Diane Davidson - Tough Cookie

“Goldy, please. Don’t turn in that tape. It’ll be the end of me. I was hoping you could figure out what happened, and leave me out of it—” She bit her lip.

“What are you talking about?” I stared at her. “Leave you out of it? You were so eager to get me to figure things out, you left the articles and ordered The Stool Pigeon Murders and the avalanche book, didn’t you?” She nodded bleakly. “For crying out loud, Cinda, you took my frigging library card?”

“It dropped out of your wallet here a few weeks ago. I’d been meaning to give it back to you. But then you got involved looking into Portman’s death. And I thought, well, Goldy’s the one who’s supposed to be so good at solving crimes, why not let her solve this one?”

“Did you call me pretending to be a journalist named Reggie Dawson?”

She grimaced. “Of course not.” She sighed. “Look, I know you’re angry, but please, think about what I’ve gone through since the avalanche. That day changed my life, for the worse. Who killed Fiona Wakefield? And did whoever do it see me up on the ridge? Did Nate tell anyone that I was the one he was filming? Does anyone know I’m the one who started the avalanche that killed Nate Bullock?”

“What do you think?” I asked her. Again, I was aware of the tape in her VCR. I was also aware that I suddenly did not trust Cinda Caldwell.

“I followed Jack Gilkey’s criminal trial,” she was saying. “I don’t think Gilkey knew I was the one snowboarding in the out-of-bounds area on Elk Ridge. But Gilkey, or whoever pushed his wife off the overlook, knew some snowboarder was on Elk Ridge. It was in the papers when Nate died. In jail, Gilkey befriended my old buddy Barton Reed. Maybe it was just to be friendly, but Gilkey asked Barton a million questions about scofflaw snowboarders in Killdeer. Barton wrote me about his new friend; told me the two of them would be out soon; we could all go snowboarding. I wrote back that I hadn’t done any boarding since my knees gave out the year before.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this last week, when you were so upset that Barton had made a threat against someone in law enforcement?”

The freckled skin around Cinda’s pale eyes crinkled in sudden fury. “Oh, sure . And then have the cops ask me, ‘How do you happen to know so much about Fiona Wakefield’s death, Ms. Caldwell?’ And I say, ‘Well, Officer, I think I saw something just before I caused an avalanche in an out-of-bounds area, an avalanche that killed a PBS star!’ Do you think that kind of confession would keep me out of prison?”

How long had I been away from Rorry? How was I going to manage to be up at the bistro in less than an hour? “Look, Cinda, I have to go—”

“I had to tell you what Barton said!” she continued, impassioned. “Do you think I don’t have any conscience left? Barton had cancer, he was half crazed, he wanted to kill some guy in law enforcement. I couldn’t be responsible for two deaths! Why don’t you play the tape? Then we can see what’s what.”

“No,” I said firmly, as I ejected it from the VCR, slotted it back into Nate’s camera, and zipped up the case. “I need to leave. Meanwhile, Cinda, you have to come forward and talk to the authorities. This tape can help, and you must help, too. We have to find out who really killed Fiona—”

“If it was Jack, he can’t be tried for the same crime twice,” she countered stubbornly.

“I know, but listen. Eileen Druckman is one of my best friends. If it is true that Jack cold-bloodedly killed his wife, then Eileen has to know. She has to dump him, before it’s too late. If it was Arthur, he needs to be arrested and punished. If it was Barton Reed, then we can close the case. If it was Boots Faraday, then she can get ready to teach art classes in prison.”

“I can’t ,” said Cinda, her jaw clenched. “I’ll go to jail for the rest of my life.” She held out her hand. “Give me the tape, Goldy.”

“No.”

At that moment the office door opened. Cinda and I froze. Rorry Bullock’s huge belly came through first. She looked blankly from Cinda to me. Behind Rorry, Ryan’s head appeared. He peered over Rorry’s shoulder.

“Hey boss,” he said desperately. “I’ve got four people out here screaming for vanilla lattés, and I can’t find a new bottle of extract.”

I announced: “Time to go.” Hoisting the camera case, I made an internal bet, the kind that always drives Tom crazy when I tell him about it later: Cinda would not risk exposing herself in front of Ryan. Nor would she wrench the case from my hands while Rorry was there. She knew she’d have a struggle on her hands, one she was bound to lose.

Rorry, the very pregnant widow of the man whose death Cinda had inadvertently caused, said, “Goldy, I need to go to work. And you need to do your show,” she reminded me.

“Oh, yes, your show,” said Cinda.

Doggone it . “See you later,” I gushed as I pushed past Cinda to lead Rorry out. “Thanks for letting us use your tape player.”

“Well?” Ryan stage-whispered as we made our way to the exit. “Did you see what you need?”

I was acutely aware of Cinda’s rigid form behind us, her ears tuned to our every word. “Not yet,” I replied loudly. “Maybe the tape’s too screwed up.”

Anything to stall for time.

The sun was struggling through parting clouds as Rorry and I crunched through the new snow to the car. Her questions spilled out. You see who the snowboarder was? No. Was Nate really filming a sports video? Yes. How did the avalanche start? Not sure, I replied tersely. Probably from the construction noise that day. She paused, then asked in a low, husky voice, Did you see him die? No, I replied honestly. I really need to look at it again, I added grimly, and have the police analyze it.

When I dropped her at the warehouse, I asked her once more if she was doing okay. It had been a successful trip, but arduous. Yes, yes, she assured me quickly, just fine. She handed me a spare key to her trailer and said a co-worker would be bringing her home about midnight. Then she disappeared behind the large warehouse doors. It was hard to tell if she was satisfied with my answers about the tape. Probably not, I reckoned, since half of them were lies.

As I drove away, I tried to figure out the best way to get to the bistro, where the show would be filmed. The new, unplowed snow was too deep to try to get up the back road in the Rover. I wasn’t going to ski down. So I had to take the gondola both ways. But how would I avoid Cinda’s, with its panoramic view of the path to the gondola?

I decided to park in the Elk Ridge lot. Then I could walk back through the trees to the creek, find the first way across, and head straight to Big Map. I had on thick waterproof leggings and good boots, and could probably move pretty fast. But Cinda was younger and much stronger than I was. Bad knees or no, I didn’t want to tangle with her.

I glanced at the camera case on the passenger seat beside me. What should I do with the cassette? Would it be safer with me or safer in the car? In the past week, it seemed as if everyone I’d come to know in Killdeer had had their place or their automobile broken into. I couldn’t risk leaving the tape in the Rover: I stuffed it into a small opaque plastic bag inside my cooking-equipment bag.

The parking lot was three-quarters full of cars and emptying quickly. Folks had had enough of skiing. They wanted to beat Denver’s Christmastime rush-hour traffic. I remembered Tom’s warning not to be alone. To get up to the bistro for the final episode of Cooking at the Top , I would have to take the least public route possible.