Diane Davidson - Killer Pancake

When I hung up, I touched Julian’s arm. “Will you call Tom today and check in occasionally? Please? I won’t be near a phone, and I’m going to be a wreck worrying about you—”

“Sure, of course.” He managed a mirthless smile. “When we were talking during the storm, Arch told me—real serious, you know how he is—that he was going to stick to me like epoxy all morning while I was cooking. He swore he’d call an ambulance if I went into shock.” Julian chuckled morbidly. I sighed. “So I told him to concentrate on the Mothers of Invention and I’d worry about the fathers of commerce. Tell you what, Goldy. I didn’t want to mention that even if he finds some of those old LPs, he’s never going to get hold of a system that’ll play them.”

“Who’s fighting?” demanded a sleepy Arch. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen. “I heard you guys.”

“Nobody,” I assured him. This morning, my son was wearing an oversize black T-shirt that said GO PANTHERS! on it. Looking for memorabilia from the civil rights movement, Arch had been overjoyed to find the tattered thing at the Aspen Meadow secondhand store. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him it was the booster uniform from the Idaho Springs High School football team.

He pushed his glasses up his nose. His straw-brown hair stuck out in all directions, like a game of pick-up sticks. “Don’t you need to leave, Mom?”

“Yes, yes.” But I didn’t move.

Arch turned to Julian and frowned. “Okay, here I am. Why don’t you give me something to chop for the brunch you’re doing?”

Julian said, “Why don’t you sit down and have breakfast, Eldridge, and then I will.”

Arch plopped into a kitchen chair, caught my eye, and gave me a nodding scowl: Everything’s going to be okay here , his look said. Sometimes our clan felt like a pride of lions, everyone protective of everyone else. I scooped up the first chafing dish and walked outside.

With all their more harmful consequences, at least the storms had brought a welcome break in the weather. A breeze ruffled my chef’s jacket. I hustled past Tom’s garden. Cabbage butterflies and iridescent hummingbirds flitted from red dianthus to purple Corsican violet. Aspen leaves that had stirred so languidly on their pale branches two days before now quivered, as if in anticipation of a change in season. In Aspen Meadow, fall usually begins in the middle of August, which was just six weeks away. In the distance, patches of brilliant sunlight on breeze-rippled Aspen Meadow Lake quilted the water with sparkles.

When I came back in, Arch was eating one of the cranberry-orange muffins Julian had made on Wednesday. I packed the food and the second chafer into the van. Julian insisted on hauling out the dry ice and the speed cart, where the cups of salad would stay cold. At the last moment I remembered the bleach water. The vat of bleach water is a necessary hygiene element for utensils when no running water is available. I packed the closed chlorine-smelling vat in last. With a coffee-deprivation headache percolating, I fervently hoped that one of the food fair booths would offer espresso, and plenty of it.

The van choked, coughed, and wheezed before moving unenthusiastically out of the driveway. An inch-thick spew of stones and gravel covered our road and Main Street. When I exited Interstate 70 and moved into the heavy stream of summer-in-the-suburbs traffic, my temperature gauge flickered upward ominously. The first surge of Denver’s hot air filled the van, and I thought of Julian, with us for a year, part of the family. After his outburst in the kitchen, he had warned me brusquely to have something to eat before I started working. He’d said, You don’t want to faint in that heat. I took a bite of one of the muffins he had placed on a napkin in the passenger seat. The tart cranberries and Grand Marnier combined for a heady taste. I remembered how energetically Julian had banged the tin into the oven before Claire arrived. And then his agonized questions from this morning echoed in my ear: Who would do this? Why …

I put on the turn signal to go back to Aspen Meadow. Turned it off. Turned it back on. Leave him alone , my inner voice warned. If you do the chamber brunch, you’ll only be saying you think he’s incompetent. Reluctantly, I turned off the ticker and resolved to stick with the day’s plan. After all, the mall opened at eight for special sales in all the stores, and folks were going to come up to the food fair famished from shopping. At least, that was my hope.

“Hey, lady! Make up your mind! The light’s gonna change!” came a shout from a convertible behind me.

When the light turned, I gritted my teeth and urged the van forward. I decided to concentrate on the morning ahead. But I had never done a food fair before, and the idea filled me with unhappy anticipation.

Booths at A Taste of Furman County were much sought after, although it was hard to figure out why. Great publicity, I guessed. The big beneficiary of the event was Playhouse Southwest. For the hundreds of servings the playhouse auxiliary told the food folks to provide each day, none of us was compensated. Visitors to the fair, though, paid forty bucks a pop to obtain the official bracelets that allowed them into the tent-festooned roof of the mall garage. The open air was necessary for ventilation, and the roof provided views of Denver’s suburban sprawl to the east and the Front Range of the Rockies to the west Once inside the roped-off area, tasters were promised that horror of horrors, all you can eat , which to food people translates as until we run out. There had been so much demand for booths from local restaurateurs, chef’s, and caterers who wanted to offer their wares, the organizers had even split up the serving times into two-hour shifts. I did not know whether potential clients would be likely to shop or eat during my daily slot from ten to noon. I certainly hoped that they’d stop by my booth, be enthralled and enchanted, and whip out their calendars—and checkbooks—to sign me up for all kinds of profitable new bookings. Otherwise, I was going to be very upset. Not to mention out about a thousand bucks’ worth of supplies.

My van sputtered and slowed behind a line of traffic crawling toward the mall garage entrance. After a moment I saw what was once again causing the slowdown. At the side of the parking lot, by the elegant marble entrance to Prince & Grogan, a crowd of animal rights’ demonstrators waved placards that read MIGNON COSMETICS BRING DEATH—DEATH TO MIGNON COSMETICS! Shaman Krill, arms outstretched, hair wild, was leading the crowd in a chant that I couldn’t quite make out. The row of cars stopped. I reached across and gingerly rolled down the passenger-side window.

“Death on your hands! Death on your face!”

A uniformed officer was directing traffic. The van crept forward. As I neared the shouting demonstrators, my hands became clammy on the steering wheel. Three parked sheriff’s department vehicles seemed to indicate that the police weren’t just there to head cars up the ramps.

“Death isn’t pretty! Death’s pretty gritty!”

Maybe there were other cops I couldn’t see who were keeping an eye on the activists. Or perhaps the officers were there as part of the continuing investigation into Claire’s murder. From the small crowd of people pushing through the nearby door to Foley’s department store, it looked as if shoppers were avoiding the protest. This, undoubtedly, was the deterrent the demonstrators wanted, since Mignon was carried exclusively by Prince & Grogan.

“Food fair or shopping?” the policeman asked when my van was finally first in line.

“Food fair.”

He pointed to the far right side of the ramp, where a food service truck was lumbering up to the top level. When I slowly accelerated away from the cop, there was a thud on the side of the van, and then another. Frantically scanning the mirrors, I thought I must have been hit by a car backing up, when Shaman Krill’s face leered at the partly open passenger-side window.