Dark Tort

reassuringly: it was locked, but loose. Someone had to be in there, I reasoned. Still, as I knocked harder, I wondered if I should be running up to the grocery store.

When there was no response, I hammered mercilessly on the glass door. And it broke.

Finally someone appeared. I even recognized him: a young fellow, twentyish, Dusty’s boyfriend. Vic Something. I’d seen him over at the Routts’ house from time to time.

He yelled, “Why did you do that?”

“I need help!” I called, surveying the shards now littering the inside of the store. “It’s an emergency!”

“I guess so.” Vic was tall and very slender, his peaked face set off by an explosion of curls the color of straw. As he moved toward me, his young, high forehead wrinkled like folded tissue.

“Could you just hurry up?” I implored.

Vic’s long legs finally brought him to the door. “You didn’t have to break the door. Oh, it’s you, Goldy,” he said breathlessly. “Well, I can only let you do a couple of copies, and you’re going to have to pay cash because—”

“I need a phone!”

His hand was unexpectedly warm and moist as he grabbed mine. “Take it easy, take it easy. Okay, step over the glass.” His last name swum up into consciousness: Vic Zaruski. Yes, definitely Dusty’s boyfriend, but did I recall that they’d broken up? I wasn’t sure what kind of connection Vic had with Dusty now, if any, because my mind wasn’t working properly.

“I simply have to call help.” I stumbled forward over the pile of glass and into the store’s warm interior. “Show me the phone. Please. Someone’s hurt.”

Vic, his wide, dark brown eyes blinking in disbelief, his hair glowing like a ragged halo in the flickering neon, seemed at a loss for words. But he moved to the counter, picked up the phone, and handed it to me.

As I punched in the three digits, Vic’s worried glance took me in. He reached underneath the counter and pulled out a sweatshirt. “Put this on,” he whispered. I clutched it and nodded thanks. When the emergency operator answered, I told her what I’d found, and where. I said we needed medical help right away.

Vic drew back, his face drained of color. He said, “What?” But I had to ignore him, as I was telling the operator that in addition to an ambulance, she needed to send the sheriff’s department.

I pulled the sweatshirt over my head as the operator continued to talk, telling me to be calm, that help was on the way.

“What’s going on?” Vic demanded. Wind blew through the hole where the door had been, and a couple of curious ticket seekers from the grocery store peeked in. How much had they heard? What if they decided to go across the street to poke around and try to see what I was so upset about? Abruptly, I hung up the phone and bolted for the smashed door.

“Was there a break-in?” Vic persisted from behind me. “You said you needed an ambulance for Dusty? Why? Why do the cops need to come?”

When we reached the glass, I suddenly turned back. Vic collided with me and I caught a whiff of his scent, some musky boy-cologne.

“Vic,” I said, my voice low. “You need to herd these people back up to the grocery store. It’s important that they not go across the street. Please.”

“I can’t—” he began to protest. But I ignored him, as well as the people staring at me as I stepped over the glass and onto the sidewalk.

“Hey, Goldy—” came one voice, but I didn’t look back.

“I’ll get my cell,” a female voice announced, but I didn’t pay any attention to that either. My skin needled under the huge sweatshirt as I walked quickly down the slick sidewalk. I knew I shouldn’t be talking to anyone now except medical and law enforcement people. No sense making more of a mess of this than I already had.

Behind me, Vic’s excited voice told the curiosity seekers to get back up to the grocery store. He ordered them not to follow us. Us? Dammit. Vic’s footsteps echoed down the pavement behind me.

“Vic, you cannot follow me,” I shouted. He didn’t answer, and soon he was right at my side. As we walked, he begged me to talk to him, but I just shook my head. Finally we arrived at the grass-covered hill that overlooked the road. We stood, waiting, for what felt like an eternity, but which in actuality was probably not more than fifteen minutes. Vic’s frustration and fear radiated like a negatively charged aura.

In the time since I’d raced across the street, the darkness had deepened and the cold intensified. On the far side of the street, the parking lot still held Dusty’s forlorn Civic. Vic began to cough in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that he was crying. When I told him again to stay put, he moved away from me.

Across the street, a long black car moved into the parking lot. Then another dark vehicle, this one coming from the I-70 side, pulled into the lot. Not even a moment later, a third car followed them. Oh, Lord, I thought as I recognized all three cars. Maybe the woman with the cell, or perhaps someone else outside the grocery store, had seen me bolting from the building occupied by Hanrahan & Jule. I had to have looked suspicious, frantic and coatless, as I leaped across the street, ran up the shopping-center sidewalk, and banged on the copy-place door. When I’d broken the glass and shouted for a phone, then called for an ambulance and the sheriff’s department, anyone within fifty yards would have heard me.

I stopped at the bottom of the hill and glanced back at the crowd of folks outside the grocery store. They were moving en masse, making their way down to where Vic and I were standing. Welcome to living in a small town. Someone had thought, What’s up at this time of night, with the caterer running away from the office building occupied by H&J? That same someone had put two and two together and made a call. And now, across the street in the H&J lot, we were faced with the result.

The lawyers are coming! The lawyers are coming!

Great.

CHAPTER 1

I tripped over the body of my friend Dusty Routt at half past ten on the night of October 19.

At first I thought it was a joke. Loaded down with bread-making supplies, I had just pushed through the heavy wooden door of Hanrahan & Jule, the boutique law firm in Aspen Meadow where I’d been catering breakfasts for several months. My foot caught and I stumbled forward. I thought, Those H&J clowns are up to something. Again.

The bag of flour I was carrying slid from my hands and exploded on the carpet. Two jars of yeast plummeted onto the coffee table, where they burst into shards and powder. My last bottle of molasses sailed in a wide arc and cracked open on the receptionist’s cherrywood desk. A thick wave of sweet, dark liquid began a gluey descent across the phone console. My steel bowl of bread sponge catapulted out of my arms and hit the wall.

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to change my own trajectory toward an end table. It was one of two rough-hewn, cabin-style monstrosities that the decorator had thought necessary to make Hanrahan & Jule look like what it claimed to be: “your Rocky Mountain neighborhood law firm!”

I hit the end table, ricocheted over to the desk, cried out, and finally landed on my stomach. I had tripped over I-knew-not-what in a spectacular manner, and now I was prone on an imitation Native American rug. I shrieked, “Very funny, fellas!” But the lawyers who pulled these pranks didn’t appear.

I wiped flour out of my eyes and waited for the guys to reveal themselves. When they didn’t, I tried to focus on what I could see of the small lobby space. Lamps made of elk horns sat on the clunky tables. The bentwood couches, which were placed beneath homey paintings of food, were empty. I was lying on a sponge-soaked picture of a tepee. The pain assaulting my tailbone was excruciating.

Gritting my teeth, I figured I was about as upset as any caterer could be, when the bread for the following morning’s breakfast has been wrecked the night before. I still hadn’t seen what had caused my fall. Nor was there any telltale noise. In fact, the law firm of Hanrahan & Jule was completely quiet.

I’d ended up on the far side of the massive coffee table, a thick column of wood carved, I’d been told, from the trunk of an ancient blue spruce tree. I rubbed my behind and stared at the dark lacquered bark. Had I just stumbled over my own feet? No, I was sure the small cadre of lawyers who were not in Maui this week, ostensibly engaging in continuing education, was responsible for this mishap.

I heaved myself onto my back, wondering if the guys—and that’s what all ten H&J lawyers were, guys