Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson

“You want to explain yourself?”
Cecelia straightened her glasses and squinted at me. she replied in a deadpan voice. “Not here. But I can, if you want. Especially if you can tell me what I want to know.”
Arch bounced up, chewing on a brownie. “Mom! I thought we were in some kind of hurry to get to Dad’s.”
“We are,” I told him. I bade Cecelia a polite good-by, then hustled Arch out the service exit. Backing the van out of its narrow parking space, I came very close to whacking Cecelia’s battered old station wagon. I hit the brakes and did some maneuvering to wiggle the van clear, without incident. Cecelia wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to have as an enemy.
Zooming past the club’s mini-mansions in the direction of John Richard’s rental, I wondered what in the hell Cecelia had been talking about. There was Marla’s question: Now that the Jerk is out of jail, where’ he getting his money? He had no job that I knew of, or, more important, that Marla knew of. My best friend had also calculated that John Richard’s highly publicized sponsoring of a local golfing event — twenty-five thousand bucks — plus purchasing the Audi — another forty thou — plus rent must have been subsidized by Courtney, the newly wealthy widow. Lots of her money, apparently, had been lavished on the Jerk.
But John Richard had dumped Courtney, and according to Marla, he was renting in the club area while he looked for a big house to buy. In this, Marla had joyfully concluded, he would not be successful. While our ex was incarcerated and deprived of the Mountain Journal, he probably hadn’t heard that home sales in Aspen Meadow had virtually stopped. Fire insurers had refused to write new homeowner policies. This did not bring down the general anxiety level in the town. Was John Richard’s search for a house what Cecelia wanted to know about? Maybe. But I doubted it.
I whizzed into an area of extra-large houses: here a huge colonial, there a rambling contemporary, around the corner of a Swiss-style chalet. Every few houses, there was the type favored by John Richard: a mock Tudor, with lots of plaster and crisscrossed exterior woodwork. One thing the houses in the club did have in common: They all boasted very green lawns. In town, rumors of how country-club residents managed illegal watering were rife. Some said hoses whistled across lawns at midnight. Others claimed that underground sprinkler systems hissed to life at three in the morning. Like the communists, residents were supposed to report infractions by neighbors. But in that department too, there were reports of deals — I won’t tell if you won’t. So much for community spirit.
When I piloted the van into the dead end that contained the Jerk’s current mock-Tudor domicile, another car was parked out front. I sighed and prayed that this was not a new girlfriend. Maybe that was why John Richard favored the architecture he did: He fancied himself a contemporary Henry the Eighth. Lotta wives, lotta girlfriends.
I parked the van behind the car, an older blue Chevy sedan that looked as if someone was in it.
“Okay, hon,” I said to Arch. He looked passably clean. He’d neatly parted and combed his wet hair after the shower, and he’d managed to lick all the chocolate away from around his mouth. “Just take your clubs and go to the door, do you mind? I’ll wait here until you’re inside.”
Arch pushed his glasses up his nose. “Okay, Mom. Sorry you had to go to so much trouble.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just hurry.” It was exactly ten to four, which meant Arch and his father didn’t have a whole lot of time to get down to the club for their tee time.
Arch let out a long, exasperated breath, hopped out of the van, and heaved the strap of his golf bag over his shoulder. Then he trudged up the driveway, turning left to go up the steps to the house.
A sudden rapping on my hood startled me. An older man, maybe in his mid-fifties, with a receding