Diane Davidson - Killer Pancake

Arch made one of his sudden appearances, probably lured by the sound of raised voices.

“Hey, guys! What’s going on? Blow-Up was too weird and complicated, I didn’t like it. Is that pancakes on my plate out there? Neat. I put them in the microwave.”

I nodded and held up one finger: I’d be there in a minute.

“She was afraid,” Julian said tonelessly, as if he were speaking from a distant asteroid.

“Who—” Arch began.

I gave him a warning look and shook my head: Say nothing . Arch crossed his arms and waited for an explanation, which he didn’t get.

“Afraid of what?” Tom asked Julian gently.

“Just yesterday she told me she thought she was being followed,” Julian replied wearily. “But she said she wasn’t sure. Oh, God, why didn’t I tell you? I just thought it was some stupid thing, like the unexplained stuff at the counter.”

“Wait,” I said. “Wait.” I thought back through the muddle of the day. Claire, her Peugeot, the helicopter. When I’d swerved the van into the right lane, I’d barely missed a pickup truck. Then when I’d looked again … the pickup had fallen back several car lengths. “Someone might have been following us on I-70 this morning. In a pickup,” I said miserably.

“Make?” asked Tom mildly. “Color? Did you see the driver?”

“No,” I said helplessly. “No … I don’t remember any of that. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

Julian was holding his head in his hands.

“Big J.,” said Tom, “why don’t we go inside—”

Julian’s head jerked up. “There’s a part of you that’s always alone,” he blurted out. “People always have secrets, and you know they have secrets, but maybe they don’t want to tell you because they’re afraid of your reaction, or maybe they don’t want to tell you because they don’t want to burden you. She didn’t want to be a burden to me. And I didn’t want to trouble you with it.”

Tom and I exchanged a look. Inside the house, the microwave buzzer went off. My instinct told me Arch and I should leave Tom and Julian alone. Perhaps without an audience Julian would feel more inclined to talk to Tom.

“Let’s go,” I said to Arch.

“Why can’t I eat out here?” Arch asked, perplexed. But he obeyed.

“Mom?” he asked when we were back in the kitchen. He held up his plate precariously. “Should I eat now or not?”

“Sure, hon, they just need to be alone for a while.”

He took a mouthful of crêpe and said, “So what’s going on with Julian? Who was afraid and what’s the big secret?”

I told him Julian’s friend Claire had been killed in a hit-and-run accident. His eyes opened wide behind his glasses. “Do they know who hit her?”

I told him they did not but that Tom was working on it. “Arch, something else. Hon, Marla had a mild heart attack jogging around Aspen Meadow Lake today. She’s at Southwest Hospital but should be out in—”

Before I could finish, Arch whacked his chair back and bolted from the table.

“Arch, wait! She’s going to be okay!”

I bounded up the stairs after him. By the time I got to his and Julian’s room, Arch was lying facedown on the upper level of the bunk. I put my hand on the back of the awful tie-dyed T-shirt, but he shook me off.

“Just go away, Mom!”

“They can treat a mild heart attack—”

“I’m not upset about Marla . I mean, I am upset about Marla. Of course I am. It’s only that … Look, just leave, okay?”

I didn’t move. “Claire, then? You didn’t really know her, although I know you worry about Julian—”

He shot upright suddenly, his brown hair askew, his face pale with rage. “Why are you so nosy? Why do you have to know about everything?”

“Sorry, hon,” I said, and meant it. When he dropped back down on the mattress without saying more, I asked, “Want the curtains closed?” He didn’t answer and I backtracked toward the door.

“Wait.” His voice was muffled by the pillow. Slowly he sat up. He looked at the wall with his fifth-grade drawings of wildflowers, made during an intensely lonely period, the painful time before Tom came into our lives and well before Julian became Arch’s personal hero. “Could you close the door, Mom?”

I did as directed. Arch gave me a fierce, guilty look.

“I wanted Claire to leave,” he said harshly. “I hated her.”

“Why? You met her only once—”

“So? Julian was always with her or thinking about her or on the telephone with her, or something . We never had any fun anymore. I wanted her to go back to Australia.” He faced the drawings again. “Now I’m being punished for wanting her gone.”

I hate feeling so helpless. “I may not know much, Arch, but that doesn’t sound like the way punishment works.” He shook his head and refused to look at me. I went on. “Claire’s death wasn’t just a terrible accident. Somebody ran her down on purpose.”

He was silent, his eyes on his drawings, his face expressionless. Then he muttered, “I still feel bad.”

“Then help Julian over the next few days, especially when I go down to work the food fair. He’ll need your company now more than ever.”

He hesitated, then said in a resigned voice, “Yeah, okay.” After a moment he asked, “Do you think Julian will ever find another girlfriend? I mean, sort of the way you found Tom after things didn’t work out with Dad?”

It was so tempting to give him an easy answer. I said softly, “Arch, I don’t know.”

He shook his head mournfully. “Okay, Mom,” my son said finally, “it’s not helping to talk to you. Would you please just leave?”

Storms ripped through the mountains that night. Thunder boomed overhead, echoed down Cottonwood Creek, and seemed to shake the walls of our home. I woke and saw lightning flicker across our bedroom. The flashes were so constant that it was difficult to tell when one ended and another began. Rain pelted the roof and washed noisily down the gutters. I slipped out of bed to close our bedroom curtains, and found myself mesmerized by the storm. Torrents of muddy water gushed around the vehicles parked on our street, including a pickup truck blocking the end of our driveway.

As a lightning flash faded, I hesitated. Did a light turn on and then quickly off in the pickup? I narrowed my eyes. The storm slapped rain against the window. It was an unfamiliar truck; I didn’t recognize it as belonging to one of our neighbors. But people had summer guests all the time, especially in Colorado, where we were usually spared the heat that afflicts the rest of the country. In the midst of the storm’s violence, the truck was dark and still. I stared through the slashes of raindrops and decided the light was something I’d imagined.

A wave of water spewed up over the curb and surged toward Aspen Meadow’s Main Street. This summer gullywasher would dump tons of mud and gravel on Aspen Meadow’s paved roads. It would leave in its wake deltas of stone and a river of caked dirt. Driving after one of these torrents is invariably slow and treacherous. I sighed and wondered if Alicia, my supplier, would be able to get her truck up the street, to park anywhere close to the house in the morning. Especially if the pickup was still blocking the driveway.

When the tempest seemed to be abating, I glanced at the digital clock. But the clock face was dark. The storm had probably taken the electricity out. I fell into bed next to Tom’s warm and inviting body. Incredibly, he had slumbered sonorously through it all. But when I inadvertently woke him by touching his foot, we had a deliciously stormy half-hour to ourselves.