The ambulance left the parking lot with siren wailing, confirming that Sheila was still alive. No need for a siren if she was dead. In spite of all I knew she’d done, even what she’d tried to do, I was relieved. Though, guiltily, maybe that was more because I didn’t want me and my jabbing stick to be responsible for her death.
“Deputy Hardishan and another deputy are still up there,” Mac added.
“What are they doing?”
“He might be trying to arrest a goat. We ran into a bunch of them up there. He tried to shoo them off, but one old billy goat with horns took offense and butted him.”
“Where?”
I meant where did it happen, but Mac gave a different answer. “On the backside, I believe.”
Deputy Hardishan looked to be limping a bit when he came across the parking lot a minute later.
A bad night for backsides.
Kathy said, “You’re a good woman, Ivy.” Another pat. “Wanting Sheila to be rescued, even after what she tried to do to you. And thank you again, thank you for what you’ve done for us. You’ve cleared Brian’s name.”
I hadn’t done it yet, but yes, I could clear Brian of any guilt in Renée’s death. He hadn’t killed her, and the gun in their laundry room belonged to Sheila, not Brian. But Kathy wasn’t going to be nominating me for LOL Do-Gooder of the Year after she found out I’d contacted PI Megalthorpe in Missouri.
Which might not be long.
Another car pulled into the parking lot, and through the window I could see a head with a familiar comb-over hairstyle. Megalthorpe had proved his worth as an investigator and found Brian and Kathy on his own.
Megalthorpe didn’t get out of his car, but Deputy Hardishan motioned and said he wanted to talk to me out there in the cruiser. Mac wasn’t invited, but he came along. I sat in the car. Mac and Hardishan stayed standing. Apparently the deputy didn’t feel like sitting yet. He took notes about what I said Sheila had told me. I’d rather not tell him about my jabbing stick, let him think Sheila just stumbled over the cliff, but honesty made me tell it all.
“I think the stick went in . . . fairly deep. And that’s why she started jumping around and finally fell over.”
Deputy Hardishan didn’t comment, but I saw him add that to his notes. I realized what Sheila had told me might be considered unacceptable “hearsay” evidence and not hold up in court, but I had one bit of information the deputy might be able to check out.
“Do you still have Renée’s SUV?”
“Yes, we do.”
“I was thinking—I’ve heard that whenever two objects come in contact, there’s always some kind of exchange.”
“Every contact leaves a trace,” Hardishan agreed. “Locard’s exchange principle, it’s called.”
“Sheila’s bicycle was in Renée’s SUV, but the lab or whoever hasn’t known that. If they’ve come across any scratches or bits of paint or anything they haven’t so far been able to identify . . .”
Hardishan didn’t jump up and down with glee, but I thought his nod held a hint of victory. “We’ll check it out.” He closed his notebook. “You folks probably want to get on home. I’ll be in touch.”
I slid out of the cruiser. Mac got a hold on my arm and stopped me. “We came across a little information about Ric Echol, if you’re still interested,” Mac said to Hardishan.
The deputy gave Mac a sharp look. “We’re interested. We know he’s in the area, but he’s kept his nose clean and so far we haven’t been able to nail him down.”
So Mac told him we’d learned Ric had a good buddy known as Bowser, and Bowser occasionally worked at a plant nursery near the airport. “He might know Ric’s whereabouts.”
“We’re familiar with Bowser. We’ll check it out.”
“You also might want to talk to the man in the car out in the parking lot. Over there,” Mac added, nodding that direction. “He’s a private investigator named Megalthorpe from Missouri.”
The deputy managed an expressive lift of eyebrow in spite of his encounter with the goat. Of course, it wasn’t the eyebrow that had made close contact with the goat. “Missouri?” he repeated.
“He has information about a crime you’ve never even heard of, but I think a connection with our local residents will interest you.”
“Well, thank you. You two are just full of information.” That sounded a little snarky, but friendly snarky.
And then Mac took me back to the motorhome. We didn’t move everything into it, but we didn’t have to discuss it to know we wanted to spend the night in our very own bed.
There’s something a little creepy about sleeping in a bed belonging to someone who’s just tried to kill you.
Chapter 23
Ivy
“Get out!”
Mac and I both stared at the woman screaming at us when I opened the motorhome in response to the hammering on the door. It was a week after my encounter with Sheila at the cliff, and she was still in the hospital under guard twenty-four seven. Her head injury was more severe than they’d originally thought. Sheila’s daughter, Vivian, had seemed distraught but friendly enough when she’d arrived earlier in the day, before she’d gone in to the hospital to see Sheila. She’d said her mother’s attorney had called and suggested she come up and take care of Sheila’s home and any business affairs that might need attention. Vivian thought the implication was that Sheila might not be free to do anything herself in the near future.
Vivian had also said she wanted to use up perishables in her mother’s refrigerator and planned to make chicken soup for dinner. And why didn’t we come over and share the soup with her that evening? I said I’d bring some garlic bread to accompany the soup.
It looked as if we were now uninvited.
At least we wouldn’t have to be on the lookout for paper clips among the carrots and onions.
“We’re planning to leave in another day or two,” Mac said. “If we could—”
“No, you’re leaving now.” Both Vivian’s red hair and blue eyes practically shot sparks. The red hair was the same shade as Sheila’s, which probably meant I’d been mistaken in my assumption that Sheila’s was bottle-red. Unless they bought the same brand bottle. “Mom told me all about how you told the authorities some wacko story about murder and selling pain pills and how you pushed her over a cliff!”
So that was Sheila’s story. No doubt the same one she was telling law enforcement. Were they believing it? I doubted it. A couple of days ago Hardishan and another deputy had come out and removed Sheila’s bicycle from the patio by her double-wide.
“If you’re not out of here in half an hour, I’m calling the cops!”
A half hour? Could we do that? Actually, we beat that and were pulling out of the driveway in twenty minutes. Without confronting Vivian again, we’d rubber-banded an envelope to the doorknob of the double-wide. In it was money sufficient to pay for the electricity we’d used in the over-the-garage room with some extra for Sheila’s hospitality in letting us stay in the room.
We headed over to Duke’s trailer to tell him goodbye and give him the gift we’d ordered off the internet for him, which had arrived a couple days ago.
I wasn’t really angry about our rushed departure. I could understand Vivian’s antagonism, although she was mistaken about the facts. Whatever Sheila had done, she was Vivian’s mother. We were planning to leave soon anyway.
But even if we weren’t angry at Vivian about the abrupt eviction, I felt . . . disconcerted. I’ve never been kicked out before, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you feel guilty even if you haven’t done anything.
Some unknowns had been cleared up.
We knew through Deputy Hardishan that Ric Echol was in custody. They’d talked to Bowser. They were suspicious of him on a possible hit-and-run case, and he’d tried to bargain his way out of his own problems by offering a flood of information on Ric. Including that Ric had been responsible for the explosion of a certain Po
rsche, even going so far as to supply a reason for why he’d done it. Ric thought Brian Morrison had killed ex-wife Renée, and when Ric’s anonymous call to the sheriff’s office about Brian’s involvement with Renée hadn’t gotten Brian charged with her murder, he’d turned to do-it-yourself justice. He’d planned to blow up Brian in the Porsche, but he didn’t want to kill or hurt Kathy—crooks can apparently have their own version of a conscience—so he’d done a fairly sophisticated job of wiring in a timer to explode the Porsche several minutes after the engine was started, when Brian would be well away from the house. Except he hadn’t counted on Brian leaving the engine running while he went back into the house, so it was empty when it exploded out in the parking lot.
Deputy Hardishan didn’t say whether this gush of information had helped Bowser with his own problems.
Mac had sent in his article about the old tales of treasure in the dinosaur park to the magazine and received enthusiastic approval on it.
Kathy and Brian were also in custody now. Deputy Hardishan was closemouthed about their conversations with authorities in Missouri, but something else turned up when a man in Idaho contacted the local newspaper about what he was now thinking was a scam of some kind. It concerned a Brian Morrison soliciting investments in a proposed resort with ocean frontage and an extravagant theme park with moving dinosaurs and elaborate rides. Brian and Renée’s scheme? After showing up with another search warrant, they’d taken Brian’s computer and various other records.
After doing that, they’d decided they were finished with the apartment and gave Duke permission to go in and clean up. We’d helped him with that. And in the process we’d found something unexpected. It was a box with two urns in it, both full of ashes. One had “Mother” worked into the construction of the fancy urn, the other plain urn was unmarked. The ashes of Kathy’s “husband”? Why had she kept them? Guilt? Some sense of responsibility? Could any information be obtained from cremated ashes? We turned the urn over to Deputy Hardishan.
Megalthorpe had stopped in to see us before going back to Missouri. I asked how he’d located Brian and Kathy’s place on his own, and he said he’d used old-fashioned detective legwork and showed the photos he had to numerous people in the local area. Brian’s old newspaper photo hadn’t been any help, but a couple of people identified Kathy’s photo as being the woman who made those good cookies at the dinosaur park. By now I’d concluded that Kathy had originally been so determined about not acknowledging she knew me back in Missouri because she was even more afraid I might recognize her current husband as the same husband she had back in Missouri, who was supposed to be dead.
We’d gone into the Hideaway one day for lunch. Ron Sweeney was working there again, but we weren’t in his section of tables and didn’t talk to him.
Sheila was facing charges of the murder of Renée Echol, attempted murder of me, and various other charges. Hardishan had said they might need us to come back and testify at her trial, but that could be some time yet. He thought, with the contact evidence that Sheila’s bicycle had been in Renée’s SUV, that they had a strong case.
We parked the motorhome at the dinosaur park and walked over to Duke’s trailer. I wished I’d had time to make cookies for him. Kathy wouldn’t be supplying cookies for him anymore. We already knew he’d been to see Sheila in the hospital and heard her stubborn story about my making up outrageous lies about her and almost killing her too. He didn’t believe it, but he’d still seemed a little stunned when we helped him with the apartment cleanup. His girlfriend a killer; his friends running the dinosaur park and making cookies for him, also killers.
He opened the door and gave me a hug. I was relieved that, although he was still sad and subdued, he wasn’t holding any grudges against me.
We told him we were on our way south and just wanted to stop and tell him goodbye. We didn’t tell him we were leaving a bit early because Sheila’s daughter had kicked us out. In honor of the start of our honeymoon, I was wearing the jeans grandniece Sandy had sent me. The glittery design still looked like an octopus in a sparkly Christmas tree, but it would soon be a dark and moonless night anyway.
Now Duke had some news. His nephew was retiring in a few days and had decided to move out here within a month. He’d live in the apartment and maybe open the dinosaur park next summer. Duke hoped he’d spruce it up a bit. Duke said he’d decided to move the trailer into an RV park in town that took residents on a permanent basis. Close to Billie’s Burgers? I wondered. But I didn’t ask.
Then we gave him the gift. He recognized what it was immediately, of course.
“A champagne saber!”
Not the twenty-five-thousand-dollar version he’d seen in the magazine, but a rather nice stainless steel version. And a set of champagne flutes to go with it.
Duke gleefully wielded the saber in a few practice strokes. “How about we try it out right now? I still have that bottle of champagne in the refrigerator.”
“No, you save your champagne for a really special occasion. Maybe one is coming soon.”
MAC
Now we were on our way. As Duke had pointed out earlier, we’d run into an extraordinary number of crooks and outlaws here. But, as always, as I’ve learned from Ivy, the Lord is in final control.
It was almost dark, and the beam of the motorhome lights momentarily lit up the figure of Tricky the Triceratops in the parking lot. I hoped the nephew would spruce him up too.
It was, as Ivy had mentioned earlier, a bit disconcerting being kicked out of our temporary space in Sheila’s pasture, but my spirits picked up as we headed down the road. We could stop at an RV park, park in a rest area, or drive all night. We could do whatever we wanted. We had food, heat, everything we needed. Our honeymoon had been somewhat delayed, due to this detour. But honeymoon is, as Ivy says, a state of mind.
And beside me Ivy looks . . . I’ve been uneasy with the word so much in use now, but right now it fits. Yep, Ivy may think those jeans are too glittery for an LOL, but I think they’re fine.
There’s no better to say it: Ivy MacPherson looks hot.
The End
If you enjoyed Detour, I’d very much appreciate a review on the site where you purchased the e-book. Watch for the next Mac ‘n’ Ivy mystery!
OTHER E-BOOKS BY LORENA McCOURTNEY
THE MAC ‘N’ IVY MYSTERIES:
Something Buried, Something Blue (also available in print)
THE IVY MALONE MYSTERIES:
Invisible
In Plain Sight
On the Run
Stranded
Go, Ivy, Go!
THE JULESBURG MYSTERIES:
Whirlpool
Riptide
Undertow
THE ANDI McCONNELL MYSTERIES:
Your Chariot Awaits
Here Comes the Ride
For Whom the Limo Rolls
THE CATE KINKAID FILES MYSTERIES (Available in both paperback and e-book):
Dying to Read
Dolled Up to Die
Death Takes a Ride
CHRISTIAN ROMANCES
Three Secrets (Novella)
Searching for Stardust
Yesterday Lost (Mystery/Romance)
Canyon
Betrayed
Dear Silver
The author is always delighted to hear from readers. Contact her through e-mail at: [email protected]
Or connect with her on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/lorenamccourtney
Happy Reading!
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