Last Scene Alive at-7

by Charlaine Harris

  I wasn't moving because of Robin, I assured myself. I was moving because I was ready to rejoin life. And if that life included Robin right now, so much the better.

  I was carrying the arrangement when I got out of my car, and he came over to me to help.

  "They're beautiful," I said. "Thank you so much."

  A little awkward, he bent to kiss me, his hands full with the bowl of flowers. The minute his lips met mine, I felt a sort of solar flare. It was unexpected and violent, and I thought the damn flowers would end up on the ground again.

  When we broke for air, I took a deep breath.

  "This seems, I don't know, a little precipitous," I said.

  Robin's eyes were shut behind his glasses. He was breathing raggedly.

  "Feels good, though," he said.

  "You're coming off a relationship and a loss, I'm coming off a relationship and a loss," I pointed out. My relationship, and my loss, had been far greater, but he knew that already. We walked over to the house.

  "What happened to your face?" Robin said. It was dark already, and I'd just disarmed the security and flicked on the kitchen lights.

  "Does it look very bad? I've been dodging mirrors since noon," I said. My fingers anxiously patted the darkened area. I trotted to the downstairs bathroom, Robin at my heels. I leaned across the sink, my glasses folded on the counter, and peered at my right cheek. Not too bad—a dark center and a lighter ring of bruising. It would be gone in a week.

  "You want to tell me what happened?" Robin asked.

  It crossed my mind that Robin had not expected me to call him about this. He was waiting for me to tell him— not angry at not knowing already. This was a different reaction from the one to which I'd grown accustomed. Robin definitely approached life differently from Martin, and his expectations were different, too. I shook my head at myself. I should not compare.

  "You don't want to tell me?" His voice sounded mildly teasing, nothing more. But I could tell from the way he stood that he was more serious, now.

  "Someone ran up behind me in the library parking lot and pushed me down. The flowers were in my hands, and I couldn't drop them fast enough—I didn't want to drop them—so I kind of hit the pavement hard."

  "Someone attacked you?" Robin was quite rightly astonished. "In the library parking lot?"

  "Yeah. Strange, huh? Right out in daylight."

  "The police didn't catch him?"

  "Or her. No, the police didn't."

  "Why ‘her'?" Robin's face was involved in thought, suddenly. I could practically see the lightbulb over his head.

  "I thought I smelled perfume." I eyed him. "Does this ring some kind of bell with you?"

  Robin looked profoundly embarrassed. "Ah, maybe." He did everything but look up at the ceiling and whistle. "But I ... maybe if I went and talked to her. ... I hate to say anything unless I'm sure."

  "That's what people in mysteries say right before they get killed. ‘Yes, I think I know the killer, but I have to check a few things before I talk to the police.' Next scene, they're toast."

  Robin was struck by this observation, which as a mystery writer should have occurred to him first. "That's true," he murmured. We'd drifted from the bathroom into the kitchen, and I'd gotten out a pitcher of tea. He nodded when I lifted it, a question on my face.

  "Okay, well. This is really... there's this girl. She..." Robin turned a dark red. He took a big swallow of tea. "She has this big thing about me. Like a superfan. She took this job to be..." Robin was overwhelmed with chagrin, shook his head speechlessly. Hollywood had not made him completely egocentric, I thought, smiling at him.

  "She's nuts about you?" I suggested.

  He nodded morosely. "You know how I found out about Celia and Barrett spending the night together? I knew already when I came to the trailer. I got an anonymous note. I'm about ninety percent sure it was from her."

  I began to put two and two together, myself. "Tracy," I said. "Tracy, from the Molly's Moveable Feasts catering company."

  "Yep." Robin finished his tea in one long gulp.

  I thought this over. "Did you tell the police about Tracy?" I asked.

  "No," he said, horror written all over his face. "This isn't exactly something I want to talk about, Roe."

  "Robin, didn't you consider the fact that the woman murdered was your girlfriend?"

  "Former," he corrected. He looked at me almost angrily. "Of course, Roe. What are you... ?" His face cleared. "Oh."

  I saw the tide of realization pour over him. "Oh, no," he said. "Oh, no."

  "I hope not," I told him. "But you have to say something."

  He fumed and fussed, but he was just postponing the inevitable. "You think she may have attacked you today, too?" he asked, as he pulled his coat back on to drive to the police station.

  I shrugged. I remembered Tracy's face, after (I now realized) she had seen Robin and me together in the library, obviously close, obviously in lust. I wondered what would have happened if I hadn't pulled out of the parking lot, if I'd waited to talk to her as she'd wanted.

  I was really glad I hadn't stopped to find out.

  Chapter Eleven

  I met my mother in front of a house on Oak Street. How perfect could that be? Every town has an Oak Street. Hearts of oak, the Old Oaken Bucket, Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.

  The street name would have been perfect. The house wasn't. The living room was an awkward rectangle, the bathrooms tiny and inconvenient.

  As I might have anticipated, my mother was less than patient with my quibbles. If she'd been more of a stranger, she'd have had to listen quietly. As it was, she argued— until I commented that I could easily switch realtors. "In fact," I said, "I could go to Russell & Dietrich. They'd laugh all the way to the closing." After that, Mother seemed to understand that if I said I just didn't like the house, it wouldn't do to quarrel with that feeling.

  So our first evening out, we came up with zip. Mother had lined up four houses to see; and I had objections to all of them.

  "The couple I showed your house to this afternoon seemed to like it," she said, before climbing into her new Cadillac. But by that time all I could think of was getting back to that house.

  As I let myself in, I was shivering. The evening had cooled down very quickly, and I knew our warm weather was about to end for the season. As I tickled Madeleine behind the ears, I admitted to myself that our failure was actually a relief to me. If the house-hunting process had been too easy, I would have mistrusted it. It would take forever to sell this place, anyway.

  I was sure of that until about eight o'clock the next morning, when Mother phoned to tell me that the people who'd seen my house the afternoon before had called her with an offer.

  "What?" I gaped at the telephone.

  "What can I say? They saw it, they liked it, they made an offer. It isn't even an insulting offer." It wasn't. It was actually a little more than I had been willing to settle for.

  Suddenly, I felt as if the ground were falling out beneath my feet. I was terrified. I was losing my life.

  "Roe?"

  "Sorry. Just... having misgivings."

  "You don't want to withdraw the house?" Mother was trying not to sound outraged.

  "No. No," I said, trying to stiffen my spine. "No, I need to move. I just... when do we let them know?"

  "You mean, you accept the offer?"

  "I guess I do," I said, surprised to hear my voice saying the words. "I can't think of how not to. I just thought it would take months to sell this house. Months."

  "Me, too," my mother said. "But this couple wants to live in the country. The house looks beautiful now. They have a son who loves to hunt. The man's father is coming to live with them, and he needs the apartment above the garage."

  "Well. Counteroffer for two thousand more dollars," I said, hearing my voice as if it were coming out of someone else's mouth. "If they'll come up with that, I guess we've got a deal."

  "There is one snag."
/>   My heart gave a lurch of hope. "Oh?"

  "They need it now."

  "What?"

  "They need the house as soon as you can get out of it. If that's before we can arrange a closing, they'll pay rent. It's a domino situation. They've sold their house, the grandfather has just retired and is driving down in a van full of his stuff, and they have nowhere to put him when he gets here."

  "He can't just drive up and settle here in the yard."

  "No, Roe, what I meant was that he can sleep on their couch, but that's going to be pretty unsatisfactory for more than a week or two."

  "So, I need to find an empty house. And buy it."

  "Or we need to work something else out. Of course, you can stay with me and John for as long as you need to, but I know you don't want to put your things into storage if you can help it."

  We discussed the situation for a few more minutes, and Mother agreed to get together another lineup of houses to see that afternoon. I thought I'd calmed down, but I was still shaky when I hung up.

  I thought of calling Robin.

  No, I would not lean.

  To my disgust, I began crying. I'd done fine on my own, just fine, until I'd met Martin and decided to marry him. Now, here I was, aching to have a man to talk to, used to having someone around to consult with, used to having a companion to share every little thing. I had missed that acutely over the past year.

  The phone rang again. I was almost scared to answer it. But I did, since I am an optimist.

  "Hey, this is Carolina," said her accentless California voice.

  "How are you?"

  "Busy as hell. I just wanted to let you know I did talk to Sarah, and she says she just opened the door, said, ‘Thirty minutes till you're due on the set, Miss Shaw,' and shut the door again."

  "No reply?"

  "No, she didn't hear Celia say anything, and the light wasn't on in the trailer."

  No, it wasn't until Barrett had opened the door wide enough to let in sunlight that he'd seen the body. I thanked Carolina and hung up.

  The clock was telling me I'd be late for work. I finished yanking my clothes on, determined to go in to work as usual. I brushed my hair carefully, hoping its length and volume would obscure my bruised face and my hickeyed neck. As I hurried out to my car, unlocking it with a click of my keypad, it did cross my mind to wonder if I had managed so splendidly before I got married. Hadn't I always been looking? Hadn't I always longed to have someone to share my life with? Hadn't I always assumed I would find that person, sooner or later?

  I had. And he'd violated the dream by dying on me.

  I was back on a more or less even keel after I'd been at work for an hour.

  Probably it was inevitable that I'd have emotional spasms of grief for some time to come, right? For the first time, I wondered if it would ever be over. Surely I'd grieved and raged enough. I'd waited almost a year to even look at another man. Granted, when I'd looked it had been more like an immersion, but I had not even thought about men until Robin reentered my life.

  I was broody and worried about the house situation, but not tearful, when Robin called.

  I seldom get calls at work, of course, and I was a little surprised to hear Robin's voice on the other end of the phone.

  "Roe, hey, I'm back at the motel. Listen, are you free for lunch? I need to talk to you."

  "Um, I guess so. Beef ‘N More?"

  "No." I could practically hear him shudder. "There's a pizza place on Kenneth Road. It used to be okay."

  "Yeah, Trixie's. That would be all right. I get off work at twelve-thirty. Is that convenient?" It wasn't Robin's fault I'd spent the morning castigating myself for my longing to throw myself into his life.

  "Sure. Is something wrong?" He didn't sound as though he really wanted to ask. I guess I hadn't been as successful as I'd hoped in keeping my voice neutral.

  "I'm just fine," I said independently. "I'll see you then."

  He might have sounded a little puzzled as he said goodbye, but that was okay.

  As I was working the return desk, Mark Chesney came in. He was looking good today, wearing what seemed to be his work uniform of pressed blue jeans and an oxford-cloth shirt. He was carrying a small box.

  "Aurora!" he said, looking as astonished to see me as I was to see him. "What are you doing here?"

  "I work here," I said, trying not to sound too "duh." "You knew that, Mark. It's in the script."

  "Sure," he said. "So, in real life, you really do..."

  "Work in the library," I finished, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as possible.

  "Okay," he said, still faintly stunned. "Here, ah, these are books that Celia had in her trailer. I guess she checked these out before we started shooting. And I brought some paperbacks that were lying around, in case the library can use them."

  I glanced at the hardbacks, and then looked again. The Seventies Bombers. Political Violence in the U.S. The Black Panthers. And, sadly, Diagnosing Your Own Illness.

  "She was doing research," I said, carefully balancing my voice between question and statement.

  "Oh, yeah, remember? She talked about it while we were out at supper that night, I think. Her next project was a movie set in the late sixties, early seventies, about violence in the hippy era. She was playing a middle-class girl turned radical who builds a bomb in her basement with the help of an African-American friend. Based on a true story."

  I nodded, as if I'd remembered all that. The truth was, I'd barely listened. I rummaged through the books. The paperbacks were an undistinguished batch of popular fiction, but we can always use books in good condition. "Thanks for bringing these in," I said. Mark turned his attention back to me. He'd been giving Perry the onceover. Perry hadn't noticed, for which I was grateful. Perry was not exactly Mr. Stable, and I couldn't ever gauge his reactions, even to more ordinary occurrences.

  "Hope you get to come back to the set," Mark said politely. "We've got our new leading lady. She's flying in tonight, and we should resume shooting scenes with her tomorrow."

  That must be why they'd gotten the trailer cleaned out so quickly. The new lead would need it. "Jumping into a part must be incredibly hard for an actor," I said, focusing on what he was telling me, rather than on my random thoughts. "How can anyone learn lines that fast?"

  "That's the business," Mark said briskly. "She'll be studying on the plane."

  "Not Meredith," I observed. He looked blank. "Meredith Askew didn't get the job."

  "Oh, gosh, no. Meredith doesn't have the star quality Celia did. And that's what we need."

  "Kind of hard on Meredith."

  "That's the business, too," he said, shrugging. He smiled at Perry, who happened to be looking in his direction, and gave me a little wave before he left.

  I picked up the medical book. A strip of paper had been inserted between the pages in the H's. Huntington's Chorea had been underlined. So the police knew, as I did now, that Celia had been aware of her problem. I wondered if she'd gone to a doctor when her symptoms had become obvious, or if she'd had some other kind of warning.

  Poor thing. She'd known, and she had to have dreaded the disease's progress. But she should have been given the choice of how to deal with her death sentence. She should not have had that snatched away from her. Someone had drugged Celia, someone had strangled her, and someone had hit her in the head. She'd been killed so many ways. Had three different people wanted her to die? Or had one person caused so much damage? If so, why?

  The plastic cover on The Black Panthers was torn, so I carried the whole box back to the repair area. That was a corner of the employees' lounge, the corner right by Patricia's cubicle. Nothing closed to view, here. We like to check up on each other, here at the Lawrenceton Library. The donated books would have to be processed back here, too.

  After I'd placed the box on the table, I noticed that a thin manuscript was at the bottom. I fished it out. Mark had packed the script of the movie Celia had been signed up to shoot after Whimsical D
eath. I'd have to call him to ask if he would like to come by and retrieve it. I stuck it back in the box.

  I examined our torn cover more closely. If Celia hadn't been dead, I would've had a sharp conversation with her about this book. She'd been underlining, though I admitted to myself I couldn't be sure that had been Celia. There were slips of paper stuck here and there through the pages. I flipped through, removing the slips. One had been inserted in the center of the volume, where there were pages of pictures. I glanced down at the Afros with that kind of superior amusement we give to past fads. I thought of showing some of the more outrageous ones to Patricia, as a kind of peace offering, and I looked over to her cubicle to see if she was overwhelmingly busy.

  She was staring at me with the blankest face I'd ever seen. I couldn't tell if she was broadcasting fear, or anger, or just a feeling of stunned inevitability, but the emotion was strong and directed at me. Puzzled, I gave her a little wave like the one Mark Chesney had given me, and went back to weeding out the makeshift bookmarks. I risked a glance in Patricia's direction after a minute or two, and she was still sitting at her desk, but her head was bowed. I had never imagined Patricia looking defeated, or even cowed, but that was in her posture. I thought about going to speak to her. But since she was Patricia, and she didn't like me, and frankly I'd never particularly liked her, I just didn't.

  The book looked like new, I thought proudly, after I'd finished replacing the cover. As I taped the last flap of plastic in place, Patricia walked by me, heels tapping on the linoleum, her trench coat belted around her tightly. She never looked in my direction. Her purse was hanging from her shoulder. She was talking rapidly into her cell phone.

  "Please have him in the office by the time I get there. He's late for his orthodontist appointment," Patricia said precisely. Her eyes met mine as she pulled open the employee door and she registered nothing. I might as well have been invisible.