Diane Davidson - The Main Corpse

“Prospect Financial needs to make everything appear normal,” Marla claimed over the phone. “That’s why they loved my idea of having the party up at the mine. To show the investors they’re in control.”

Pondering all this, I sighed and cut the delicate dumpling dough into squares. I sauteed morsels of fresh shrimp with scallion, water chestnut, and soy sauce. In control of what, I had wanted to ask, but had not. The mouth-watering odors of Chinese food filled the kitchen. When the shrimp had cooked to a succulent pink, I turned the mixture out to cool and started slicing thick slabs of tomato for the tomato-Brie pie.

Really, I reminded myself, I had enough problems of my own without worrying about Marla’s romantic and financial interests. With the Jerk leaving his medical practice to his colleagues so he could take a sabbatical – otherwise known as can’t-stand-the-Colorado-weather-need-lengthy-vacation-in-Hawaii – Marla and I had lost the person we loved to complain about most. And then there was my dear husband Tom, who had a whole plateful of problems all to himself, in which the death of Victoria Lear played a significant part.

I cut wedges of creamy Brie and alternated them with the tomato slices. Tom called this particular dish heart-attack-on-a- plate, so I would never serve it to Marla. I grated pungent Fontinella to sprinkle over the Brie. I wouldn’t give it to Tom either, as I was extremely worried that his current job situation might lead to heart-attack-at-the-office.

Tom had been an investigator at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department for more than a decade. His problem was his new boss. Five years from retirement, Captain Augustus Shockley was so paranoid he stayed locked in his office most of the day. Tom had taken to slipping his notes and reports under Shockley’s door. In his two months as chief honcho, the only thing Shockley had seemed able to do was to move totally incompetent people into positions where they swiftly managed to drive Tom insane. Shockley had also, as it turned out, placed his retirement savings with Prospect Financial Partners, and he’d become obsessed with Victoria Lear’s car accident. Check it out, Schulz! Go investigate the site! Shockley’s frantic memos to Tom had ignored the fact that the steep, rain-soaked crash site was virtually unreachable. The memos also ignored the fact that Idaho Springs was in Clear Creek County and outside of Furman County jurisdiction – thus, not Tom’s problem. Nevertheless, Tom had been in contact with his counterpart, the Homicide Investigator at the Clear Creek Sheriff’s Department. As a result, Tom had been one of the first people the coroner had called with his report. This isn’t very helpful, Shockley had scrawled across Tom’s summary of the fatal wreck. I often thought my handsome husband resembled a bear. Now, with Augustus Shockley to deal with, he was beginning to act like one.

But, I thought as I whisked eggs with whipping cream, I was looking forward to tonight, after the party. Tom and I would toast the financial turnaround Goldilocks’ Catering was making with the Prospect event. The party by the mine was going to be marvelous, I told myself confidently. I’d worked hard on recipes; I’d gathered mountains of fresh ingredients. Since my former in-house assistant, Julian Teller, had moved to upstate New York to attend Cornell, I’d hired another helper. Macguire Perkins had been one of Julian’s classmates at Elk Park Preparatory School. For the party at the gold mine, Macguire had ordered beers, ales, stouts, and wheats-brewed beverages for aficionados. And I’d begun to cook with gusto.

A rental company was setting up the tent early this morning. The electricity wired to the mine would provide power for a compact disc player and rented portable ovens, which the same workers would place behind a makeshift counter at the back tent flap, all ready to use when I arrived this afternoon. Getting up the narrow dirt road to the mine, which was situated five miles above Idaho Springs, wouldn’t be quite as convenient. High Creek Avenue did not wind and dip as dangerously as Orpheus Canyon Road, but first-time visitors to the mine were bound to be spooked. The invitations warned the guests to come in four-wheel-drive vehicles and to maneuver their vehicles with care. I prayed that the rental company folks had made it. The specter of Victoria Lear’s car catapulting off a cliff had propelled me to do a very slow dry-run trek in my van the previous day. Yesterday’s run, of course, had been anything but dry. To get from my house in Aspen Meadow to the mine – fifteen miles away – took Marla and me nearly an hour. We bumped across wooden bridges spanning rain-swollen creeks and rocked through deep mud on mountain roads. If the catering didn’t work out, I’d told Marla on our way back home, I could always become a Sherpa.

I wrapped spoonfuls of the shrimp f1lling in dough packets and set them aside. Then I quartered artichoke bottoms and skewered them with the bacon slices. These would sizzle and bubble in one of the portable ovens until Macguire and I served them with Dijon mustard judiciously thinned with whipping cream. I took a greedy whiff of fresh cilantro, then sliced a pile of it to go into the salsa for the crab quesadillas.

As I began to fold the quesadillas, I wished for the hundredth time that I, too, had been able to invest with Prospect Financial Partners. Marla swore she’d made a nest egg fit for a hen of any size. To prove it she’d bought, in addition to her Jaguar, a Mercedes that boasted four-wheel drive. When I doubted Tony would accept a client with so little money, Marla laughingly replied that I could always approach the other partner, Albert Lipscomb. Albert would take on anyone, as long as he or she listened to his reasons for investing in a company. All his reasons. Albert, she laughed, made life-insurance salesmen look like stand-up comics. I envisioned a public reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and said no thanks.

I smiled and topped the Fontinella with glossy dark leaves of aromatic basil, then poured on a lake of cream beaten with eggs. Prospect was struggling with its image, Marla was trying to cope, Tom had a horrid boss, and my business was faltering. But I was cooking. Big-time. As always, working with food soothed my nerves and made all mundane problems appear faraway, or at least on the other side of the Continental Divide. When I brought the spicy chicken sausage to sizzling and gently stuffed it into giant mushroom caps, I felt a rush of joy. I was so happy I whistled, which brought our new dog, Jake, loping into the room. At Jake’s heels was my son Arch, who had turned fourteen on the snowiest, coldest day of April. The dog skidded to a stop and bumped into my leg. I begged Arch to take Jake – a tawny, ungainly, oversized bloodhound – away. Jake’s claws scrabbled across the kitchen floor as he recovered his balance, raised his deeply furrowed brow, and gazed at me with droopy, bloodshot eyes that appeared deeply, deeply hurt. I shook my head. “Teach him to play dead, or something, while I finish the food for the Prospect shindig. Please.”

Arch straightened his tortoiseshell glasses on his freckled nose. His eyes were reproachful. “If you don’t want Jake to come, Mom, then you shouldn’t whistle.”

Tomato-Brie Pie

Crust:

1 ž cups all-purpose flour

ž teaspoon sugar

ź teaspoon salt

ź cup chilled lard, cut into pieces

6 tablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1 - 3 tablespoons ice water

Preheat the oven to 350°. Place the flour, sugar, and salt into the bowl , of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Process 5 seconds, then add the lard, process until the mixture is like cornmeal (10 seconds), then add the butter and process until the mixture resembles large crumbs (10 seconds). Add the water one tablespoon at a time, pulsing quickly just until the mixture holds together. Roll the dough out between sheets of wax paper to fit into a buttered 9-inch pie pan. Prick the dough and flute the edges. Bake the crust for 5 to 7 minutes, or until it is an even, pale gold. Set aside on a rack while preparing the filling.