A Deadly Cliche bbtbm-2

by Ellery Adams

  “Did you get these people’s names?” Olivia demanded tersely. Anger was rising within her and she tried to push it back down. “What do they have to do with my father, or more importantly, my father’s blood?”

  “Their names are Kim and Hudson Salter. They own the café and a little bed and breakfast above the eatery. After I explained who I was and why I was there, Hudson told me that your father had rented rooms from them until he fell ill. Seem as though he’s run out of money and is almost out of time too. Pancreatic cancer. The Salters have been taking care of him. “

  “And no doubt they think I’ll pay them a small fortune for their kindness toward their elderly tenant. I wonder exactly when they discovered that he’s my father.” Olivia didn’t trust the couple at all.

  Hamilton looked a little embarrassed. “Ma’am, I believe the family is in a hard way and don’t have the funds to spare to cover the costs for his treatment. Mrs. Salter seemed pretty upset over the way this whole thing was handled. She didn’t say a word, but I could see that she was ashamed.”

  “Did you see this dying man who’s supposed to be my father?”

  “No. Hudson wouldn’t allow it. He was very protective of your father.” The investigator hesitated. “Mr. Salter seems like a hard man, but from what I’ve been told by the locals, he’s been really good to your father. They kept telling me that Hudson and your dad were very close. But they’re a tight-lipped lot on that island. They don’t like to talk about their own to a stranger.”

  Olivia curled her fingers into her palms, digging her nails into the flesh as rage coursed through her. “I don’t care what the locals say. When I’m done with this man, he will regret his attempts to manipulate me.”

  “Ma’am, Hudson swears that he did not send you a letter. He told me that he could guess who’d written it. He left me there then and came back about twenty minutes later with the blood sample. His face was flushed and it seemed like he’d had words with the letter writer, but he refused to give me their name.”

  “I wonder why.” Olivia frowned deeply. “I don’t understand any of this! Why would these people take care of some elderly tenant? Why would they pay for his medical bills? Did they think he was some kind of cash cow? And who is the real blackmailer? Who are they protecting?”

  Hamilton nodded in sympathy. “This certainly isn’t a clear case, but I didn’t want to push Hudson without talking to you first. He asked me to give the blood to you, in case you were interested in getting a DNA test.” Hamilton kept his voice soft and even. It was obvious that none of his news had been easy for Olivia to take. “Hudson told me you were welcome, once you were convinced that the sick man is your father, to travel to Okracoke and see him before time runs out. He’s keeping his best room reserved for you.”

  Exhaling loudly in frustration, Olivia cried, “This guy’s claiming he didn’t write the letter and yet he took the money! What kind of fool does Hudson Salter think I am?”

  The private investigator shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “There’s a lab in New Bern where you can get DNA results in twenty-four hours. Would you like the address?”

  “Yes,” Olivia answered in a tight voice. She stuffed the vial back into the envelope and then pulled her checkbook from her purse. “At this point your services are no longer required. You’ve done excellent work, Mr. Hamilton, going above and beyond the call of duty. I appreciate your dedication and would be glad to send you a written recommendation for your files.” She scribbled out a check, pressing her signature deep into the paper.

  Hamilton waved his hand for her to stop. “You don’t need to worry about payment now, Ms. Limoges. My secretary can send you a bill. This must be quite a shock for you.”

  “I’m sure this will more than cover your fee.” Olivia put the check on the table and rose. She desperately wanted the man to leave, needing solitude at this moment more than ever before.

  Blinking at the amount of Olivia’s check, Hamilton folded it in half and slid in into his pocket. “This is very generous of you, ma’am, thank you.” He moved to the door and then paused. “I hope you find the closure you were seeking, Ms. Limoges. One way or another.”

  And then he was gone.

  Olivia sat motionless at the table and listened until she could no longer hear the rumble of Hamilton’s car engine. When all was silent, she shoved her chair back so roughly that it toppled and clattered on the tile floor and she rushed out to the deck, Haviland bounding after her in expectation of a walk. Olivia didn’t even notice as the poodle shot over the dunes ahead of her. Kicking off her sandals, she rushed into the waves, droplets of salt water stinging her eyes. She pumped her arms and legs, going deeper and deeper. When she could no longer touch the sandy bottom, she began to swim. Eyes closed, she struck out toward the cold, dark blue water well offshore.

  Haviland yipped from the beach and then dove in after his mistress. An excellent swimmer, the poodle was beside her in a matter of minutes. When Olivia finally became aware of his presence, she stopped her forward progress and began to tread water. She turned toward the shore and watched her house bob up and down in the distance. Her gaze then shifted to the lighthouse keeper’s cottage.

  “Come on, Captain,” she said breathlessly, and together, the sodden pair returned more leisurely to the beach.

  Back on dry land, Olivia twisted water from her cotton skirt and then walked slowly to the cottage, dripping as she walked. She’d hired her regular contractor to repair the building’s flood damage and, stepping inside, she could see that he’d made decent progress. The carpet had been removed and the floors and baseboards were primed. Without the furniture, it was easy for Olivia to picture the rooms as they’d once been during her girlhood. She could picture her father seated in his favorite chair, whittling a pipe bowl. He often worked on pipes during winter evenings while Olivia and her mother worked a jigsaw puzzle or played card games for pennies.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” she asked the empty room, her voice bouncing off the bare walls. “I can feel it. You’re alive on that island and you can’t die because you’re waiting for me.” Her eyes filled with tears and her lips trembled. “I waited for you for thirty years!” She moved forward, accusing the space where her father’s chair had been. “And all this time you were so close! Didn’t you want to see me? Didn’t you care how I was?”

  Haviland whined, nosing Olivia’s hand with his nose.

  Olivia was crying freely now. “Why didn’t you love me enough to come back for me?”

  Her tears fell on the pristine white floor, mingling with the salt water pooling from her clothes.

  She stood in that puddle of salt and water and felt as insignificant and alone as she had as a little girl, the healed scars within her heart pulling apart.

  Chapter 14

  The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

  —SYLVIA PLATH

  Olivia dropped her drenched clothes in the washing machine, showered, and dressed in black yoga pants and a loose, russet-colored cotton shirt. She escorted Haviland to the Range Rover, buckled him into his canine seat belt, and then sped inland toward New Bern.

  At the first red light, Olivia examined the blue vein lying just beneath the skin in the crook of her right arm. Her eyes traveled over the freckles on her forearm to her long, graceful hands. They were her mother’s hands. Though several inches taller than her mother, Olivia favored the Limoges line. The women were all naturally thin and graceful. Most had eyes the color of Delft blue pottery, but Olivia and her grandmother’s were of a darker shade and tended to change hue like the shifting colors of the ocean. Olivia looked nothing like her father. The only attributes she’d inherited from him were a strong jaw and a forceful will.

  She pondered her parentage on the drive to New Bern, which took far longer than usual. Obstacles seemed to appear from nowhere and Olivia was forced to plod forward below the speed limit for the majority of the trip. On the two-lane highway leading out of town, she got stuck
behind a logging truck. When it finally turned off, a line of school buses from the neighboring county got onto the road in front of the Range Rover while Olivia sat helpless beneath the unyielding glare of a red traffic light. She cursed and struck the steering wheel.

  Despite maintaining a distance of several car lengths behind the last bus in the row of electric yellow vehicles dispensing clouds of black smoke from their exhaust pipes, Olivia had nowhere else to look but at the children pulling faces at her through the rear windows. They poked out their tongues, stretched their eyes into slits, and wiggled their fingers behind their ears. Taking clear enjoyment in their antics, Haviland bobbed excitedly in his seat. He’d stick his head out of his window, his tongue flapping in the breeze as he smiled at the children, and then he’d come back inside and start the whole routine again.

  This comical exchange reminded Olivia of the thieves and the possibility that something about their appearance marked them as being obviously different. She then recalled overhearing one of the chief’s men mention the name Pampticoe High toward the end of her phone conversation with Rawlings yesterday.

  Her mind began to churn. Had the victims attended Pampticoe High? Had the thieves? She pictured the school, a squat, worn brick building surrounded by scraggly bushes and sandy parking lots. Out front was a rusty flagpole flying Old Glory and the flag of North Carolina. There was also a set of park benches facing a magnificent bronze sculpture of a Pampticoe Indian paddling a dugout canoe. Olivia knew the county had been using the funds from its coffers—fuller than in the past as a result of several resoundingly successful tourist seasons—to improve roads, the business district, and the public beach areas, but the school was in dire need of attention.

  “That building requires refurbishment,” Olivia told Haviland. “It hasn’t been updated at all while I was away. The town needs to look after its youth, create a sense of pride of place or they’ll all move away.” Making a mental note to raise the issue at the next Board of Education meeting, another thought occurred to her. Laurel had gone to Pampticoe High. She must have several yearbooks sitting around. Perhaps one of the thieves was even a classmate.

  “Unlikely,” she mused. “But it’s worth a look.”

  Once in New Bern, Olivia drove to an off-leash dog area and allowed Haviland a few minutes of freedom. She tried not to be too impatient as he greeted other dogs and sniffed the base of every tree and garbage can. Finally, she called him to get back in the car and promised to return to the park as soon as she was through at the lab.

  She pulled the Range Rover beneath the shade of a massive oak tree, put the windows down, and poured Haviland some water. Then, because she wasn’t sure how long she’d be inside, she gave him a large bone.

  “Be back soon, Captain,” she promised, but the poodle was too interested in his treat to so much as glance up in acknowledgment.

  Inside the lab’s office, it was obvious that she wasn’t going to be breezing in and out of the lab quickly. A dozen names were listed on the receptionist’s clipboard. Once she’d added hers, Olivia asked the receptionist for an estimate on the wait time.

  The woman shrugged. “’Bout thirty minutes.” She handed Olivia another clipboard. “Please complete these forms and make sure to sign and date them at the bottom.”

  Retreating to an empty corner of the waiting room, Olivia raced through the paperwork and handed the pile back to the receptionist. The woman scooped up the forms, asked Olivia for payment in advance, and then called an elderly man forward and began to chide him for not having an updated insurance card. He searched through his wallet with trembling, age-spotted fingers but could not find anything to satisfy the receptionist.

  Everyone in the room looked bored and miserable. A television mounted on the wall nearest the exit was turned to CNN, and an anchorman droned on about the state of the nation’s economy. Rumpled magazines sat untouched on veneered end tables, and a plastic display case filled with health pamphlets covered a coffee table in the center of the gray- and mauve-speckled carpet. The patients waiting to be taken into the back looked like zombies. No one met anyone else’s gaze, but each person took regular turns glancing at the large clock above the receptionist’s desk.

  Olivia had paid in cash, slipping two extra twenties into the receptionist’s plump hand in hopes of being able to cajole the woman into seeing that Olivia was seen quickly. The attempt was unsuccessful. The woman counted out the bills and then called Olivia up to her window. Raising her pencil-drawn brows, she said, “You gave me too much money.”

  She spoke loud enough for the rest of the room to hear and her tone was replete with disapproval. Olivia had no choice but to apologize, take back her cash, and return to her seat. She could feel the receptionist’s accusatory eyes on her back, but felt no shame. Haviland was waiting outside, so she had a valid reason to try to expedite her stay at the lab.

  The minutes dragged on as one person after another passed into the next set of rooms. These patients moved deeper into the lab with slow and heavy steps. Olivia shared their feelings of reticence. She was not fond of having blood drawn and tended to become dizzy and nauseated during the experience.

  Finally, a woman wearing purple scrubs encasing wide shoulders and a solid bulk resembling that of a NFL linebacker called Olivia’s name. “Olivia . . .” She frowned over her clipboard. “Limodges?”

  “Limoges,” Olivia corrected. And then, because this woman was about to stick a needle into her, tried to amend her answer so that it sounded more conversational. “It’s the same name as the French porcelain.”

  The woman blinked at her and then smiled. “Oh, I’ve seen that stuff on Antiques Roadshow. Pitchers and cups and the like painted with flowers. That’s not my style. Too fancy. Me? I collect unicorns. All sorts of unicorns. I just think they are so magical.” She gestured for Olivia to enter an empty exam room to the left and continued to list the types of figurines or plush toys she’d bought or been given over the years even though Olivia was paying her little heed. She was too busy wondering whether to sit in the reclining chair or lie flat on the cushioned exam table to focus on crystal unicorns.

  She opted for the table and sat on its edge. Pushing her sleeve up her arm, she waited for the woman to get to work, but she continued her recitation of her unique collection.

  In order to stop the phlebotomist’s prattle, Olivia abruptly thrust the envelope containing her father’s blood into the woman’s free hand. “You need this more than I do,” she said and eased back against the cushioned headrest of the exam table.

  Temporarily derailed, the woman checked her clipboard. “Paternity test, huh? You can sit in the chair, you know. The table’s for folks who don’t do well when they see the needle coming.”

  “It’s not the needle, but I have a track record of wooziness when my blood is drawn,” Olivia admitted reluctantly. “I’d feel more comfortable on this contemporary fainting couch.”

  “The what?” The woman asked but didn’t pursue the subject. Humming softly, she tied a rubber tourniquet around Olivia’s bicep and tapped on her skin a few inches below the tourniquet to make the vein swell.

  Already feeling a bit clammy, Olivia looked away and tried to find an interesting focal point in the room but could only comfortably see a poster of the human circulatory system. She imagined the red and blue veins as highways on a road map. No matter which road one followed, the end would always be the metropolis of the heart.

  Olivia did her best to study the body’s most significant muscle as the phlebotomist stuck her twice before finally hitting the vein. “There we go!” The blood must have filled a vial quickly, for after a brief moment of silence, the woman placed a cotton pad over the needle hole and then applied pressure over the small wound for several seconds. She then slapped a Hello Kitty bandage over the cotton and straightened.

  “You just stay still for a bit,” the woman directed. “You’ve gone a bit pale.”

  Grunting once in assent, Olivia closed her
eyes. That was a mistake. She immediately felt a wave of nausea wash over her. Jerking her eyes open, she searched out the red and blue heart on the poster again, taking in deep breaths through her mouth. By the time the phlebotomist returned, Olivia was able to sit up.

  “When will I get my results?”

  The woman tidied up her work area, dropping the spent syringe into a biohazard box and putting the bandage wrappings in the trashcan. “They’ll probably take two days.”

  Olivia didn’t care for this answer. “I thought results were completed within twenty-four hours. You’re talking about twice the expected wait time.”

  Unperturbed, the woman opened the door and indicated that Olivia was free to leave. “We’re pretty backed up right now. Seems like everybody in the county has come down with shingles. You’ll just have to be patient.”

  Pausing in the doorway, Olivia made it clear that she wasn’t going to follow the woman to the checkout area. “I need these results immediately. If those blood results are positive, it means that my father, whom I believed drowned thirty years ago, is alive. But he’s barely alive. He’s got pancreatic cancer and is almost out of time. Do you think it’s acceptable to ask me to be patient, to possibly miss the chance to see him before he dies, because this lab is backed up identifying cases of shingles!”

  The woman didn’t so much as flinch in the face of Olivia’s indignation. “We’ll do our best, ma’am,” was all she would say before walking up the hall to the waiting room. “Ms. Limoges is ready to check out,” she told the sourfaced receptionist, wished Olivia a good day, and called for the next patient.

  Olivia received an instruction sheet on obtaining her lab results and marched out of the office, eager to vent her frustration. Seeing no nearby outlet, she returned Haviland’s boisterous greeting by hugging him around the neck. She then drove to a nearby sandwich shop to pick up lunch for herself and several slices of roast chicken breast for Haviland.