Sweet Revenge

Chapter 1-2

Whether or not Tom believed me, eventually he did realize how upset I was. He started taking me seriously, or he pretended to. In fact, he asked so many questions and paused so long while writing down the answers, I thought I was going to be late for my meeting with Hermie. I finally told him that I would see him that night. I resolved to put the apparition—the phantom? some inner voice asked—of Sandee Brisbane out of my head. I eased the van back onto the narrow road, and continued along to the stone gates marking the entry to the Regal Ridge Country Club area.

Marla had been right. Wending my way down a dead-end street, I passed two impressively massive homes, then reached the end of an enormous cul-de-sac, where the MacArthurs’ house sat, a contemporary stone castle complete with a crenellated roof and turrets at either end. I smiled as I descended the steep driveway, then put on my professional face and demeanor as I ascended the staircase that led to the kitchen.

Working with “please call me Hermie, darlin’ ” to decide on the menus went reasonably well. I assured her that the first event, the curry dinner celebrating a recent acquisition Smithfield had made, would be fantastic. It was while Hermie and I were figuring out the flow of guests and times for serving that Smithfield MacArthur burst into the kitchen.

“Hermie!” he exploded. Like Hermie, he was quite tall and had thin gray hair. But what made my mouth drop open was that he had a very, very red face. Was he from Virginia, I wondered, and had his parents laughingly named him after a Smithfield ham? No, no, that would be too cruel. I closed my mouth and noted that like many megarich folks, Smithfield did not care a whit about his clothing. He wore a rumpled white shirt, much-creased khaki pants, and ancient, loose penny loafers that were literally coming apart at the seams. “Hermie!” he yelled again.

Hermie languidly lifted her wide, well-powdered chin and clacked her pearls together with her hand. “What, darlin’?”

Smithfield squinted and moved his head around wildly, as if he couldn’t see the two of us seated at the black granite breakfast bar. He was perhaps ten years older than his wife, but that didn’t stop him from acting as if he were her child. “Hermie!” he bawled for the third time. “What did you do with my glasses?”

“I put ’em on your head, darlin’,” his wife patiently replied.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Smithfield cried. He reached up, nabbed his specs, and slid them into place. He thrust his jaw forward and demanded, “Are you sure you invited both Drew and Larry to the party?”

“We’re plannin’ the party right now.”

“Is my caterer here?”

“She’s sittin’ right beside me, darlin’.”

Smithfield thrust his scarlet face toward me. “Have you done your reading yet?” he bellowed.

“Reading?” I echoed.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Hermie!” Smithfield shouted.

“I’ll give her a copy of your book,” Hermie promised.

“Make sure she pays for it,” he grumbled.

Then he stomped out of the kitchen. Hermie sighed, and I wondered if I could slip Smithfield one of Marla’s Valiums the night of the curry party.

Two hours later, I drove back up the MacArthurs’ long driveway with a copy of Smithfield’s fat, self-published volume, Map Collecting Through the Ages, tucked against the passenger seat. Hermie had waved her hand and said I could have it, no charge. And if I could read it in my spare time—I almost choked with laughter at that idea—then I could return it when I did the curry dinner. Whoopee!

At the top of the drive, I came upon a gaggle of teenage girls playing lacrosse in the dead end. Since the MacArthurs’ house was right next to the cliff of Regal Ridge, I wondered what happened when lacrosse balls went over the edge. If it was your ball, you were out of luck.

While I was stopped, the players parted slowly, a Red Sea of masks, sticks, and sweatsuits. It had been several hours since I’d passed the dark car with its two inhabitants. Was one of the lacrosse players the girl I had seen with Sandee, if indeed it was Sandee I had seen? I scanned their faces and shook my head, then eased the van into the cul-de-sac and away.

With the winter solstice fast approaching, darkness fell over the mountains like smoke. I drove the winding road past the Regal Ridge Snow Sports Area, where man-made snow and bright spotlights were now allowing snowboarders to whiz down the hill until nine at night. Was Arch there now? I wondered. I couldn’t remember, and frantically called his cell.

He was at home, he reminded me when he picked up, because I’d said he needed to work at least an hour decluttering his bookshelves before he could go to a sleepover. I exhaled in relief, then asked if he knew a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl with long brown hair.

“I know about fifty of them.”

“Well, she’s very pretty.”

“Twenty-five, then. Are you going to let me work on these books?”

I told him to remember to pile them into boxes, then signed off and headed home. When I finally came through the front door, Tom gave me a long hug. He was handsome, brown-haired, and just enough taller than I was to make an embrace both comforting and exhilarating. I closed my eyes and happily let his mountain-man body encircle mine.

“Miss G.,” he said when we parted, “you’re beginning to worry me. You think you see things, and you call Arch because you forget where he is but he’s home doing what you’ve been nagging him about all week. You need to get more rest. You’ve been working too much, and you’re beginning to act like a nutcase.”

“Never call a caterer a nutcase. We think it’s something to eat.”

“Exhaustion makes you see things,” he reminded me.

“Right. So what you’re saying is, I’m tired, I’m exhausted, I’m totally whipped? And therefore it follows that what I saw was a hallucination?”

“Is that whipped like potatoes?”

I tried to punch him. But he was too quick for me, and I missed. He laughed, but I didn’t. I was still thinking of that ghost.

Chapter 2

Well. Insofar as possible, I tried to put seeing Sandee—or whoever she was—out of my mind. But this did not prove easy. It wasn’t that I fumbled with my work. The first two weeks of holiday events went off as planned. Under Tom’s watchful eye, I began going to bed earlier—no later than midnight, unless a party ran over. When I did fall onto the mattress beside my warm husband, I’d be asleep before I landed.

But then … four hours later I would awaken in a sweat. Somehow I couldn’t forget the vision of Sandee’s surreptitious glance, of her quick move to avoid my van. Worry enveloped me like a miasma. Why was she back? What had she been doing on Regal Road, and who was the girl in the car? Would Sandee come after me the way she had John Richard, my ex-husband, because I’d seen her … and knew she was very much alive? What about Arch? Was he in danger?

I didn’t have any answers. Tom sensed my distress and repeated to Arch that he was never, ever, to take a ride from someone he didn’t know. Arch, with only the faintest band of freckles still running across his turned-up nose, nodded sagely and said, “I wouldn’t, and I won’t.”

I went on working. Some parties brought in big money, others less. A shipment of oysters was lost somewhere between the Mississippi and the South Platte. A truck carrying beef tenderloins was hijacked. These things happened. Caterers coped.

But then there was the one celebration I was doing at cost, which basically meant at a loss, for the Aspen Meadow Library.

This proved different.

The library had contracted my business to do a holiday breakfast for their staff and volunteers. No one is immune to flattery, least of all yours truly. I suppose that was why I agreed to do the unprofitable, labor-intensive fete.

“We voted, and you were the clear winner,” Roberta Krepinski, the ultrathin reference librarian, had gushed. When Roberta talked about how much she loved her work, her tightly curled carrot-colored ringlets all bounced at once. I worried about her, though, because I was always afraid she wasn’t eating enough. I thought devouring books and chocolates should go together, but Roberta didn’t like people to munch while they were reading her books, by which she meant the library’s. I didn’t argue, because I’d learned long ago you couldn’t win an argument with a librarian.

Where I came into Roberta’s line of sight revolved around the fact that she ran special events at the library. “And anyway,” she’d burbled while working with me in October, “everyone is so sick of the usual Christmas potluck.”

“So that’s what you voted between?” I asked. “Me and potluck?”

A frown creased Roberta’s brow. “No, Goldy. We wanted you.”

So Roberta and I hammered out the details. First issue for discussion in the contract: Why was Roberta insisting on my doing a holiday breakfast? What were we going to have, rum toddies and toast? No, no, Roberta replied. This, too, was something the staff had voted on. With an early Saturday-morning event, everything could be cleaned up by nine-thirty, and the library could open on schedule at ten. The party would have a festive air, Roberta assured me, because volunteers already were planning on decking out the shelves with ropes of greenery and a profusion of red bows. The breakfast itself would be held in the library’s high-ceilinged reading room. There, a gas fire produced flames that looked so realistic, the librarians sometimes caught kids trying to roast marshmallows.

At the beginning of the second week of December, despite my early-to-bed routine, Tom assessed me grimly and said I looked horrible. Not only was he concerned about the number of events I’d done, he told me I hadn’t been able to hide my insomnia. I said my bout of not sleeping had been precipitated by the appearance of Sandee, and if his department would do their job and find her, I’d be able to drift off to Dreamland without a care. He ignored this and urged me to cancel the library event. He asked why I couldn’t let them have their potluck after all. I pointed out to him that our town’s librarians had put their hands on every single one of my requests for out-of-print French cookbooks. I couldn’t abandon them at the last minute.

“You never say no,” Tom said. “You’re planning a breakfast that morning, a lunch at noon, and a dinner that evening. You’ll never make it.”

“Not true.” From the oven, I pulled a test of the cheese pie I was hoping to serve the librarians. “Julian will be helping with the lunch and dinner,” I went on, referring to my enterprising twenty-two-year-old helper, who lived in Boulder. “And if I truly am out of the library before ten, I’ll have plenty of time to skedaddle over to the conference center and get set up for the garden-club ladies.”

“That’s another group you should have let fend for themselves. Whoever heard of a cookie exchange where nobody makes cookies?”

Actually, I had, and was grateful for it. Unlike the library party, the lunch and cookie exchange for the Aspen Meadow Garden Club was going to he hugely profitable. All the cookies the ladies would be trading had been made by two people: Julian and me. To the garden-club ladies, who was actually making the cookies was a mere technicality. Like the library staff considering a potluck, the garden-club members had thought making their own cookies would ruin all the fun. I mean, who really wants to be hassled with rolling, shaping, baking, icing, and decorating mounds of sugar-cookie dough during the holidays?