Murder in the Dog Days

by P. M. Carlson

  “How are you?”

  “Rotten. As usual.”

  “It’ll gradually improve, Jerry says.”

  “Yeah. Everyone who isn’t going through it says that.” He stood up, moving easily, Olivia saw, not the little hesitations and hurries that had characterized his last weeks in the Sun-Dispatch office. He’d be back to full-time soon.

  Behind Olivia, Tina ran past into her own room across the hall. Little Sarah was right behind her. Dale winced.

  “I’ve got a message for you from Nate,” Olivia said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Leon Moffatt stopped by to complain to Edgerton about something you were doing.”

  “Moffatt?” Dale’s eyebrows crept up in pleased inquiry.

  “Yeah. Mrs. Resler came to complain too. But Moffatt really seemed furious. Edgy whisked him into the office out of earshot. But Nate thought you’d want to know.”

  “Moffatt! All right!” Dale hurried back to his chair. “Listen, Olivia, I won’t be able to—”

  “Sunshine on my shoulders,” bellowed John Denver’s recorded voice from across the hall.

  “Goddamn it, Tina, turn that off!” roared Dale, charging to the door so vehemently that Olivia stepped back. In the sudden silence that followed he spotted his wife at the end of the hall. “Donna! Bring me one of those sandwiches you made!”

  “A sandwich? But the picnic—”

  “I can’t go to the beach now! I haven’t been able to have my nap yet. Besides, this story is getting interesting.”

  Olivia regarded Dale with amusement. A true reporter. Dale at work was a perfectionist, even rigid, with files that were actually orderly and a strict self-imposed schedule. She could never run her life that way. But she shared the insanity that relegated all things, even sickness and trips to the beach, to a lower order than the demands of a story. Still, she said, “Nate suggested that you go easy.”

  “Aw, come on, Olivia, you know better than that.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Donna came hurrying down the hall with a plate containing a wrapped sandwich, a little bag of potato chips, and a mug of coffee. “Dale, the children wanted to go to—”

  “Right! Exactly!” He took the plate and plunked it onto the table. “Take them away!”

  “You mean go without you?”

  “Right.”

  “But honey, I was hoping you’d get some rest.”

  “Donna, honey.” Dale took her by the shoulders. “I’ll take my nap first, I promise. And if you take my daughters away a few hours, I may even get some work done.” He released Donna and rolled his eyes at Olivia. “Never, ever try to work in the same house with kids!”

  “Yeah. My niece has already taught me that,” Olivia agreed. “Come on, Donna, I guess he’s serious.”

  Donna Colby was not only an immaculate housekeeper but a good organizer. The picnic basket she’d raided for Dale’s lunch was packed, towels and toys ready. Nick and Jerry carried them out to the van and lifted Tina into the back seat. Olivia held open the door that led from kitchen to garage while Sarah jumped from the step with Maggie’s help. Josie came running back in through the garage, coltish and stiff-legged, and bounded awkwardly past them and across the kitchen.

  “What’s the rush, honey?” asked Donna, who was picking up the last bag from the kitchen table.

  “Tina forgot Ken and Barbie.” Josie disappeared into the dining room and the hall beyond. Olivia heard her sandals slapping unevenly on the hardwood floor.

  Dale’s roar could be heard all the way to the garage. “Damn it, Josie, aren’t you gone yet? I’m trying to make a call!” A whoosh, a slam, a click of bolts closing.

  Josie, looking small and white, beelined from the bedroom to the garage, Ken and Barbie clutched in her fists. Donna looked after her despairingly, then stepped into the dining room. “We’re leaving, honey. Bye.”

  There was no response. Donna waited a moment, steadying herself with a hand on the wall, then turned and came back into the kitchen with a tremulous smile. “He’s really not feeling very well. And he’s so involved with this story.”

  Olivia tried to think of something charitable to say. “It’s tough to dig up stories even when you’re healthy.”

  “Yes, and there’s other pressure. He got a letter this morning from his first wife. I don’t know what it said, but—” Donna shrugged. “It’s hard for him these days.”

  “Hard on the kids too,” Maggie observed. She and Sarah had negotiated the step and were watching Donna too.

  “Yes. I wish the doctor had waited until they were in school before he started this new drug.” Donna, her face drawn, followed them through the hot garage to the van. “They were in camp this summer, but it only lasted through July.”

  “Well, let’s take them to the beach,” Maggie said pragmatically, opening the van door. Jerry had turned on the air conditioner. They climbed into the coolness gratefully and headed for distant Bethany Beach.

  Thunderheads came boiling down from the northwest as they finished the picnic dinner. A cool gust of wind hit Olivia’s damp back and sent goose bumps running along her skin. “God, that’s great!” she exclaimed. “I haven’t felt cold for months!” She joined Nick and Maggie, who had started to pick up toys and sandals from the water’s edge. “Guess it’s time to get back.”

  “Right,” said Nick. “I think Donna will be just as glad.”

  It was true; they had hardly arrived before Donna had sought out a phone to call Dale, though the line was busy so she soon gave up. She had been pleasant, had sat out the swim but had joined in the wild volleyball game that pitted the women—including little Sarah—against Nick and Jerry, who made up for their reduced numbers by shouting sexist comments such as “Here you go, doll babies,” or “Hurry up, dainty Maggot!” It had been impossible to keep score, especially since the men insisted that points scored by women were more delicate and therefore smaller than their own robust variety. Donna had smiled about it too. Afterwards, though, she had seemed restless, as though uncomfortable outside the well-ordered home she ran.

  The wind grew stronger. The younger children, excited by the looming black clouds, shrieked and ran around. Maggie didn’t help by suggesting to Josie that it looked like the arrival of the evil Lord of the Nazgul on his unholy winged steed. Josie had been quiet all day, haughtily rebuffing her mother’s sympathetic questions, refusing to put on her swimsuit and collecting shells and pebbles instead. But she enjoyed Maggie’s suggestion and began to instruct Tina and Sarah about ways to save Barbie and Ken from doom. Sidestepping the darting children, the adults threw toys and towels into the van helter-skelter, no trace remaining of Donna’s careful packing. Even so the first drops were falling as they finally rounded up Sarah, wriggly and sandy in her little red swimsuit, and closed the van door. The return trip, through heavy rain, was slow. At last they drove through the last of the storm into an oddly cool, cloudy twilight. The world seemed stunned by its sudden scrubbing.

  The children were inspired all over again by the wet unfamiliarity of the yard. Tina ran to the side of the garage. “The little house is gone!” she squealed, pointing at the muddy remnants of some earthen creation. Josie renewed the doomsday chronicle of the beach, which required much running about and flapping of arms. Nick and Jerry joined in, chanting ‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?’ to the delighted screams of the girls. Olivia had to grin at them. It was true, the relative coolness was invigorating.

  She helped Maggie carry some of the towels as far as the kitchen door. Donna, visible through the dining-room door, was calling timidly, “Dale?” There was no answer. She turned back, hand trailing along the wall, and returned to the kitchen with a shrug. “Probably on the phone,” she said with a quick apologetic smile.

  “No danger he won’t know we’re back,” observed Olivia as they sauntered back to the van. The excited squeals continued, punctuated by Nick’s and Jerry’s hilarious versions of do
om-laden Nazgul squawks.

  Maggie pulled another towel from the van and shook sand from it into a puddle. “Is anyone else hungry?” she asked.

  “We just had a huge basket of sandwiches,” Olivia objected. She grabbed a towel and hurled it at Jerry as he ran flapping by. He caught it and came over to help.

  “Yeah, I’m hungry,” he said, fishing a pink plastic swim ring from the van. “Pizza, right, Maggot?”

  “With anchovies and extra cheese!” she agreed enthusiastically.

  Tina galloped past her mother and there was a crash.

  “Oh, dear!” Donna, her hand at her mouth, looked down at the picnic basket she’d just dropped onto the wet driveway.

  Nick was already kneeling to pick up the scattered contents. “Nothing broken except the jar of pickles,” he said, handing her a packet of paper plates. “But the napkins got wet.”

  They cleaned up, repacked the basket, and tucked all the toys and towels inside the kitchen door. Then Nick and Jerry took Tina with them to the shopping center to get pizza. The others wiped their shoes and went inside. It seemed stuffy after the rain-washed air outdoors.

  “Dale!” Donna called. There was no response. She put a kettle on the range and pulled out a pitcher and some tea bags, her face troubled.

  Olivia frowned. Damn it, Dale was acting like a total asshole today. No story could keep him that busy. “I’ll go get him,” she said.

  The office door was closed. She banged on it. “Hey, Dale!”

  No answer. She listened, but if he was on the phone the other person was doing a hundred percent of the talking. A paper napkin drifted across the polished floor of the hall in the soft air-conditioned breeze. Olivia stuck it in her pocket and hammered on the door again.

  Still nothing.

  The knob turned but she couldn’t budge the door itself.

  She went back to the kitchen. “No answer,” she said. “I heard him say he was going to take a nap.”

  “Not many people could sleep through this homecoming,” Maggie observed with a doubtful glance toward the bedroom hall. She was squatting on the vinyl floor, belly bulging, to help Sarah get into her little blue shirt and shorts again. “You tried the door?”

  “I couldn’t get it open. Will you come try, Donna?”

  “Sometimes he bolts it.” But Donna looked increasingly uneasy.

  Maggie straightened. “Sarah and I will go have a peek in the window while you try the door.”

  Donna followed Olivia to the den door and pounded on it. “Dale? Open the door!”

  They knocked and shouted. Josie, her hazel eyes curious, sidled along the wall behind them to watch.

  After a moment Maggie came flying down the hall. “Move over!” she shouted. “Let’s get that damn door open!”

  She was carrying a crowbar. Olivia pulled Donna aside and watched, astonished, while Maggie rammed the bar between door and jamb. She braced a foot against the door frame and then levered the bar violently back and forth until the door sprang open with a piercing, agonized creak.

  Donna gasped.

  Dale Colby lay prone, splayed on the plaid carpet, his half-turned face resting in a dark stain.

  Olivia’s mind refused to consider what that stain might be.

  2

  Holly Schreiner strode up the puddled cement walk, walking point in plainclothes, mechanically registering what details she could see in the dusk. The Sandford subdivision: smallish fifties ranch houses, decent middle-class homes decked with petunias and tricycles, the summer-toasted lawns soggy but unrevived by the brief rain, the azalea bushes droopy too. Stormwater still dripped from their branches and she pulled her twill skirt aside to avoid them. This house faced north, had kids’ bikes in the garage next to a Pinto. A Ford passenger van, this year’s model, sat in the driveway. Beyond the garage, a patrolman watched them approach. In the yard next door a woman and a teenaged boy observed them all. Holly stepped up onto the cement platform that was trying to pass for a porch. Gabe Mercer stepped up beside her. Gabe wasn’t a bad partner to work with. He’d come on to her once, of course, but that was practically a job requirement. Take good notes, always carry your gun, and proposition female partners. Luckily she was senior enough to put that down quick. She wouldn’t date cops anyway. To them there were only three varieties of woman cop: nympho, dyke or frigid. They called Holly Ice Maiden. She was content.

  Gabe was younger than Holly, already too pudgy. Not that she should point fingers, she was no Twiggy herself. He punched the button.

  She heard the bell chime inside, heard the plop-plop of water from a drainpipe at the corner of the garage, heard the squeals of children down the block. Heard the chopper. The throbbing rotor crescendoed suddenly overhead, pounding the humid air, hammering the spike of memory into her gut. A wave of nausea. Her stomach began the crawl toward her throat, lifting ahead of it a spreading fan of image and odor: steamy air weighty with the stench of charred red flesh, red mud oozing through the cracks in the wall, reds everywhere in a fantastic palette from maroon and brick red through scarlet to petal pink….

  Steady, Schreiner. The door was opening. The chopper had passed. She swallowed acid and planted her crepe-soled sandals a little further apart, bracing herself, her ID held out before her. A uniformed town cop peered out at them, graying, big-bellied, suspicious. She drew herself up to her full five five, fixed him with the stolid, unblinking cop stare she practiced in front of the mirror at home, and said crisply, “Holly Schreiner and Gabe Mercer. County Homicide.”

  Reassured by the shield and by a glance at Gabe’s round face, the cop nodded. “I’m Higgins.”

  “What have we got?”

  “DOA in the back room.”

  They followed him into the house. From somewhere in the rear came a child’s shrill chatter. Comfortably machinelike again, Holly checked off the details. An arch from the entry hall into a living room with gold wall-to-wall carpeting, flowered sofa, wing chairs. Sibilant sound of central air-conditioning. Newspapers stacked neatly on a shelf, big-screen Sony TV in the corner, expensive stereo components on the bookshelves. Barbie and Ken dolls dressed for a rock concert and then abandoned by the brick fireplace. The bookshelves were filled, except for a gap near the stereo. Across the room, another arch led into the dining room. From a door in its wall, kitchen probably, two people craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the newcomers. One was a tall, dark-haired woman, the other a girl, twelve maybe, who chewed solemnly on the knuckle of her forefinger. “Family?” asked Gabe.

  “Yeah,” Higgins confirmed. “And friends. Found the body. I told them to wait in the kitchen. It’s out of the way, other end of the house.”

  “Fine.” Holly and Gabe followed him around the corner and down a short hall. First door on the left was a bath. Two bedrooms were on the right, one sporting white-painted bunk beds, probably advertised as French provincial. A yellow plastic tape recorder sat on the pink rug, a John Denver poster looked out from the wall. Barbie and Ken’s resplendent two-story colonial house stood atop a white dresser. Holly had missed Barbie, had already been in high school when the curvy dolls had first swept the nation. Born too soon. She asked Higgins’ sweat-rumpled back, “Ambulance been here?”

  Higgins nodded, scrabbling in his pocket for a card where he’d jotted down names and numbers. “Couple of seconds after we got here. Pronounced him DOA and left him for us.”

  He waved vaguely at the last door on the left. A den. Gray metal file cabinets, battered Naugahyde recliner with the footrest up, big oak desk, gray metal typing table bearing an IBM electric typewriter. Big windows to the south and west gave a twilight view of the backyard and side fence. From the vent, air brushed softly past her face. As she stepped into the room, Holly saw that the doorjamb was splintered.

  The body sprawled on its back between the typing table and the recliner. The neck and shoulders were twisted, scalp and face gashed, dark blood soaking the plaid carpet. A few feet away lay a metal lamp base, shade mash
ed, bulb shattered. Holly squinted at it. Blood on the base. She said, “Fill me in, Higgins.”

  He pulled another card from his shirt pocket. “Guy’s Dale Colby. Reporter for the Sun-Dispatch. Wife and two daughters, in the kitchen now. Friends too. They were away swimming, got back about nine, yelled for him. Didn’t answer so they tried the door.” He frowned doubtfully at Holly. “What they say is, it was bolted from the inside. They broke it down.”

  “Wonderful.” Frowning too, Holly turned to examine the door. It held a standard brass barrel bolt installed about a foot above the doorknob. The bolt was in its locked position, barrel jutting past the end of the door, the strike that should be on the doorjamb now dangling from the end of the bolt. The screws of the strike had taken a chunk of wood with them. It would fit the splintered scar in the jamb. “Okay. Crime Scene will check it out.” She looked at the windows, three of them, gauze-curtained, all clamped closed. One looked cracked. “Higgins, you secured the yard outside these windows, right?”

  “Yeah, my partner’s there.”

  “Good. You better get back to the family. I’ll talk to them one at a time.”

  Cautiously, she squatted by Colby’s body, grateful for the few moments before the forensic technicians arrived with their bustle and black jokes. Colby was wearing a crisp short-sleeved blue shirt, blue jeans, heavy leather belt, sandals. He’d soiled himself in death, that was common enough, but otherwise his clothes were uncommonly neat. He lay on his back, his head and neck twisted oddly aside. The gash in his skull and forehead over his right eye did not seem deep but had bled profusely. The blood was drying now, thick, caked black in the sparse brown hair. Something was odd about it, about the angle of the face. She decided it was the way the blood had spread toward his temple and right ear; most of it should have run down across his forehead the other way, toward the left. Didn’t quite match up with the stain on the carpet either. And there were purplish hints of lividity on the up side of his neck. “Wonderful,” muttered Holly in disgust. “Paramedics or somebody rolled this body around.”