Crunch Time

“Goldy?” Tom called.

“That was quick,” said Ferdinanda.

And then, before I could even get to the door, Tom was through it. “What happened?” he demanded. He was standing in the hall, shaking and staring at the bloody weeder. “I was on my way home when the call came through.”

“We’re just hearing about it from Arch,” I replied. “In the kitchen. So far, all we know is that Arch stabbed the guy, with your weeder there.” I pointed at the dripping garden tool. Tom shook his head, glanced at the weeder, then stormed down the hall. I followed. Boyd had come through the front door; he brought up the rear.

“Have somebody bag that thing for evidence,” Tom ordered Boyd, who relayed the message to an officer behind him. “And have somebody else bring the dining chairs that are in the living room into the kitchen, would you please?”

“He was outside the dining room window,” Arch was saying to Ferdinanda and Yolanda, “and then I—”

“Arch, are you all right?” Tom asked, taken aback by my son’s bald-egg head.

“I’m fine. Well, sort of.” He sipped cocoa. “You want me to start over?”

“Yes, please,” said Tom. In that command-taking way Tom had, he motioned for Yolanda and me to sit at the table flanking Arch. My son must have seemed like a pretty cool customer for someone who’d just attacked a would-be intruder with a garden implement. Boyd brought in extra chairs and put them down carefully. Tom placed a recorder on the table and pulled out his notebook. Then he and Boyd sat, while Ferdinanda rolled her wheelchair over to be beside Yolanda.

“What happened to your hair?” Tom asked Arch.

“One of the guys on the fencing team has leukemia, and the chemo has made all his hair fall out. So the other team members and I shaved our scalps. You know, in sympathy.”

Tom nodded. “Okay. Begin about an hour ago, and tell me what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”

“An hour ago,” Arch said, “let’s see.” His hand trembled as he put the cup back on its saucer, and liquid spilled across the table. Maybe he wasn’t quite as cool as I’d thought.

“I’ll get it, you talk,” said Ferdinanda, already on her way to the sink for a sponge.

Arch inhaled. “An hour ago is about when Gus’s grandparents left off our sick friend, Peter, at his house on the other side of Cottonwood Creek. The Vikarioses couldn’t get up our hill, so I told them I could walk. I was coming up our street, and I”—here he swallowed—“I saw someone peeking in our dining room window. So I cut through the neighbor’s backyard, then slipped into our garage—”

“How’d you get in there?” asked Tom.

“Someone, the guy probably, had broken open the side door. The snow was making everything quiet. The guy was still looking into our dining room, so I tried to figure out what I could use against him. I don’t know how to shoot, but I do know fencing. I figured I’d have the most luck with your weeder, Tom. So I took it off its hook and came up behind the guy. He was pushing the numbers on a cell phone, maybe to call someone, maybe to text. He didn’t hear me, so I lunged at him, the way I’d learned in epee. Got him in the back. He squealed. He whirled around and tried to get the weeder away from me. But I did a parry and riposte and stabbed the front of his shoulder. He howled again and fell against the house wall. I was about to gouge him again when he gave up and started running toward Main Street. He was yelling his head off.”

“Schulz,” said a patrolman from the door. “We’ve got a blood trail from outside your house to Main Street, where we lose it. Looks like the perp had a car parked down there. No outside surveillance cameras on any stores, either. He might have dropped this, though.” The patrolman held up a black watch cap.

“Yeah, yeah, he was wearing that!” Arch interjected as Ferdinanda expertly wiped up the spilled liquid, placed the cup back on the saucer, and patted Arch’s arm.

“Thanks,” said Tom. “Check for boot prints or anything he might have dropped, all right?” Like a cell phone, I thought, but dared not hope. To Arch, Tom said, “I need you to remember everything you can about this guy. How tall he was, hair color if you saw any hair, like his eyebrows, say. I need to know whether he was fat or thin, how old you think he might have been, what he was wearing. No detail is too small.”

Arch drained the last of his cocoa. “He was taller than me, but not as tall as you. Maybe just under six feet? He was stocky, but I couldn’t have said how old he was. Not a kid, though. A man. I don’t remember his eyebrows, because I was concentrating on attacking him. He was dressed all in black. I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re trying to break into somebody’s house in a blizzard! Why not wear white?’ ”

“Dressed in a black coat? Or a jacket? Black jeans?”

Arch closed his eyes as he tried to remember. “I don’t know what kind of pants they were. He had on a bomber-type jacket, only it wasn’t leather, or the weeder wouldn’t have gone through.” Worry suddenly creased Arch’s face. “You don’t think I really hurt him, do you, Tom? I mean, you don’t think I killed him, do you?”

“If you’d killed him,” Tom said matter-of-factly, “we’d have a body. You probably just grazed him.” Tom stood, as did Boyd. Tom put his big hand on Arch’s shoulder. “You did a good job.”

“Thanks.”

Tom said he was going outside to work with his colleagues.

“Wait,” I said, then took Tom into the hall. “The main garage door was open when I got home.”

Tom cocked his head. “Any idea who opened it? Or how?”

“Ferdinanda thought Boyd might have left it open. She’s not sure. Anyway, I closed it. Sorry I didn’t see the side door broken into.”

“That piece-of-crap flimsy hollow door,” Tom said, fuming. “I should have replaced that thing months ago—” Arch poked his head into the hallway. He wanted to get online with his pals to tell them what had happened. Was that okay? Tom asked him to hold off. “Anything else I need to know, Miss G.?”

“Trudy said there were three people sniffing around here today—”

Boyd appeared in the hallway. “Tom,” he said, his tone ominous. “You’d better come look at this.”

Tom shook his head and followed Boyd. Curious, I threw on a coat and trailed behind them to the side door to the garage, which was now blindingly illuminated with sheriff’s department lights.

I shivered when I saw what they were all looking at. The medicine-type cabinet where Tom had installed the hidden compartment was open. His forty-five was gone.

The investigative team split up. Half worked the garage scene, the other half the area outside the dining room window. The snow continued to fall.

A buzzing began in my brain. One more thing, it said over and over. It would take hours, I knew, for Tom to fill out reports regarding our watch-cap fellow’s attempted burglary—if that’s what it was—and the actual one, of a firearm being stolen. Because if the guy had had a gun, why wouldn’t he have used it on Arch? I shivered and felt suddenly nauseous.

Yolanda and Ferdinanda went to bed; whether they would sleep was anybody’s guess. Tom insisted that we keep the security system armed at all times. I returned to the kitchen, too nerve-racked to sleep. The Breckenridges’ party loomed. I decided to mix extra bread dough for the double batch of focaccia. It would taste better if it rose overnight in the refrigerator, anyway. I mixed yeast, spring water, flour, sea salt, and fresh rosemary, and placed the savory-smelling concoction into a buttered plastic container, which I covered and put in the walk-in.

The police were still outside, and Tom and Boyd with them. I decided, What the hell, I’ll go ahead and make the two flourless chocolate cakes. Initially I was going to make only one, but with the addition of six people, Sean’s two, plus Humberto and Tony and the women accompanying them, there was no way one would work for everybody.

I preheated the oven, prepared the pans, then melted unsalted butter and bittersweet chocolate in the top of my double boiler. I sifted cocoa and sugar onto waxed paper and set them aside. Unfortunately, that same terrifying thought invaded my brain: What if the man who’d stolen Tom’s gun had used it on Arch? I felt dizzy and began breaking eggs. Why oh why had Arch felt he had to attack someone? I gritted my teeth and folded the ingredients together, then poured them into the prepared pan and placed the pan in the oven.

As I sat at one of our kitchen chairs waiting for the cakes, waiting for Tom, waiting for clarity, I felt so much nausea and vertigo I had to put my head between my knees. I probably had some medication to treat this condition somewhere. I also probably had batteries somewhere. But when you’re nauseated and dizzy, the last thing you can