release from prison, and a bullet shattered one of our windows at four this morning. With a temporary restraining order in place, what was our next step for visits with our son?
I disconnected as the chapel bridge across Cottonwood Creek came into sight. Beyond the bridge, the chapel’s delicate gray spires and arched stained-glass windows looked ethereal in the soft morning light. After auctioning off the Henry VIII letter, Eliot had given the Gothic chapel to the church, to offset his tax burden. In order to make Hyde Chapel a tourist attraction clients would associate with the castle conference center, Sukie had directed an extensive cleanup, and paid Charde Lauderdale handsomely to decorate the place. The labyrinth had been the crowning centerpiece of the renovation. Saint Luke’s had been thrilled.
This day’s lunch event had been covered in a fluff piece in the Mountain Journal and in the Saint Luke’s newsletter. Although the church had received lunch confirmations for twenty, the Episcopal Church Women had begged me to make enough food for up to ten more folks, for those donors untroubled by RSVP’s. The ECW was handling the loan of church plates, silverware, and crystal for the lunch. I’d merely replied to the ECW that lunch for thirty or even thirty-five would be no problem.
I swung the van across the chapel bridge, intent on finding the tables. With the bad publicity generated by the Lauderdale incident impacting my business, it was imperative that the lunch event go without a hitch. If the tables had not been delivered, I would call Party Rental at nine and deliver a blistering harangue. In the catering biz, sometimes you had to get rough.
No spotlights illuminated the chapel. I pulled into the gravel parking lot and swung around to park facing the creek, as close to the building’s carved front doors as I could get. Across the highway in Cottonwood Park, the sun lit the top of the thick cluster of pine trees.
As I sat with the van running, I tried to recollect the combination on the lockbox that held the chapel key. The chapel had been designed as a miniature of Chartres, and boasted some features of that enormous cathedral, including a rose window and, now, a labyrinth. I tapped the steering wheel and finally recalled that the letters on the lockbox combination were C, H, A, R, T, R, E, S. There was a Gothic-lettered sign to my right, at the top of the creek bank. Set your brake! it warned. Management cannot pull your car out of the creek!
I smiled at the vision of Eliot and Sukie towing a vehicle out of the water. I pulled up on the brake, then leaned forward in my seat to check how far I was from the creek. Fifteen feet below, the narrow chute of black, gurgling water raced between the icy banks.
I squeezed my eyes shut, heart pounding. I hadn’t just seen what I’d just seen. Or had I? Surely it had been an illusion, my sleep-deprived mind playing tricks with ice, water, stone, sunlight. You think you see something flesh-colored, something bobbing eerily in the water, and it turns out to be a rock.
I took a deep breath, jumped out of the van, and walked carefully to the edge of the creek bank. No, it wasn’t quartz, granite, or even mountain marble. In the creek was a blackened hand. A hand attached to an arm clothed in plaid flannel. A blackened hand? I stared into the water below. The rigid body of a young man lay half in the creek, as if he’d been tossed there.
I looked away, chilled. He needs help, my brain screamed. Help him. Get him out of that water!
I took a few tentative steps down the steep, boulder-strewn creek bank. Then I slid on a patch of ice.
Help him, get him out. But how could I get to him? I regained my balance and stared at the water. There were rocks in the creek itself, and a sheet of ice that might or might not hold my weight. Even if I got down there, was I strong enough to pull him out?
Now ten feet from the water, I caught sight of the young man’s scalp. What I had thought was thick hair was a dark splotch of blood. I blinked and tried to make out his facial features.
Hold on.
His photo had appeared at least a dozen times in the Mountain Journal. I’d heard his voice once, on the phone.
But he wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be hiding. In New Jersey. Where Tom was looking for him to question him about the FedEx hijacking. Not in Colorado. Not lying in Cottonwood Creek. Yet there was no doubt that Andy Balachek wasn’t gambling at a casino table.
Andy Balachek was dead.
-6-
It was hard to look at Andy Balachek. He was so young. Had been.
Where was my phone? Wait: It was still plugged into the van outlet. Heedless of the ice, I scrambled back to my vehicle, and flung myself inside. With numb fingers, I punched in the numbers for the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. My second call to them this morning, I thought morosely, as I glanced back at
the creek and tried to find my voice. When the operator answered, I gave her the details of what I was looking at: a young man in lumberjack shirt and jeans, with no hat covering his frozen, blood-slickened hair. His skin was pale in some places, blue-black in others. It was Andy Balachek, I told her. At least, I was pretty sure…
The cell phone’s call-waiting beeped. I told the operator that I’d had an emergency situation myself that morning and I had to take this other call. She snarled at me that I was not to hang up, and that I should quickly dump the other call while she waited. That’s the thing about emergency operators: You’re anxious to get off the phone and deal with your emergency, right? But the operators want you to keep talking and not do a thing. They get especially testy if what you’re dealing with is not a natural gas emergency or a car wreck, but a crime.
“Goldy?”
“Tom! Where are you? I have so much -
“
“On Interstate Seventy, just past Golden. Took an early flight out. I called the house - “
“Oh, Tom,” I wailed. He listened in silence as I told him about the gunshot that had shattered our window, about John Richard’s early release, about us having to take refuge at the castle. I told him my current location by Hyde Chapel, and about the young man in the icy water, a young man who was never going to move again.
“Oh, Tom - it’s Andy Balachek.”
“Miss G. - where are you exactly?” His voice was calm. “In the chapel parking lot?”
“Facing the creek and the highway. Across from Cottonwood Park. You know the chapel bridge? Andy’s body is about fifty feet downstream from that. I’m above him, in a parking space, forty feet or so from the chapel doors.”
Before he could confirm that he understood what I was saying, the call-waiting bleeped again. I’d completely forgotten about the emergency operator.
“Get yourself out of there, Miss G.,” Tom ordered me. “Now. Drive back to town, this minute - “
“I… I can’t!” Static invaded the cell phone and I stared at it. For some reason, I suddenly remembered Arch’s Montessori teacher telling us parents that I won’t means I can’t and I can’t means I won’t. So … why was I telling Tom that I couldn’t leave? Did it really mean that I wouldn’t leave?]
I glanced down at poor Andy Balachek and shuddered. If I left him, somebody might see his body and be compelled to
stop and gawk, or maybe mess up the crime scene. They might even steal his body. Not only that, I reasoned blindly, but this could be related to whoever shot at our window. Tom had arrested Ray Wolff. Andy Balachek knew Ray Wolff. Tom was working on the case. Thanks to the newspaper article, virtually everyone in town knew that I, Tom’s wife, would be catering at the chapel today… . I moaned.
More crackling assaulted my ear. Why had I discovered Andy? Most folks know a caterer is the first to show up at an event. Was I meant to find him? No question, I was getting paranoid. The static suddenly cleared and I heard Tom say my name.
“Dammit,” I said fiercely, “Tom, I don’t think I should just drive out of here.”
The call-waiting beeped again. “Tom, I need to go, the emergency operator is holding. I’ve already called the department, I can’t leave. Please understand.”
“Don’t worry about the operator,” Tom said calmly, just as the beeping stopped. Had she given up? Had she decided my call was a prank? “I’ll call the department,” Tom went on. “They’ll have a car up more quickly if I do it. I’ll cut over from seventy, be coming from the direction of Denver. I should be there in less than ten minutes. Do you have a good view of traffic from the east?”
I glanced around. Cottonwood Park slanted steeply to the road all along the other side of the two-lane
