by Lora Roberts
I looked out the window at my backyard, which needed mowing. The flowers wanted deadheading. There might be green beans on the vines that grew up poles I’d made from plum tree suckers. I had writing to do and a living to hustle. And I was hiding in my bedroom from the invading harpy. It was satisfying to present all her crimes to some imaginary tribunal—“And she didn’t even make the bed, Your Honor!”—which would dish out imaginary punishments— “She is sentenced to carry her bulging suitcase all the way back to Denver with her teeth!”—but that didn’t get me anywhere.
There was a knock at the bedroom door. “Liz?” Renee sounded tentative. “I need to use the bathroom.”
Definitely an anticlimax. I thought about telling her to go find a bush somewhere, but I figured that would just get me more hysterics.
When I opened the door, she swept past me into the bathroom with quite a regal air, slamming the door behind her. A moment later there was the faint snick of the bolt being shot. Renee had found a hole in my defenses. She didn’t seem to have grown up much from that sulky nineteen-year-old who’d married my equally sulky brother.
It would be interesting to see how long she could stay in there, and what the rest of us would do if she decided not to come out. Driven from my bedroom by her proximity, I went into the living room, only to flee from the disorder everywhere. Even the kitchen didn’t seem free of contamination.
I opened the front door to escape. Drake was coming up the steps. “Please,” I said, tottering toward him. “Arrest me. No, on second thought, I don’t want to go back to jail. Arrest Renee instead.”
Chapter 22
Barker followed me out. I shut the front door and sat on the porch steps. The air in my house was too full of Renee’s musky cologne to be breathable.
“What’s up?” Drake glanced past me at the shut door. “Your sister-in-law getting on your nerves?”
“You could say that.” I cuffed Barker, who stopped growling at Drake and licked his hand. “Isn’t there a law against that? Entering and inducing mental breakdown?”
Drake dropped down on the porch step beside me. He gave his hair a thorough plowing. I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Someday it’ll fall out, and then where’ll you be?”
“Huh?”
I pointed to his fingers, writhing in the graying frizz that exploded out of his head. “You’re a hair abuser, Drake.”
He snatched his hands away. “Look, Liz. Bruno and I think you can help. Will you go through it all again, from the beginning? This starts with Jenifer. Maybe something you saw or heard will confirm—” He sighed. “I just need to hear it once more.”
“I want to help, of course. But—”
“Everybody wants to help, but nobody really does.” His hands reached skyward again before he pulled them back. “I’m sorry, Liz. You’re tired of talking about it.”
“Not tired, exactly.” I didn’t know how to describe what I felt. “It just scares me to be classed as a participant when I’m nothing but an observer.”
He looked at me. “Observers also have to take a part sometimes.” His voice was gentle. “But no matter how you see yourself, Liz, you’re not passive. You care about things too much for that.”
I didn’t say anything. His insight was scary. I didn’t want him to be figuring me out, watching, analyzing—judging.
“So.” He took out his tape recorder. “Let’s talk.”
“Can we go to your place?” I jerked my head backward. “Renee probably has her ear to the door right now.”
Drake’s kitchen caught the afternoon sun; the light reflected off shiny copper and stainless steel pots and gizmos everywhere. There wasn’t much left in it that recalled Vivien, my dear friend who’d lived there for decades until her untimely death the previous fall. I didn’t like feeling that mysterious death was companioning me, gobbling up people whose lives intersected with mine. And yet what was I to think? What did Drake think—that I was the Typhoid Mary of the murder crowd, carrying it with me wherever I went?
We went through my movements on the day of Jenifer’s death, once again examining both my short conversations with her to find hidden meanings, missed clues. There was nothing there that hadn’t already been scrutinized—the tension she’d been under at SoftWrite, her yawns at her apartment, the voice I thought I’d heard, the footsteps leaving.
Drake had his notebook open on the kitchen table, as well as the tape recorder. “I think of the facts like those little round wooden things—what were they called? I had a set of them when I was a kid. You connect them to each other with sticks.”
“Tinkertoys.”
“That’s right. Well, I’ve got the round things, but I don’t have the sticks. Something that connects all this stuff into one coherent picture.” He glanced up at me. “I can’t help but feel that you’re in the middle of it, Sully. You connect Jenifer to SoftWrite.”
“Drake, be reasonable. She worked there, she was already connected.”
“That, too. Different Tinkertoy.” He turned a page in his notebook. “Let’s go over your association with those people. You met Ed at Bridget’s party.”
“You did, too,” I reminded him. “Suzanne was there. I didn’t meet her, but later she mentioned she’d noticed me talking to Ed.”
Drake stared into space and hummed a few bars of “It’s a Small World.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Emery knows Ed and Suzanne from way back. Clarice has worked there since the beginning. Jenifer was only there since she came back from Seattle. Jason hates Ed, Clarice hates Jason, Suzanne maybe hated Jenifer, Bill Aronson seemed to hate everybody, and Larry was probably blackmailing them all about something.” I shrugged. “This is hopeless.”
Drake chewed his pen and stared at the undecipherable chicken tracks of his writing. He pulled the phone toward him and dialed, banging it down a few moments later. “Answering machine,” he grumbled. “Maybe I can reach Emery at work—I’ve got his number somewhere in my office.”. He glanced over his notes, frowning. “Let’s finish this up. After the party, you and Clarice found the body.”
“She looked so—untouched, natural. Lying there.” I could see it all too well. “Are you sure it’s murder?”
He hesitated. “I’m taking you into my confidence to some extent, Liz. Bruno would probably kill me if he heard. But the more you know, maybe the more careful you’ll be.”
“Nobody can get to me without going through the layers of my relatives.” I couldn’t stop the shiver that ran through me. “In fact, if I die, it’ll be from aggravation.”
Drake saw through the bravado. His arm came around my shoulders in a friendly, comforting hug.
“Jenifer might have taken those pills of her own volition,” he said after a moment. “They were Clarice’s prescription— that’s why she hid the bottle you saw beside Jenifer. Clarice said she’d given Jenifer one a month or so ago when she couldn’t sleep. Clarice thought that might make her responsible for Jenifer’s suicide. Then she found Jenifer’s notebook under the sofa, and she looked through it to make sure Jenifer hadn’t written a note that said she was taking Clarice’s pills.” Drake smiled cynically. “She says she was going to give it to me, and I imagine she hoped it would get Jason into trouble. But before she could, it was stolen.”
“By Larry.”
“Right.” He got up and opened his freezer. “I’m going to have some decaf espresso. Want anything?”
“Uh-uh. Did you find anything else about Larry? Was he the one selling information to MicroMax?”
“There’s no proof.” Drake spoke over the roar of his coffee grinder. “It’s certainly possible. I’m going over his bank records tonight, if the bank coughs them up.” He fiddled with the espresso machine for a moment, then came back to the table. “Where was I? Oh, right. What we think happened was that someone drugged Jenifer—gave her a couple of pills in a drink before you arrived on the scene. After you’d left, when she was groggy, she was given more of them.”
>
“And left to die.” I shivered again. “And Bill Aronson?”
“There’s a bruise on his head that’s unaccounted for. He could have been knocked out and left in his car with the motor running.” Drake hesitated. “My guess is he was suffocated, though the forensics guys are being cagey about it.”
“Suffocated—then left with the motor running to make it look like carbon monoxide poisoning?”
“Right. Two could-be suicides. Maybe we would think Aronson caused Jenifer’s death, if we weren’t satisfied with her suicide. And maybe if we weren’t satisfied with Aronson’s suicide, we’d wonder why you were up on Skyline buying expensive shrubs.” He grinned at me. “That was a hoax, by the way. Farwell’s didn’t have anyone on their order list with a phone number remotely like this one. I’d guess it was a spur-of-the-minute thing to call here and see if you couldn’t be lured up there to confuse things. Whoever planned this had a lot of backup protection built in.
“It wasn’t me.”
“Didn’t I just say it must have been a well-organized person?” Drake patted my hand. “Nobody suspects you. Your time yesterday was pretty well accounted for. It would have been tough for you to get up to Skyline and put Bill Aronson out. However, this last poisoning—” He took his little cup and saucer out of the cabinet, and stripped some peel off a lemon that was already half-naked. “One of my esteemed colleagues swears that poison is always a woman’s weapon—like it was last fall.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t strychnine.”
Drake froze. “How did you know what the poison was?”
“I listened in when you talked to the hospital, but it was obvious to anyone who reads mysteries.” I waved at the shelf of books in his living room. “Classic, in fact.”
“Right.” Drake looked sour. “Well, whoever did it didn’t do it right. Larry got the lethal dose, but Garfield won’t die, though he’s gonna feel like shit for a few days.”
“So you’re looking for someone who had reason to want Jenifer dead, who knows something, but not much, about poison, and who is pretty ruthless,” I said, trying to sum things up. “But why would anyone want Jenifer dead?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Drake brought his cup and saucer to the table and tasted his coffee. “That note you found in her lunch bag. There was no name on it, but it threatened to reveal that she had connived at using MicroMax’s proprietary software code to beef up SoftWrite’s new product. The author wanted money to keep his or her mouth shut.”
“His, at a guess.”
“Yeah, sounds like something Larry Dortmunder would do, based on what we’ve been told about him.”
“That makes Jenifer’s motive for committing suicide better,” I said slowly.
“Could be.” Drake picked up his pencil. “You told me your impressions of Larry earlier. Now tell me about Ed and Suzanne. What are they like?”
I felt flattered. “Well, Ed’s a real go-getter. But he’s very nice, too—takes time to talk to the peons and wants the people around him to enjoy their work. I gather he’s irresistible to women—some women. I found him charming. Suzanne seems to be carrying the torch for him still.” I thought for a minute. “He listens to NPR,” I offered. “Has it on in his office all the time, sort of droning away. He has a bunch of health-food kind of snacks in the coffee room, and you saw his tonic. I saw a box of that ginseng tea you like in his office. Maybe that’s what kept him from dying.”
Drake grunted skeptically. “What about Suzanne?”
“She’s difficult to analyze.” I shook my head. “Guarded, sort of. But I got the feeling that she holds herself to a pretty high standard. I’d say she has integrity, but not much business sense. She’s pretty smart. She’s the brains behind the software there.”
“I thought Jenifer was the software person.”
“One of them. Mindy said—something about Jenifer doing most of the stuff on this new product. She must have been pretty good, too.”
“And Larry—the guy everyone loved to hate.” Drake flipped through his notes. “One of those programmers told me Larry cheated on the football pool. He was quite indignant about it.”
“Does that constitute a motive?”
“Maybe.” Drake spent a minute hunting through his scrawls.
I felt almost a kind of nostalgia for SoftWrite. I wasn’t going back there. But in just two days I’d developed a sense of loyalty to the place. There were nice people working there. I hoped no one else was in danger.
Drake slapped his notebook shut. “Thanks for the info, Liz. I don’t know that it points one way or another, but it helps to paint the picture.” He stretched and rubbed his forehead. “I’m going back to the office.”
“I’m going back to hell, relatively speaking,” I muttered. Amy would return soon. She and her mother and I could have a three-way knock-down-drag-out catfight. I could hardly wait.
Chapter 23
Claudia’s backyard was a barely tamed jungle of roses and the last of the wisteria. Tall and massive, she presided over it like the goddess of gardens. I had a standing gig every Saturday morning to help her.
“‘What is so rare as a day in June?’” Claudia spoke the words in her best invocation voice, rolling them out sonorously while we snipped deadheads off the climbing American Beauty rose. It was a standard feature of our Saturday morning garden sessions that we would trade bits of poetry. “Hackneyed choice, really,” she said, after the part where you see life glisten. “I don’t remember the rest.”
I hadn’t gotten anything ready, which I usually did Friday evenings at the library. So I fell back on Browning, trying to say the song from Pippa Passes with the same impressive diction Claudia used. “‘The year’s at the spring, And day’s at the morn—’”
“It’s not spring, it’s summer,” Claudia objected.
“And all’s certainly not right with the world.” Though that was hard to believe, enclosed in that bright space, with roses providing their perfume free of charge and bees making their monotonous music.
“What’s the matter?” Claudia pushed her glasses up and settled her shady hat more firmly on iron-gray curls. “Is surrogate parenthood getting you down? Or is it this other stuff? Biddy mentioned after you left Thursday night that you were having some kind of trouble with the census.”
“Trouble, yes.” I snipped off a couple more faded flowers, and bent to pull up a mat of scraggly forget-me-nots that were sticking their seed pods onto my socks. “Nothing but trouble, lately.”
Claudia stopped snipping and stared at me. “The Browning Society might have your poetic license revoked for inappropriate quoting, but otherwise your life seems as chaste and pure as that of any novice nun.”
I shook my head. “Not so. Death is dogging me.”
“It dogs us all.”
“Not quite so near at hand. People are dying right in my face lately. It’s—unnerving to have bodies turn up so regularly.” My bucket was full of flower parts. I carried it to the big trash can to dump it.
Claudia holstered her Felco shears in one pocket of the faded overalls that had, years ago, belonged to her husband. “I want to hear all about it,” she said, plunking herself down on the garden bench.
I didn’t want to sit. I kept snipping while I told her the story. It took so long I nearly finished weeding her vegetable plot, too. She followed me around with a chair, firing questions while I talked. Claudia’s queries were easier to answer than Drake’s interrogation the previous day. She didn’t judge every word I spoke. She just wanted the facts, and she wanted them in the right order. Biography writing had made her as nosy as all get-out about other people’s lives—not everyone, just those she was interested in.
“So how does your niece feel about finding herself in the middle of this?”
“She’s resilient. It’s like a murder mystery to her. She doesn’t know any of these people.” I shivered, despite the warm sunshine. “She doesn’t realize I went through something similar l
ast fall.” The rows of corn and melons were neat and weed-free, freshly hilled up. The dark earth had its own fragrance, and I enjoyed it while I could; the next step was to hoe in a little fish meal.
Claudia frowned. “Why haven’t you told her?”
“It’s not that I’m sheltering her or anything. It’s just that she and her mother go at it hammer and tongs to the point where ordinary conversation is impossible.” I got up, stretched the kinks out of my back and headed for the greenhouse at the rear of Claudia’s big yard.
She followed me. “Nevertheless, Liz, it’s a mistake to assume teenagers aren’t tuned in to what’s going on.”
“If I tell her, I have to tell her mom, and I can’t face it.” I filled Claudia in on the invasion of Renee. “Last night she and Amy fought and fought. I can’t even go in my room and close the door, because the bathroom opens from my bedroom and they were storming back and forth from there. I didn’t realize before that the bathroom was so heavily used by middle-class women and their offspring.”
“Bathroom and kitchen, women’s traditional territory.” Claudia spoke absently, watching as I rooted through the coffee cans and paper bags stored under the potting shelf in the greenhouse. Last week we had started flats of lettuce; the seedlings were just peeking above the soil. That was one bright spot in my dull and ever more endangered existence.
“And parlor—don’t forget the parlor.” I found the coffee can of fish meal.
“And the kitchen garden, of course.” Claudia wrinkled her nose at the sight of the fish meal. “Think I’ll get some iced tea. You want a glass, Liz?”
“Sure.” I wished I could escape the fish meal, but someone had to fertilize the corn and melons. It didn’t take long. I raked in the meal, spread some compost on top to keep the neighborhood cats out, and joined Claudia in the kitchen.
“I called Bridget,” Claudia said. “For once she was home on a Saturday morning. She’s coming over.”
