[03] The Cereal Murders by Diane Mott Davidson

Author:Diane Mott Davidson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307426987
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-12T20:00:00+00:00

12

The throbbing in my finger woke me up Wednesday morning just as the sunrise began to brighten the horizon. I was lying there, feeling exceedingly sorry for myself when the radio alarm blasted me six inches off the mattress. Blasted, yes. Not unlike Blaster, now part of my ruse for a confrontation with Egon Schlichtmaier. But an early morning session lifting weights with one hand virtually out of commission was not my idea of fun. It seemed the mattress was begging for my return. I ignored its siren call and slipped carefully into a gray sweatsuit, stretched through the yoga salute to the sun and five more asanas, and tried not to think about lifting anything.

In the kitchen I wrote the boys a note. Gone to rec center weight room. This would engender surprised looks, no doubt. My double espresso spurted merrily into a new Elk Park Prep carry-along mug, a heavy plastic container that the seventh-grade parents had been requested (read “strong-armed”) to purchase at the beginning of the school year as a fund-raiser for the kids’ trip to a self-esteem workshop in Denver. Afterward Arch informed me he wasn’t going to think positive unless he absolutely had to. And nobody can make me, he added. That’s what I should have said when it was mug-buying time.

The grass underfoot was slick with frost, and my breath condensed into clouds of moisture in the cold October air. The van engine turned over with a purposeful roar. I ordered myself to think strong and muscular. Maybe I needed a positive-thinking workshop.

The van chugged obediently over streets whitened by a thin sheet of ice. Aspen Meadow Lake appeared around a bend—a brilliant, perfectly still mirror of early light. The evergreens ringing the shore reflected inverted pines that looked like downward-pointing arrows trapped in glass. Early snows had stripped the nearby aspens and cottonwoods of their leaves. Skeletons of branches revealed the previous summer’s birds’ nests, now abandoned. Without the trees’ masking cloak of foliage, these deep, thick havens of twigs looked surprisingly vulnerable.

Like Keith Andrews.

And so did our household seem vulnerable now too, with accidents or pranks that were becoming increasingly serious. Julian appeared to be coming apart at the seams. And I had been nastily injured trying to deal with the Stanford rep’s one and only visit to Elk Park Prep. As the caffeine fired up the far reaches of my brain, I tried to reconstruct: Why was someone targeting Arch? If indeed the spider in the drawer was intended for someone, was I that someone?

Without meaning to, I wrenched the wheel to the left and winced when pain shot up my finger. I’d have to watch the bite area with the weights. Either that or risk passing out. The Mountain Journal’s too cute headline would read: CATERER A DUMBBELL?

An image of the dreaded simile-speaking headmaster invaded my thoughts. Perkins certainly had not been overeager to find the snake-hanger who plagued Arch. But in the minds of most, which was what Perkins was after all concerned with, he might be considered successful.

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