Dying for Chocolate

“Late thirties. History of heart disease in the family. High blood pressure, type A, all that.”

To my surprise, Marla had tears in her eyes.

I said, “I thought you didn’t know him.”

She shook her head, drank more wine. “I didn’t.”

“Well?”

She put her glass down and leaned toward me. “Goldy, if you had a sister you’d grown up with, and cried with every time the two of you had to part, and told about the first time you kissed a boy and all that, wouldn’t you think that one of you would seek out the other one when her husband died?”

“And she didn’t?”

Marla sniffed and delicately wiped her eyes with her napkin. “She came out west to visit when our parents retired here. The doctor left her a lot of money. Her way of dealing with grief was to spend it. She bought a place in Sun Valley and part ownership in a condo in Aspen. That’s probably worth a mint. She should sell it. You can’t ski Aspen if you walk with a cane.”

I nodded. It usually worked the other way around, though. You skied Aspen, you ended up with a cane.

“She spent some time with me, even bought some land here, where their house is now. But did she talk to me about how she felt? Did she cry in my arms? Did she need me? No.”

“Well,” I said slowly, “maybe she only did that when you were little.”

“I wanted to help her,” Marla said. Her eyes were red and leaking again.

I remembered the flicker of judgment in Adele’s eyes when Marla had appeared at her house last Friday. And then there had been Marla’s bent head, her embarrassed acceptance of that judgment. For a moment, I had seen Marla as she must have been afraid her slender, perfectly groomed older sister saw her—as too heavy, too scatterbrained, too frowsy, too frivolous.

I said, “Adele doesn’t like others, even Bo, to help her. Well, unless it’s for some greater cause, like fund-raising. She doesn’t like to seem dependent, I think.”

“It’s not the same.”

I said evenly, “You wanted her to love you—”

“Don’t say it.” Marla dabbed her eyes, blew her nose.

We had finished our lunch. The heavy conversation was over. Our waitress brought us lemon mousse, on the house, she said, to make up for the coffee.

Marla insisted on paying for lunch. As we began to walk out, I told her I had forgotten something at the table. I hobbled back and left the waitress a twenty-two-dollar tip.

15.

Marla wanted me to leave the van at the café. She would drive me home, she announced. I politely declined. In addition to hating cowboys, Marla could not abide the flood of summer tourists in Aspen Meadow. There you’d be with her behind a car from Kansas, Texas, or Nebraska going ten miles per hour on a mountain road. She’d let down the Jaguar window and yell, “Admit it! You’re lostl”

So I let her follow me back to the Farquhars. She wanted to make sure I could manage my vehicle. This was no easy task. My arm ached from the makeshift bandage, but I gritted my teeth. Something twisted inside my chest upon seeing the repaired Thunderbird in the garage. I invited Marla in, but she begged off.

“Adele and Bo haven’t asked me over once since they’ve lived here. I’m not going to traipse in uninvited. But the next time your neighbor has an aphrodisiac dinner, why don’t you get her to include me? I’ll think of some fellow to bring. And believe me, Goldy, I’ll make sure the food works.”

“How did you know about the dinner?”

She drew her puffy cheeks down into a scowl. “I’d be willing to wager the whole town knows, now.” Reluctantly, she reached into her capacious purse and pulled out the new issue of the Mountain Journal, then handed it to me with a dour look. “Don’t do anything rash,” she said before grinding the Jag around in a thirteen-point turn to get out of the driveway.

I tucked the paper under my arm and started up to the house for bandages and an aspirin. The wine had not killed the pain. My aches swelled like a chorus.

Before I reached the house, something caught my attention: the door to the magazine side of the garage was open. Its edge was just visible where the two walls met. Either somebody was in there or somebody had left the door ajar.

I walked through the garage, making as much noise as possible. Peering into the magazine’s near-darkness, I could see General Farquhar surveying rows of weapons arrayed over a banquet-size table. He had been alert to my arrival, and nodded to my knock on the open door.

He saw me holding my arm. “Don’t tell me that bastard—”

I said, “No, no. At least, I’m not sure.”

“What happened?”

“I sort of had an accident.”

“Another one?”

I told him about the shove at the café, although I did not tell him what the attacker had said. “It’ll be all right. The main damage was to the café, I think. What’s all this?” I gestured at the weapons on the table.

“Just doing some cleaning,” he said. “After all those flowers and shops in Vail, I needed to do something constructive.”

I didn’t know how cleaning weapons was constructive, but I let it go.

“May I sit down?” I asked tentatively. “Will I be buzzed by some electronic ray?”