Marla and I settled in the living room, which was decorated in brown, black, and beige. Along one wall were shelves full of books with fancy names like Driving Venture Capital on the Information Highway.
"Don't touch anything," Marla warned.
"We're already in trouble, just for being here," I informed her sourly. After the stunts she had pulled in the past few days, this hardly seemed the time for her to advise caution.
Macguire gazed out one of the floor-length windows. "The neighbors came out, anyway. They're all gathered around like there's been some kind of accident. Man, people are so nosy," he said without a trace of irony.
Lena returned, looking even more anxious and ashen-faced than she had outside. Her blond cloud of hair appeared deflated. "He's gone." Her voice was vacant. "His suitcase, his clothes..." Her voice cracked. "His passport. We... he and I... He's gone."
"What?" Marla shrilled.
Wordlessly, Lena sank into a chair. I walked out to the kitchen, retrieved a Waterford glass from a cabinet, and filled it with water. Maybe I should have filled it with whiskey. Upon my return, Lena looked closer to fainting than when I'd left. She took an absentminded sip of the water, then said: "His closets are empty. His suits are all gone. Ditto his suitcases."
Macguire interjected with, "Oh, man. I mean, can you believe this?"
"Wait," I said. "What do you mean, gone? How do you even know where he kept his suitcases?"
"We... used to go to Estes Park together...." Lena's voice trailed off:
Marla addressed me tersely. "Call Tom."
I gave her a helpless look and tried to think. Albert's clothes and passport were gone? Where was he? "I will call Tom," I said, "but I can tell you what he's going to say. The cops won't take an official missing person's report yet. They have to wait forty-eight hours." It was just shy of four o'clock. If Macguire and I didn't hustle back to my kitchen right now, the Aspen Meadow Women's Club would be out of luck.
A car honked out front and Macguire leapt to check the window.
"It's Mr. Royce."
Marla greeted Tony at the door and gave him the bad news. He choked and then he howled and insisted we were being ridiculous. Albert had to be somewhere around, he said firmly. Lena managed to struggle to her feet and confirm that Albert had absconded.
Tony looked wildly around the room. "There has to be a reason!" he cried. "This is absurd! He must have left a note or something!"
"You and I should go," I said to Macguire. "We have an appointment to do food."
"Well," my ever-committed assistant protested, "who's going to call the sheriffs department? They should jump right on this."
I exhaled patiently. No question about it, Macguire was romanticizing police work. Once he spent a couple of months trying to track down drivers' licenses and reports of missing persons' vehicles, he'd change his tune.
When we came out to the stone foyer, Marla was slumped on the floor next to Tony. Both faces were studies in misery. Lena kept murmuring into a cellular phone about Albert being gone.
"I'll call you," Marla promised me. But she did not. At least, not for the rest of that day, Monday. Macguire and I were so busy with the chicken dinner for the Women's Club, I didn't have time to talk anyway. On Tuesday Marla did phone and say Lena had gone through Albert's files at the office and the house. His datebook revealed nothing unusual planned, except for the partner meeting with Sam Perdue, which Albert missed. Tony confirmed that Albert's passport and all his best clothes were indeed gone. Albert appeared to have packed and departed in haste. His Explorer was gone. None of the neighbors saw him leave. They hadn't heard anything either, but of course it had been raining. Probably nobody even wanted to look outside.
Marla didn't call again on Tuesday. I hoped her silence meant she'd spent most of the day at the hospital doing her rehab, the way she was supposed to. In any event, on Tuesday I was tied up preparing a last-minute vegetarian picnic for the board of the Audubon Society - under porch eaves, because of the rain - and came home so totally wiped out I slept for twelve hours straight. On Wednesday morning, Jake got loose. Arch and I spent several pleasant hours traipsing through damp pines and over soggy grass locating him. On our return, I pondered grinding up his dog biscuits in the disposal.
Marla showed up on my doorstep late Wednesday afternoon. Her frizzy hair was unkempt, and she was not wearing makeup. She was wearing a denim skirt and flowered T-shirt. Both her outfit and her appearance were totally atypical. Her skin, usually peaches and cream, was pale. I was afraid to ask if she was again short of breath.
"May I come in?" Instead of her usual bounciness, she sounded frighteningly subdued.
I invited her to sit down and gave her a glass of Dry Sack. The hand she took it with was trembling. For once it was good to have no jobs. I asked her to stay for dinner. She declined and drank her sherry in silence.
"Let's go for a walk," she said finally.
Arch was in the next room. I told him we were leaving. Even though the sun was finally shining intermittently through towers of white cumulus clouds, I put on a slicker, tossed Tom's raincoat over Marla's shoulders, and picked up two umbrellas. It would be good for Marla to walk. We emerged into the cool, wet-scented air.
I waved to a few neighbors as we moved down the sidewalk. Now that the rain had momentarily let up, the entire neighborhood, it seemed, was either out in their gardens putting in flowers, or out on their decks trying to soak up a little sun, dermatologists be damned.
"I feel totally depressed," Marla offered glumly as we rounded the corner and started up a graveled foopath put in by some earnest Boy Scouts about ten years previously. The path was lined with pine trees and white-barked aspens, their buds still tightly closed because of the late spring. A sudden burst of sunshine made raindrops glisten sharply on each pine needle.
"What's going on?" I asked. "Did Albert Lipscomb ever show up?"
"No." She chuckled bitterly. Her fingers brushed pine needles and sent a shower of drops onto the gravel. "No indeedy. Tony filed the missing person report. this morning. The cops started looking for credit card usage, the usual. The Denver police department is mobilized now, too." She took a deep breath, then moaned, "Oh, God."
I tried to think. Had Tom mentioned anything unusual going on at the department? He had been tied up testifying in a forgery case he'd been working on for over a year. But I hadn't heard a thing about what was going on at the department except for the usual complaints about Captain Shockley.
"The Denver department?" I asked. "Why?"
We came to a wooden bench, also placed by the Scouts. Marla said, "Goldy, will you sit down?"
I brushed raindrops off the cedar boards and obeyed. The sun slipped behind a billowing cloud; the sky darkened ominously. Next to me, Marla shivered as a raindrop fell. She said, "Before he left, Albert Lipscomb cleaned out the partnership account. Three and a half million dollars."
"Judas priest.... How did he do that?"
"Well, he went to the central bank location. First of the Rockies, downtown Denver. Ordered the cash out of the account on Monday, picked it up on Tuesday. Apparently he charmed the teller, too."
"Some charm job."
"Must have been," Marla said with eerie calm, "because she disappeared with him."
7
Marla did not elaborate on Albert's and the bank teller's disappearance as no details were known. She did report that Tony was in a state of shock. He kept saying, "We have to make everything look normal. This is just a glitch. The work got to him. He's just holed up in a motel with the girl. Maybe they're in the Caymans." The partnership would not immediately go under; they had a small escrow account as well as modest equity positions in Medigen and other companies. "It's going to be okay," Marla said Tony kept repeating like a mantra. "We just have to believe it's going to be okay."
This was not the case at the Furman County Sheriff's Department.
"I don't know how the cops reacted to the 1929 crash," Tom told me as he patted an appreciative Jake that night. Tom shook his head. "But it couldn't have been much worse than the way Shockley is handling this. He calls Prospect every hour on the hour. He calls the Denver P.D. every hour on the half, to see if they've found that teller yet. He's handling the Missing Persons on Lipscomb himself."
I looked up from my recipe file. I'd promised to take a chocolate care package to General Farquhar the next day. "The captain is handling the Lipscomb search personally? What happens to all those rapists and murderers out there while Shockley searches for his missing money?"
Tom chuckled. "Not much. Law enforcement in this county has been put on hold, you can bet that."
When I made incredulous noises, Tom wagged a finger at me. "You gotta keep the distance in this job, Goldy, it's the only way to stay sane. Besides, I want Prospect to get straightened' out. If Shockley doesn't have enough money to retire, I'm going to have a heart attack myself."
"Has he found anything?"
Tom shook his head. "First place he sent his team was to Orpheus Canyon Road, to see if Lipscomb had pulled a Victoria Lear - you know, maybe had a car crash. He hadn't. Why would you risk escaping across Orpheus Canyon Road, with all that money and a cute bank teller? Then he sent guys to that damn mine, where, if you'll excuse my saying so, he didn't exactly strike pay dirt either. The place was totally deserted and all locked up. It's not in his jurisdiction anyway. This Lipscomb? If he changes license plates, doesn't use his credit card, and doesn't get stopped for anything, it could take forever to find him." He rumpled Jake's ears and gave me a serious look. "I gotta tell you, Shockley called me in and asked about Marla."
"Marla? Why?"
"I don't know," Tom replied slowly. "Shockley's secretive and paranoid as hell. He asked how long I'd known Marla, did she seem entirely stable, did I know how much she stood to lose if Prospect went under. He implied her little argument with Lipscomb at the party might have turned sinister at a later point."
"Good God. That's ridiculous. Marla couldn't hurt a soul." If you didn't count the Jerk, that is. And he had deserved it.
"I was very offhand, said Marla's bark was worse than her bite, a wonderful friend to you for many years, all that." He sighed. "But I have to tell you, Miss G., I didn't feel good about the conversation. At all."
Neither, of course, did I.
The next morning, I suggested Arch take his dog far from the sounds and smells of my kitchen while I prepared General Farquhar's chocolate treat. If Jake loved cinnamon, there was no telling how he'd flip for products made from the cocoa bean. Arch was only too delighted to lead Jake up to his room. Gleefully, he vowed he was going to teach the hound the difference between fake blood and the real thing. Although I was not eager to know the details of this lesson, Arch assured me he had a whole bottle of fake blood left over from his Halloween disguise, and he'd just use a pin-prick of his own blood for contrast. How comforting.
So, while Arch and Jake played with blood upstairs, I sifted dark European cocoa with flour, and thought back to when I'd worked for General Bo Farquhar. Two years ago he'd been married, strong, utterly confident. A battalion commander in his 1960 class at West Point, he had distinguished himself in the Special Forces in Vietnam and been promoted early to the rank of general. He'd become the army's ranking man in the study of terrorists. To his superiors' eventual chagrin, however, Bo developed his own idea of who deserved to share his military know-how. A group of Afghans facing Russians who refused to retreat - had found a friend in General Bo Farquhar. While the Carter administration insisted the Russians withdraw, the Afghans scored a few hits with suddenly acquired state-of-the-art weapons, smuggled to them by none other than General Bo. When the story broke, the general had been forced to retire. Undeterred, he'd settled with his wife Adele, Marla's sister, in a huge house on Sam Snead Lane in the Meadowview area of Aspen Meadow Country Club. There he'd experimented with his cache of goodies, with the unfortunate conclusion that while I was working for him, things and people had blown up, including Adele. Although he had not been charged with killing anyone, the general had ended up at the Colorado state penitentiary at Canon City for illegal possession of explosives.
I beat unsalted butter with brown sugar and remembered bringing Bo brownies while he was in prison. I'd visited him there twice. Each time he had asked about Arch; he'd wanted to hear all the details of my son's checkered school life at Elk Park Prep. Bo had wanted to know about Julian, too. But most insistently, the imprisoned general had questioned me about Marla. I'd always replied she was fine. He'd looked at me expectantly: Would Marla ever come to visit?
There was no chance of that, unfortunately. illogical as it was, Marla still blamed Bo for the death of her sister, despite the fact that he'd had nothing to do with Adele's demise. Marla had said as much to me last fall, when we'd visited Bride's Creek, the spot where Adele Farquhar's ashes were scattered. General Bo, ever heroic, still loved the deceased Adele himself. The fact that Marla refused to see him pained the general deeply.