgate. I needed to figure this out, doggone it, because I was willing to bet several pounds of unsalted butter that either she had been the secretary for Drew Parker or she’d sent one of her temps to work there.

Charlene got the idea for her business while visiting the church, when she’d seen other single mothers lining up for food for their families. If the mothers’ children were in school, Charlene figured, why not see if the ladies could be plugged into gaps in the business world in Aspen Meadow? She’d started Do It! and found work for office assistants, bookkeepers, and office managers, and after that, personal organizers, house cleaners, pet sitters, nurses, and paralegals.

I took the bowl of batter from the walk-in and carefully scooped out twelve balls of dough, which I gently