Crunch Time

as we used to say when I was growing up, any of my beeswax. Ferdinanda commanded that I make a rum sauce, the directions for which she had written out and placed next to the stove. Rum, rum . . . did we have rum?

“I found your bottle of rum in the dining room cabinet,” Ferdinanda told me, as if reading my mind. “It’s there on the counter.” And so it was. I sighed and began working on the sauce.

Tom and Boyd traipsed in and washed up. When Ferdinanda’s golden, puffed bread pudding emerged from the other oven, I was impressed. While Boyd removed the ham from the oven, Ferdinanda instructed me to pour the hot rum sauce over the bread pudding, which I did. And then we all dug in.

Ferdinanda’s dish consisted of raisin bread soaked in a spiced cream-and-egg concoction that became a rich custard when baked. The result was moist, fluffy, and luscious, especially when dripping with the hot syrup. Ferdinanda beamed when I complimented her. Boyd proudly cut each of us thick slices of the ham he had brought. We all insisted the combination of salty meat with a slightly sweet dish was perfect.

While Ferdinanda and I did the dishes, Tom and Boyd finished work on the ramp. Yolanda took care of the puppies, and I was thankful Boyd had bought more chow the previous night. With Yolanda and Ferdinanda staying there, I thought we might need more food, besides ham, that is. Once the dishes were out of the way, I nabbed an index card to start a new grocery list. Ferdinanda asked me shyly if I could pick up some guava marmalade.

“Sure. Where do you get it?”

When she described the location of an ethnic grocery in Denver, I wondered if it was the one she’d been going to when an SUV had mowed her down. Could someone have been following Ferdinanda? Why would someone do that? And was I becoming as paranoid as our two houseguests?

Yolanda came in from tending the puppies, said they were all fine, and washed her hands. Then she asked if it was all right for her to make Boyd and herself another coffee.

“Yolanda,” I replied, “you know that old mi casa es su casa saying? Just take whatever you want.”

“In that case,” interjected Ferdinanda as she shrugged into an old jacket of Tom’s, “I’m going to have a cigar. You know what the Mexicans say? Despues de un taco, un buen tabaco. Except we didn’t have tacos for breakfast, we had my bread pudding. Better put on your coat, Goldy! It’s freezin’ out there.” With this, she rolled down the hall toward the front door, not into the dining room, her makeshift bedroom. Did she already have her cigars with her? I didn’t remember her bringing anything in from the van. Where did she put stuff? I suspected that if we turned Ferdinanda’s empty wheelchair upside down, we would shake out an umbrella, a set of false teeth, and a baby pachyderm.

A short while later, I zipped up my winter coat and accompanied Yolanda out to the front porch. I held the door open while she walked through with a tray of coffees—I’d made another decaf for myself—and the ubiquitous sugar bowl. When we arrived, Tom grinned. Boyd, with his dark crew cut, muscular body, and kind face, positively lit up. Ferdinanda, clearly happy with whatever was going on between her niece and the police officer, blew cigar smoke toward the neighbors.

As Ferdinanda had warned, the air temperature had plummeted since the previous evening. A thick gray blanket of cloud lay low over the mountains. In years past, we’d had snow in mid-September, so perhaps our short- lived Indian summer was indeed over for good.

I sat down with my latte—grateful it was unsweetened in addition to being decaffeinated—and admired the progress the men were making on the ramp. Then, quite unexpectedly, I had one of those frissons you get when you know you’re being watched, or judged, or threatened.

I put my coffee down and walked out to the center of our street. Almost from habit, I checked Jack’s empty house. The FOR SALE sign was still there, if slightly askew. The place looked deserted. Our bloodhound wasn’t howling; Tom and Boyd continued to work.

I shivered and did a one-eighty, right in the middle of the street. Nothing.

I pulled the sleeve up my right wrist; my skin was covered with gooseflesh. I swallowed. I’d seen a TV nature show where the narrator had been giving a discourse on the African savanna and how gazelles were “warned” by birdcalls when predators were nearby. The question being discussed in the program was, how had gazelles learned bird language? But I hadn’t heard a birdcall, because most of our birds had flown south at the end of August. What, then?

I tried to look nonchalant as I again glanced up and down the street. Except for our little crew, no one was around. There was the usual rumble of traffic from Main Street. From about two blocks away, an approaching school bus chugged along. But then I heard something else: a metallic growling, grinding noise, like a set of gigantic axes being sharpened. Once, twice. Vroom, vroom.

“?Ai!” cried Ferdinanda from the porch. “It’s Kris.”

Yolanda, frozen in place, dropped her coffee cup onto the cement floor of the porch, where it broke. Tom and Boyd were immediately on guard. Boyd went so far as to pull his firearm out of its holster.

“Take the women inside!” Tom called to me.

I sprinted back and did as commanded. We watched through the living room windows while Tom and Boyd split up and walked to opposite ends of the street. The detritus of the ramp-making lay higgledy-piggledy across our front yard. I glanced at my watch: half past seven. Yolanda and I had to leave at eight for the Christian Brothers High School, to be there by nine so we could start setting up. But I wasn’t as worried about that as I was about Yolanda, who was trembling.

“It was his car,” Yolanda said under her breath. “Kris’s.”

I said, “You could tell by that grinding noise?”

Ferdinanda and Yolanda said in unison, “Yes.”

“He drives a Maserati,” Yolanda said, “because it’s expensive and he wants to show off. Problem is, he has trouble with the Formula One gears, and when he’s stopped, like he’s set the car in Park? He hits the accelerator so the exhaust makes that vroom-vroom sound.” I thought of Zeke Woolworth, in prison for grand theft auto. I bet he would know how to make Kris’s car hum.

“He’s around here somewhere,” Ferdinanda said, her voice flat. “He followed us to this house.”

I wanted to disagree with her, to say we’d left Ernest’s house by a back service road not known to many people, least of all to Kris. She was being paranoid. Still, I’d had that frisson. What had my nerves sensed?

Well, well. It was not Kris in his Maserati who came driving up our street a minute later, as Boyd and Tom returned, holstering their weapons. Instead, a long black Mercedes pulled to our curb and disgorged a tall, heavy, Hispanic male. Despite the weather, he wore a beige suit. He was very wide in the middle but narrowed as you glanced at his feet or head. His curly black hair was threaded with gray. His tanning-bed face and hands were the color of papaya flesh.

I recognized him from newspaper photographs: Humberto Captain.

8

“Hello, officers!” Humberto called loudly, with a papal-style wave. Ferdinanda, Yolanda, and I were still standing in front of the windows. The two women exchanged an unreadable glance. Tom and Boyd stopped Humberto on the sidewalk, where the three of them spoke in such low tones that we couldn’t make them out.

“What do you all want to do?” I asked.

“See if they argue,” Ferdinanda replied without moving her gaze from the window.

They didn’t exactly quarrel, but the conversation did not seem to be going well. Humberto gesticulated adamantly at the house, until finally Tom accompanied him to the porch, where he admonished Humberto in a raised voice to stay put. When Tom came inside, he was shaking his head.

“He wants to know how the girls are,” Tom said. “That’s his term, not mine. And he means Yolanda and Ferdinanda, not you, Goldy.”

“Did you ask him why he called Ernest’s house last night, right before the arsonist hit?” I asked with more heat than I intended. “Did you ask him if he was the arsonist?”

Tom inhaled patiently. “Goldy, I am building a ramp. Last night, our guys did question Captain. He says his cell phone was stolen last week. He also says he was at home when the Molotov cocktail was being thrown at the greenhouse.” Tom lifted his chin at Ferdinanda and Yolanda. “You want to talk to him?”