Crunch Time

“I’m not.” I mentally reviewed what I was making for the dinner. Back when we’d thought it would be held on a warm September evening—ha!—and that the twelve guests—ha! ha!—would be eating outside—ha! ha! ha!— Rorry Breckenridge and I had agreed on an assortment of cheeses, crackers, and fruit for a first course; lamb chops with garlic, mint jelly, salades composees, and hot rosemary focaccia for the main course; and a flourless chocolate cake for dessert. I calculated what was in the walk-in. I could thaw some more lamb chops and stretch out the salad ingredients I already had on hand. But I’d have to make an extra cake and an extra loaf of bread. This was not my idea of fun.

“Goldy?” Marla said. “You there?”

“Yeah, sorry. I was thinking about how to readjust my menu.”

“No need for that. Rorry told me that Sean insisted that one of the guests was willing to pay an extra thousand dollars if you’d make Navajo tacos.”

“Navajo tacos?” I asked, incredulous. I said flatly, “Navajo tacos are not gourmet food. Besides, I don’t have a recipe.”

“Oh, so what if it’s not something a French chef would serve? And call Julian for a recipe. Didn’t he come from Bluff, Utah? Isn’t that in the middle of Navajoland?”

“Yes, but Navajo tacos have meat in them, and Julian’s a vegetarian—”

“Details, girlfriend.”

“All right, all right! I’ll figure out how to do it,” I said, “since it’s for the church.”

“That’s the stuff.”

I said, “Do you know the names of the people she’s adding, by any chance?”

“Well, the four she added today are Humberto Captain and a date, and Tony Ramos and his wife.”

“Who?”

“Goldy, jeez, are you not getting a cell phone signal down there? You didn’t think I’d have her tell me about four extra people, and that I would say I’d call you, until I knew who these folks were, did you?”

“Sorry to be grumpy. Is that it?”

“No.” She took a deep breath. “I heard through the grapevine that Jack’s house sold today.”

“Jack’s—” I couldn’t breathe. I actually braked, even though we’d entered Sixth Avenue westbound, which was an expressway with no red lights. Luckily, no one honked, and I accelerated cautiously. If Jack’s house sold, then that would mean he was really gone. “Do you know who bought it?”

“Nope. My source said she thought it was a family with kids, but she wasn’t sure. Something about wanting to get in before the school year really got under way. I think the parents were going over there today with the real estate agent.”

Could this be the three people who showed up? But why would they come over to our house? I said, “I can’t stand this.”

“I know, I know. Jack was so great. But I thought you’d want to hear it from me.”

“Anything else?”

“No, except we’re getting a boatload of snow up here. Are you almost home?”

“I just got on Sixth Avenue. Listen, I need you to do a little more research for me. A few items, and they could be . . . fun for you.”

“Make my night.”

“Could you dip into the Brie Quarles story a bit? I’m wondering if the person she’s fooling around with is Tony Ramos.”

“Brie?” said Marla, disbelieving. “Brie Quarles? There’s no way she’d go for an ordinary high school athletic coach. No way. She’s a barely practicing attorney who thinks of herself as high society. I haven’t had the heart to tell her there is no high society in Aspen Meadow. There’s money and there’s no money, with all the shades in between. But now Tony’s made himself a load of dough, so maybe Brie’s interested in him. Who knows? Brie equates money with status, poor girl. All right, I’ll look into it. What else have you got?”

“Do you know anything about Charlene Newgate having a new boyfriend? One with a lot of money?”

“Charlene Newgate? Remind me.”

“Oh,” I said, without referring to the hard time I’d had bringing Charlene to mind myself. “She used to get money and food from the church, until she started a secretarial service?”

“Charlene Newgate, right. Just saw her at my lawyer’s office a couple of weeks ago. That woman gives me the creeps. She wears resentment like a second skin. She has a boyfriend? What, is she in junior high?”

“She told me she had a new boyfriend,” I said as the van crawled through the snow.

“I hate being the last to know something. I suppose Charlene would have had the chance to meet plenty of men, but still, Charlene Newgate? She’s a bitch who’s worked for every lawyer, doctor, and other well-moneyed professional in this town. I’ve never heard of anyone being interested in her. Whenever she sees me, she tells me that while she has to work, I am a wealthy, overfed layabout who’s done nothing with her life. Which may be true,” Marla admitted, “but I don’t need Charlene Newgate to tell me.”

“That’s an extremely cruel and untrue thing to say about you.”

“Thanks. But anyway, what guy could possibly want someone so negative for a girlfriend?”

“My question exactly.”

Marla said, “This one will be fun. Anything else?”

I paused before asking, “Do you know any doctor in town who’s prescribing medical marijuana? Or anyone who’s using it?”

Marla laughed. “I know country club parents whose kids use plain marijuana, and the only thing that ails them is their need to get stoned.”

I glanced at Yolanda, whose face above the blanket held an amused expression. “Can you make some discreet inquiries?”

“I can make inquiries, but I passed discreet when I was in my twenties, and I’ve never looked back. Anything else?”

“Ernest was looking into a divorce. And no, I don’t know whose, and I don’t know whether his client was the man, the woman, or someone else.”

Marla said, “Uh, that’s not much to go on. But I’ll try.”

“Thanks, girlfriend. See you tomorrow night at the Breckenridges’.”

“Sounds good. I’ll bring highbrow beer to go with your lowbrow tacos.”

We signed off, and Yolanda said, “I know how to make Navajo tacos. But here’s my question: If the food business doesn’t work out, you’re going to grow weed?”

“Why not?” When she gasped, I said, “Just kidding.”

What I didn’t mention to Yolanda was the thinking I’d done that afternoon, after I’d met Peter, the member of Arch’s fencing team with leukemia.

Ernest McLeod had been getting thin, and he needed Yolanda to prepare meals for him. Maybe it wasn’t Ernest’s sponsor who’d suggested he hire a cook; maybe it was his doctor. And if he’d been in pain? I’d have to ask Tom about how the laws worked, but it was possible Ernest had been growing marijuana for his own—legal—use.

And, most significantly of all, if Ernest had learned he was terminally ill with cancer, he might have decided to change his will.

I didn’t mention any of these theories to Yolanda. There was no point.

Aspen Meadow looked like a wonderland, albeit the kind you might find in Siberia. The lights around the lake glowed in the fog. Snow fell steadily. In winter, we get huge amounts of the dry, powdery stuff that is much prized by skiers. But after the initial fall of tiny flakes, this storm had brought a foot of fat, wet flakes, the kind that blanket our town in the fall and spring.

My van, which had good snow tires but no chains, groaned when I turned off Main Street and tried to climb the hill to our house. I slid one way, then the other, and finally backed down to the nearly empty parking lot of our town’s Chinese restaurant. We were half a block from our house, and I figured we could traipse uphill the rest of the