Tough Cookie

Jack held up a hand. “Please, hon, you wanted advice from Goldy. She needs to hear what happened.” He took a deep breath. “Fiona and I got to the overlook. A minute later, somebody crashed through the trees and attacked us. Fiona lunged for me and I tried to catch her, but she slipped away somehow. The attacker was wearing a ski mask. Whoever it was, was strong and fast. He or she hit me with a rock and I passed out.” He stopped. “Then the attacker must have pushed Fiona over the cliff. Anyway, my wife … was killed.”

“And you were convicted of homicide?” I asked incredulously.

“They had to have somebody to blame. The prosecutor said I shouldn’t have let Fiona ski drunk, that I shouldn’t have taken her down such a dangerous run. She had grabbed my hand when we were trying to defend ourselves against the attacker, and my mitten was by her body when the ski patrol came. They trampled the snow so much, they couldn’t trace our attacker.” He sighed again. “It was a day of unstable snow, too. But that didn’t matter. The police didn’t find enough evidence to charge anyone else, and I was sentenced to three years in prison. I served a year, was granted parole six months ago … I had a record of good behavior.” He snorted cynically.

I felt an ominous tingling at the base of my spine. “If you were granted parole six months ago, what does this have to do with Doug Portman?”

Eileen narrowed her eyes at me. “So you haven’t faced the parole scenario with The Jerk yet, have you?”

“No,” I confessed. “Why?”

Jack grunted. Eileen said, “There were people who were opposed to Jack getting out when he did.” When I looked at her blankly, Eileen added, “Jack’s first wife had a lot of money. Her son is the one who filled her full of wine before she skied off Bighorn Overlook that day. Afterward, he went on and on about how Jack and Fiona weren’t getting along. All crap: Arthur wanted my Jack to be liable for Fiona’s death. Now the money’s all tied up in court. But Jack isn’t going to court, because he doesn’t want Fiona’s money and never did. Only crybaby Arthur doesn’t want the million-dollar trust fund Mama set up for him. He wants the nineteen million she left to charity.”

“Sheesh!” I said impulsively, then struggled to sort out what Eileen had just told me. Arthur? “You say Fiona’s son filled her full of booze before she went out? Do the cops know this?”

There was a silence. Finally Jack said, “Fiona was drinking wines offered in a sampling by her son. He lives in Killdeer and is a wine expert. You’re working with him in the show. Arthur Wakefield. You probably saw how he gave us the cold shoulder yesterday morning.”

“Arthur Wakefield? You were his stepdad?” I was stunned. What if I had to work in close proximity with a relative of The Jerk’s? Say that relative hated me? How would I cook, much less be a chef?

Jack shook his head. “Forget stepdad. We weren’t even friends. Arthur showed up at my parole hearing, claimed he hadn’t been able to sleep since his mother died, that he brooded about her death all the time, and so on, which wasn’t true, if you judged by the fact that he never even came to our wedding, or called Fiona more than three times in the year before she died—”

“Oh, Goldy, I hate to bother you with our problems,” Eileen interrupted in a rush. “It’s just that we’ve been so upset … Look at this.” She handed me a photocopied clipping from a Denver newspaper. “It’s long. You can skip to the end if you want.”