by Mary Bowers
“Whatever it is,” I said gently, “I’m sure it will keep for just a few hours. Do you have any sleeping tablets?”
There was a pause. “Yes.”
“Why don’t you take one now, and I’ll stay on the phone with you until you start to feel drowsy.”
So that’s what we did. I made myself as comfortable as I could, sitting on the top step and leaning against the newel post, and I tried to distract her with funny stories about the animals in the shelter until I could hear her begin to yawn.
She was much calmer when we finally said good-bye. I said I’d check in at Girlfriend’s first, in case she got up in the morning feeling better. If she wasn’t there, I’d walk over to her house, and if she didn’t answer the door, I’d assume she was sleeping late and not bother her.
“You’ll need your sleep, after being up all night like this.”
“Oh, I know I won’t get any sleep at all tonight.”
“Well, at least try,” I said gently. “If you’re awake when I get to your house, we’ll have a nice, long talk. Good night, Maida.”
I ended the call feeling pretty sure that when I got downtown in the morning, there she’d be at Girlfriend’s telling me it had all been the middle-of-the-night jim-jams, just like I said, and she was so sorry for waking me up in the middle of the night.
And I’d say, “Any time – what are friends for?” and hope she’d never do it again.
Chapter 8 – A Dead Breezer
We had leftover pizza for breakfast. It’s got everything you need: protein, filling carbs, vegetable (ketchup is not a vegetable, but tomato sauce qualifies, in my opinion), and a good dose of comfort-food goodness to start the day.
Michael had come down before anybody else, as usual, and he took one look at me and wordlessly put a cup of hot coffee in front of me. I tried to nod in thanks, but the effort was too great.
After giving me five minutes to come to, Michael said, “Want me to whip up a breakfast casserole? After all, we have company.”
“It’s Lily,” I reminded him. “She’s still half-teenager. She’ll love a slice of pizza first thing in the morning.”
When Lily came down, she agreed with me completely, even enthusiastically.
When Myrtle came down, she was aghast.
“You’re giving leftover pizza to our guest?”
“It’s okay, Myrtle,” Lily said. “Pizza and Coke are the perfect meal, any time of day, even for breakfast. Same thing as toast and coffee, when you think about it.”
Myrtle didn’t even think about it. She got out a skillet, threw a pat of butter into it and got busy making a cheese omelet. And she glared at the can of Coke in front of Lily, slid it over and put a cup of hot coffee close to her, along with the sugar bowl and creamer.
I wasn’t particular about the caffeine-delivery system in the morning. Coke, coffee, whatever. My head was even worse than it had been at two in the morning, and if I’d had the strength, I would have crawled back up the stairs for about half a bottle of aspirin.
“Guess who called me at two in the morning,” I said to nobody in particular.
The popular vote was for Edson Darby-Deaver, since he gets ideas at any time of day and usually forgets that other people sleep.
“Maida,” I said, and everybody stared at me.
“I didn’t realize you were such close friends,” Lily said.
“We’re not. She thinks I’m gifted, in a special way, since Ed and Dobbs went over her house for ghosts last Monday.”
Lily shook her head and murmured, “Denial.” I shot her a look, and she left it at that.
“And did you help her?” Myrtle asked.
“At two in the morning, my psychic abilities tend to flatline,” I said. “No, Myrtle, I told her to take a pill and see me in the morning. Literally. I’m going over there soon, dammit, because telling her I’d come this morning was the only way I could get off the phone with her. She was hinting around that she wanted me to rush over to her house right then and there.”
“Well, watch yourself,” Myrtle said, plating the omelet and giving it to Lily. She had bread in the toaster for herself and Lily, and she wasn’t cooking for anybody else, but nobody minded. “It’s best not to keep dabbling around in such things. You’ll end up raising the devil someday.”
I nodded wisely and didn’t argue. Lily gave a little smirk and cut into the omelet, and Michael and I ate our pizza, making light conversation until it was time for me to go into town and face Maida. I was dreading it.
“By the way,” I told Lily, “you’re coming with me. You’re the one who got her all stirred up, and now you’re going to help me talk her down again.”
She didn’t argue. Actually, I suspected she’d been trying to think of an excuse for coming into town with me, so I’d saved her the trouble.
“Let me just go grab my bag,” she said, and she was up and down the stairs in thirty seconds. That’s Lily. Always ready for anything.
But neither of us was ready for what we were about to find out.
* * *
The first hint that something was wrong was that Girlfriend’s wasn’t open. I parked in the “Store Manager Only” space, as usual, and the back door was locked. That was the door Florence used every morning, after she walked over to open the shop, and she always left it unlocked for volunteers, deliveries, and occasionally, me. Even if she hadn’t been able to get Maida to come in that day, Florence herself should have been there.
I think I knew then. Something had been pressing in against me since the previous afternoon, and I had been trying to ignore it. At the backdoor of Girlfriend’s, I finally let it flood over me.
“Want to drive over or walk?” Lily said. She was watching me nervously, picking up my uneasiness.
“Let’s walk,” I said. “Parking on Palmetto is going to be impossible by now.”
She didn’t ask what I meant by that, and when we turned the corner of 6th Street onto Palmetto, we saw exactly what I had expected to see. There were Flagler County Sheriff patrol cars in front of Maida’s house, parked front and back of an ambulance, and a hook-and-ladder was slowly pulling away. Two patrolmen were quietly talking in front of Maida’s entrance. Lily and I stood on the corner and took it all in, and the old man who lived in the corner house, Jerry something, looked over from his front porch and recognized me. He immediately walked across his lawn toward us, telling me to get over to Florence’s house and stop standing around gawking.
“She needs you,” he said. “That new neighbor lady is dead, and Florence is the one who found her. She’s awful upset.”
That was all I needed to hear and I was speed-walking down the middle of the street. I could hear Lily hustling along behind me, but we didn’t speak.
The two patrolmen in front of Maida’s house had stopped talking and turned to stare at us, but I made it obvious I wasn’t going there. I was aiming for Florence’s house, but before I could get there, the Flagler County Chief of Police, Kyle Longley, came walking towards us from somewhere within the nest of official cars. I’d known him for years, and he was a pretty good guy.
I began talking to him before he could even say hello. “One of the neighbors said Maida was dead. Is that right?”
“Didn’t Flo call you?” he asked. “She said she was going to.” He angled his head toward Maida’s house. “The new lady’s dead all right.”
Just at that moment, my cellphone rang and a picture of Florence in a pink pullover came up on the screen. I told her I was nearly in front of her house and on my way to her. Then I nodded at Kyle and walked away, keeping Florence on the phone until she met me at the door. A female cop, Jaylynn Thomas, was behind her, and Jaylynn stayed unobtrusively with us as we went inside.
Lily had been hanging around the edges up until that point, and Florence recognized her and let her in right behind me.
I was very aware that I hadn’t mentioned to the Chief that Maida had called me the night before. It would have held things
up, and I had no idea what the call had been about. Before I took the time to tell him something that wouldn’t really help, I wanted to be sure that Florence was all right.
She brought us into her kitchen at the back of the house and sat us down, absent-mindedly giving us glasses of milk, of all things, as if we were a couple of little girls. Then she sat down at the table with us.
“She didn’t answer her door, and it was time to go open the shop,” she told us simply. “We traded house keys as soon as she started working at Girlfriend’s. I knocked and waited, then I knocked and waited again, and finally I went in.”
“Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to,” Lily said gently.
Florence looked into Lily’s kind eyes and said, “I think I need to.” Then she seemed to drift away for a moment. “And she was such a pretty woman. She’d never have wanted anybody to see her like that. Oh, she looks so awful, and now the house is full of men and they’re all taking pictures and everything. I know they have a job to do, but it’s all wrong, somehow, to take something beautiful and turn it into a job you have to do, the same as if it were something that had never been alive. She would have hated this.” She trailed off and gazed in the direction of Maida’s house.
So Maida hadn’t taken an overdose of her sleeping pills, I thought. If she had, she would have still been beautiful, and Florence wouldn’t have been talking like that. Something had been done to her, and whatever it was had made her terrible to look at. I saw a blackened face, a bulging tongue, a crease in her neck where something had been pulled so tight it was embedded into the skin.
“From behind,” I said.
Lily looked at me sharply.
“She was attacked from behind. She said something about stirring up strong emotions, but this couldn’t have been that. Unless . . . .” I paused, thinking something too terrible to say out loud: Unless you’re not powerful enough to strangle somebody with your bare hands, looking straight into your victim’s eyes while you do it.
Unless you’re a woman.
* * *
“She’s in here?” I heard a woman’s voice say from the front room.
We’d been sitting in Florence’s kitchen for nearly half an hour by then, and I’d told them about Maida’s strange, middle-of-the-night phone call. Quietly leaning against the sink, Officer Jaylynn was taking in every word. Soon, her Chief would be up in my face wanting to know why I hadn’t told him I had evidence when he’d seen me earlier.
We all turned to the sound of the woman’s voice and saw Carmen Rosewood coming down the hall from the living room.
Without any kind of greeting, she sat down at the little square table, looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you help her last night when she called you?”
Suddenly on the defensive, I found myself making excuses: Maida had never explained exactly what she wanted from me; it didn’t sound like anything really serious was going on; I actually did spend an hour on the phone with her in the chill of the night, perched uncomfortably at the top of the stairs; what else should I have done?
By the time I stopped, Carmen had already backed down a little, and I asked her, “How did you know she called me?”
“Because as soon as she got done talking to you, she called me. When I heard how frazzled she was, I said to just hold on, I was coming right over. I guess I couldn’t expect the same from somebody she’d only known for a couple of weeks.”
I understood that she was just trying to work it all out, not accusing me of anything, but I was already full of my own recriminations so it didn’t make me feel any better.
“What time did she call you?” I asked.
“A little after three. But I was only at her house for about ten minutes. By the time I got there, she had calmed down a lot. In fact, she seemed a little ashamed of routing me out of bed like that, and she kept telling me I should go home, she was fine. In fact, she eventually insisted that I go. She said you got her to take a sleeping pill? Anyway, she’d settled down again by the time I left her – she was getting undressed to go to bed – I don’t understand . . . .”
For somebody who had never stopped rebelling against her mother, Carmen seemed devastated.
Suddenly she became deadly still and said, “Somebody strangled her in her bed. She was helpless. She might have even been asleep. They slipped one of her own scarves around her neck. Garroted, the Sheriff said. Whoever it was used one of my father’s old brushes to twist the scarf tight. He still painted sometimes, when the right subject hit him, or when he needed to switch gears. He used to say that sculpting energized him, while painting relaxed him. Maida kept a pot of his old brushes on her night stand. She said she wanted to have something of his near her while she slept; something he had held in his hands. It was like making him part of the act of killing her.”
“Oh, no, dear,” Florence said. “Don’t think such a thing.”
Carmen looked across the table at her and seemed to realize what she was saying for the first time. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m just trying to understand how it happened.” Suddenly, she looked at me and said, “What did you say to her last night? She said she wanted you to come over. Did you – after I left?”
“N-no. It was two in the morning. I talked her down, suggested she take a sleeping pill, then kept her talking until she got drowsy. I thought she went right to sleep after we hung up. The only reason I’m here right now was that I told her I’d come check on her in the morning. I don’t usually come into Tropical Breeze on a Saturday.”
Carmen was staring at me suspiciously, and after a moment, she grunted and looked away.
Lily asked, “Did Maida say anything to either of you that would help figure out who did this?”
I gave her a helpless look. “She said a lot of stuff. She was so worked up, there were times when I couldn’t even make out what she was saying.”
“Well, what could you make out?”
“Oh, something about stirring up powerful feelings – emotions that were too strong to control. She thought I was psychic, and she wanted to know if I sensed anything. She thought she was in danger, but she didn’t seem to know what kind of danger, or where it was coming from. That’s all I remember, and I’m sure it isn’t going to help.”
As I said the last few words, I found myself gazing into the transparent windows of Detective Marty Frane’s eyes. He was a man I’d met before, under equally unpleasant circumstances.
“Hello, Detective,” I said.
“Hello, Miz Verone,” he answered, and without missing a beat, he said, “ever been hypnotized?”
I was caught staring with my mouth open. “As in, am I willing to be hypnotized so I can recite every word of that conversation with Maida last night? Sure, I’ll do anything if it’ll help.”
“Good. Officer Thomas, in here, if you don’t mind. You ladies just sit right here and drink your . . . ” He took a good look, then finished, “milk. I’ll be right back.”
He took Jaylynn into the living room, had a brief – very brief – conference with her, then came back into the kitchen with her and said, “Miz Purdy, I’ll start with you, if you don’t mind,” and he took Florence down the hall to the living room while Lily, Carmen and I waited in the kitchen, under the watchful eyes of Officer Thomas.
Chapter 9 – Paintbrushes and Garter Belts
“I thought the guy was a sculptor,” Detective Frane said when my turn came. For some reason, he had saved me for last, out of the group in Florence’s kitchen.
To my surprise, the homicide detective had taken me straight through Florence’s living room, out the front door and across the lawn to Maida’s house. Now we were in Maida’s living room, and while I hesitated just inside the doorway, he had walked across to the other end of the room and was staring at a small, framed portrait on the far wall. He turned to me and pointed at the painting. “That’s her, right? As a little girl?”
I could hear movement but no talking from somewhere deeper in the house, and I shud
dered. Somewhere in another room, people in whatever sort of protective clothing were silently moving around Maida’s body as it still lay on her bed, inert. The feel of it, even the sight of it, started seeping into me, and when one of the people in her bedroom raised his voice and asked somebody a question, I jumped as if I’d heard a scream.
“Miz Verone?” Detective Frane said, waiting for me by the painting.
I looked at him. “Do you think that by looking at that, by being in this house, I’m somehow going to have a psychic revelation and pop out the killer’s name? Please tell me you’re not.”
He gazed at me steadily. “Would you mind stepping over here and looking at the picture?”
I wavered on my feet, then went over for a look. It was such a small, inconspicuous thing I hadn’t noticed it the first time I’d been in Maida’s house. But like a priceless gem in a tastefully restrained setting, it was a work of perfection.
The frame was four inches thick all around, and the portrait itself was only about three inches square. It showed what looked like a child gazing out of the picture over her bare, round shoulder. It was Maida, all right, but she looked about fourteen years old. It was a three-quarters profile, and the one full eye had a lavender highlight amid a velvety purple iris. She was lovely. In the bottom right corner were the artist’s initials: G. R. A full signature would have dominated the painting and spoiled it.
“He made her look like a child, didn’t he?” I said idly. “Maida told me they got married when she was seventeen, but she looks a few years younger than that here. He was much older than she was.” I let him draw his own conclusions and walked over to an armchair and sat down.
“I suppose you know by now that Maida called me in the middle of the night, last night. I’ll answer your questions and tell you whatever I can remember, but it’s not going to be any help. Still,” I said wearily, “fire away.”
I realized I was bracing myself, but I needn’t have bothered.
“I’ve already arranged for you to see the hypnotist this afternoon. He said in the meantime you should try not to even think about the phone call, if you can help it. Something about creating false memories.”
