twenty-three

Jay and Leo and I were home by five. They had plenty of pizzazz left, but I was completely wrung out, so I grabbed the essentials and decided that everything else could stay in the car until the next day. I dropped my tote bag on the kitchen table, exchanged my jacket for a warmer one, and went out the back door with Jay. The temperature had been slipping all afternoon, and the forecast was for a hard freeze during the night. Out of habit I checked that both gates were latched. Goldie wiped some fog off her kitchen window and we waved at each other. The air was rich with the fragrance of wood smoke and something delicious. Soup, maybe. And bread.

Jay tossed a tennis ball at my feet and bowed in front of me, tail wriggling. Who can resist an invitation like that? We played until I thought the edge was off his energy, and then I headed for the back door and heard the phone start to ring just as I pushed the door open.

“Wanted to catch you before you take your coat off.”

“Hi, Goldie.”

“And I didn’t want to bother with mine.” She asked how my day had been, and without waiting for an answer, said, “I have a nice big pot of soup and some homemade bread, just out of the oven. Is that handsome fella coming over?”

“Well, Jay and Leo are already here. Which handsome fellow do you mean?”

Goldie’s laugh wrapped me up like a hug, and I smiled. “Touché, my dear. Let me rephrase. Are Tom and Drake expected? Because they are welcome, too. There’s plenty.”

“Nope, not tonight.”

She sounded a tad disappointed when she said, “Then you come, with or without your boys.”

I glanced into the living room. Leo was curled into a ball on the recliner, and Jay was stretched out on his back on the couch. “They’re both sacked out. I’ll just leave them here.”

Goldie’s kitchen wrapped me up in the same rich fragrances that had been mingled with wood smoke outside, plus the mellow warmth of soup steam and candlelight. I handed her the bottle of Chardonnay I had brought and pulled off my coat.

“Oh, perfect!” said Goldie.

“Wow, smells great in here.” I closed my eyes and inhaled. “What’s the soup? There’s something …” I sniffed again, trying to place the scent. “It smells like … licorice?”

“Fennel.”

“Fennel soup?”

“Fennel and potato and white beans and leeks.” She poured the wine and raised her glass. “To friends!”

“To friends who are geniuses in the kitchen!” I said.

I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I tucked into Goldie’s bread and soup. I didn’t want to ruin the flavors with news of the day, so I held back and mostly listened to her report from the Fort Wayne Community Schools Clothing Bank, where she volunteers once or twice a month. “We’ve gotten good, warm coats and other clothes to nearly eight hundred young people already this year. I think that’s fantastic. Not charity to my mind, just community as it should be.” She cut another thick slice of bread and set it on my plate.

“I couldn’t,” I said, then picked it up and took a bite. “What do you do to this bread, Goldie? It doesn’t even need butter.” I took another bite. “I may explode.”

Goldie giggled. “So, now that your appetite has been dealt with, tell me about your weekend.”

I poured us each another glass of wine while Goldie cleared away the dishes, and when she sat back down, I told her about Rasmussen.

“Rasmussen?” she said when I had finished. “What’s his first name?”

“Charles.”

“Oh, him!” She made a rude noise. “I’m surprised it took this long for someone to knock him off.” Another rude noise. “Especially his wife.” Then her eyes went wide and she stared at me. “Louise didn’t kill him, did she?”

I shouldn’t be surprised at who and what Goldie knows anymore, but I was. “How do you … ?”

She cut me off. “I’ve known Louise since we were girls. We went to school together. And I’ve seen her a few times since I moved back. Not often, and it’s been, gee, maybe a year?”

“Did you know him, too?”

“No, not really. He’s not from here.”

“Hunh. I thought he was somehow.” I tried to remember why I thought that, but all I had to hang onto was a foggy memory. “I thought he had family money, you know, from a local business here.”

“Heavens no. Louise is the one with the money.”

“But her father …,” I started to say, remembering that my mom mentioned that Anthony had been an electrician at the GM plant. “Never mind, Mom gets things messed up.”

“No, dear, Louise made the money. Not her dad.”

Now that piqued my interest.

Goldie went on. “She invented some gizmo that helps slippery fabrics feed through sewing machines more easily. And some other thing, you know, I don’t sew, so I don’t recall the details. She had her own altering and tailoring business back in the sixties and seventies, and was clever at finding better ways to do things. She came up with the ideas and her husband made them work. Then they sold them for a bundle.”

“So he did make the money? Or they did together?” I was confused.

“No, no. Not him. Not Rasmussen.” Goldie snorted. “No, her first husband. Nice guy, now what was his name?” She paused, then waved a hand in the air and said, “Well, anyway, he was a lovely man. Killed in that crash in Tenerife.”

I remembered that all too clearly. It was 1977 and I was scheduled to fly home from Paris the next day. I almost didn’t get on the plane.

“Phil.”

“What?” My brain had left the room briefly, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Louise’s first husband. Phil. Phil Smithson.”

“When did Rasmussen come along?” And how does a self-made woman get stuck with a bully like him?

Goldie studied something on the ceiling, then said, “I’m not sure exactly. She was dating him when I came back to Fort Wayne, and I think they got married a few years ago.”

“I wonder what she ever saw in him,” I said.

Goldie swirled her soup around, then said, “It’s a mystery, that’s for sure. He seems to have leverage in some quarters, but I don’t know anyone who likes the guy.”

“Yeah, Hutchinson mentioned that the guy has friends in high places,” I said, and told her about the complaints Rasmussen had filed. “Hutchinson says he isn’t worried, but I think he is.”

“No one who cares anything about environment or wildlife will miss him, that’s for sure.” Goldie ripped a hunk of bread from the loaf, but she put it down and spoke again. “I asked someone from my birding group, and I was right. He’s the one bent on developing a wetlands out east of town, and a couple of years ago he bought up some land that the Nature Conservancy was trying to acquire. A farm, I guess, and he made such an outrageous offer that the owner couldn’t turn it down. My friend said it was a lovely fifty acres, half of it wooded, and Rasmussen’s people cut down the trees, bulldozed, and put up a shopping center.”

“I bet that was the place off Lima Road, just past DuPont.” I had photographed a family of barred owls there over the course of several weeks and remembered the place well. “Big controversy about that at the time.”

She shifted the topic then. “So, what happens now? Did the police seem interested in anyone in particular?”

“Hard to say. They seemed to be sorting out which of us might be worth a second look. They took names and contact information from a lot of us, but that’s all. Tom and me. Giselle, too. Hutchinson said we’ll hear from them within a day or two if they want to talk to us.”

“And who do you think did it?”

“No idea.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze my arm. “You’re good at this amateur detecting. You must have your suspicions.”

I’d had more than enough of amateur detecting, and I didn’t feel particularly clever about it. “No, I’m not and I don’t. Not really. I mean, it seems like everybody I know had some reason to want the guy out of their lives. But murder? I hate to think that anyone I know would go that far.” But, of course, someone had.