“No. I’m supposed to be a house dog. I’ve seen the concrete plant a few times but that’s it.”
“Did he seem worried recently?”
“No, he was happy as a dog with a bone. Every time he made money he was happy and he made lots of it. Bones to them, I guess. He wasn’t home much but when he was, he was happy.”
Inside, Harry wasn’t getting much from BoomBoom either.
“A nightmare.” BoomBoom snapped open her platinum cigarette case. “And now Maude. Does anyone know if she has people?”
“No. Susan Tucker offered to put up the relatives but Rick Shaw told her that Maude had no siblings and her parents were dead.”
“Who’s going to claim the body?” BoomBoom, having undergone a funeral, was keenly aware of the technical responsibilities.
“I don’t know but I’ll be sure to mention that to Susan.”
“I’ve gone over that last day a thousand times in my head, Harry. I’ve gone over the week before and the week before that and I can’t think of a thing. Not a sign, not a hint, not anything. He kept me separate from the business but I had little interest in it anyway. Concrete and pouring foundations and roadbeds never was my idea of thrills.” BoomBoom lit her dark Nat Sherman cigarette. “If he roughed a man up in business, I wouldn’t know.”
“Kelly might have crossed someone. He was very competitive.” Harry picked up a crystal ashtray with a silver rim around it and felt its perfect proportions.
“He liked to win, I’ll grant you that, but I don’t think he was unfair. At least, he wasn’t with me. Look, Harry, we’ve known each other since we were children. You know for the last few years Kelly and I were almost more like brother and sister than husband and wife, but he was a good friend to me. He was . . . good.” Her voice got thick.
“I’m so sorry. I wish I could say or do something.” Harry touched her hand.
“You’ve been kind to call on me. I never knew how many friends I had. He had. People have been wonderful—and I can be hard to be wonderful to . . . sometimes.”
Harry thought to herself that someone was being anything but wonderful. Which one? Who? Why?
BoomBoom mused, “Kelly would have been amazed to see how many people did love him.”
“Perhaps he knows. I’d like to think that.”
“Yes, I’d like to think that too.”
Harry put the ashtray back. She paused. “Have the cops gone over everything? His office?”
“Even his office here at home. The only thing on his desk the day he died was the day’s mail.”
“May I peek in the office? I don’t want to be rude, but I think if there’s anything that we can do to help Rick Shaw, we should. Perhaps if I poke around I’ll find a clue. Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.”
“You’ve read too many mysteries sitting there in the post office.” BoomBoom stood up and Harry did also.
“Spy thrillers this year.”
“And for that you went to Smith College?” BoomBoom felt Harry should do more with her life, but who was she to judge? BoomBoom truly was the idle rich.
The walnut paneling glowed in the bright afternoon light. Neatly placed in the middle of an unblemished desk pad bound by red Moroccan leather was Kelly’s mail.
“May I?” Harry didn’t reach for the mail.
“Yes.”
Harry picked it up and rifled through the letters, including the postcard, the beautiful postcard of Oscar Wilde’s tombstone. She replaced the mail as she found it. At that moment she was more concerned with a certain evasiveness BoomBoom displayed toward her. She and BoomBoom got along well enough, but today there was something not right between them.
It wasn’t until later, when she had left BoomBoom and was rumbling past the tiny trailer park on Route 240, that she realized Maude had received a postcard of a beautiful tombstone as well. With the same inscription: “Wish you were here.” My God, someone was telling them, I wish you were dead. It was a sick joke. She put her pedal to the metal.
“Hey, slow down,” Mrs. Murphy said. “I don’t like to drive fast.”
Harry careened into Susan’s manicured driveway, hit the brakes, and vaulted out of the truck. The cat and dog hit the turf too.
Susan stuck her head out the upstairs window. “You’ll kill yourself driving that old truck like that.”
“I found something.”
Susan raced down the stairs and flung open the front door. Harry told Susan what she discovered, swore her to secrecy, and then they called Rick Shaw. He wasn’t there, so Officer Cooper received the information.
Harry hung up the phone. “She didn’t seem very excited about it.”
“They shag so many leads. How’s she to know if this is anything special?” Susan laced her sneakers. “Let’s hope another one doesn’t show up.”
“Damn, I forgot to look.”
“For what?”
“For the postmark on Kelly’s card. Was it from Paris?”
“Let’s go to Maude’s shop and look at the postcard she received.”
Maude’s shop, closed, beckoned the passerby. The window boxes burst with pink and purple petunias. The sidewalk was swept clean.
Susan tried the door. “Locked.”
Harry circled to the back and jimmied a window. The minute she got it open, Mrs. Murphy shot up on the windowsill and gracefully dropped into the shop. Harry followed and Susan handed Tucker to her and then followed herself.
The back room, an avalanche of packing materials, greeted them.
“I didn’t know there were that many plastic peanuts in the world,” Susan observed.
Harry made a beeline for Maude’s rolltop desk in the front room.
“What if someone sees you there?”
“They can report me for breaking and entering.” Harry snatched the mail, which was kept in boxes on the desk. “Found it!” She quickly flipped over the postcard. “Well, there goes that theory.”
“What’s it say?”
“Come here and read it. No one’s going to arrest us.”
Susan joined her. “‘Wish you were here.’ ” She then noticed the postmark. “Oh.” It read Asheville, North Carolina.
Harry slid open the center drawer. A huge ledger book, pencils, erasers, and a ruler rattled. She reached for the ledger book. Sometimes accounting columns tell a story.
Footsteps on the sidewalk made her freeze. She closed the drawer.
“Let’s get out of here,” Susan whispered.
When Harry returned to the post office and relieved Dr. Johnson, she called BoomBoom and asked her to look at the postcard. It was marked PARIS, REPUBLIC OF FRANCE.
Baffled, Harry put down the receiver. Okay, the postmarks confused her. Still, she wasn’t giving up. Those postcards were important. Whoever the killer was, he or she had a sense of humor, maybe even a sense of the absurd. Even the disposition of the corpses was macabre and trashy.
She racked her brain to think of who had a sharp sense of humor: everybody in Crozet except for Mrs. Hogendobber.
The shroud of mortality drew closer. Who could be next? Was she in danger? If only she could discover the link between Kelly and Maude, maybe she’d know that her friends would be safe. But if she discovered that link, she wouldn’t be safe.
13
Harry was taken aback by the number of people milling about the railroad track. Getting there wasn’t easy. People had to drive out to 691 and then cut right on 690. Bob Berryman, Josiah, Market, and Dr. Hayden McIntire glumly stared at the tracks.
When Mrs. Murphy and Tucker sped into the brush, Harry barely noticed.
Harry joined the men. She cast her eyes downward and saw blood spattered everywhere. Flies buzzed on the ground, feasting on what hadn’t soaked up. Even the creosote odor of the railroad ties didn’t blot out the sweltering odor of blood.
Josiah grimaced. “I had no idea that it could be so bad.”
“Considering how many pints of blood are in the human body—”
Hayden spoke like a physician.
Berryman, sweating profusely, cut him off. “I don’t want to know.” He backed away to his four-wheel-drive Jeep. Ozzie howled inside, furious that he couldn’t get out. Berryman roared out of there, tearing hunks of earth as he went.
“I didn’t mean to upset him,” Hayden apologized.
“Don’t worry about it.” Market pinched his nose. “Damn, are we ghouls or what?”
“Of course not!” Josiah snapped. “Maybe we’ll find something the police didn’t. How much faith do you have in Rick Shaw? When he reads, his lips move.”
“He’s not that bad,” Harry protested.
“Well, he’s not that good.” Hayden stuck up for Josiah.
Harry swept her eyes along the tracks. The cat and dog rummaged in the high weeds and then burst onto the tracks about one hundred yards west of where she was standing. At least they’re happy, she thought.
“We know one thing,” Harry stated.
“What?” Market pinched his nose again.
“She walked here.”
“How do you know that?” Josiah peered intently at her features.
“Because there’s no sign that the grasses are beaten down. If she’d been dragged there’d be a path even though it rained. A human’s body is literally dead weight.” The smell was getting to Harry and she moved away from the track.
“She could have been carried.” Josiah joined her.
“Have to be a strong man.” Hayden moved off the track too. “Don’t know if the killer is male or female, although men commit over ninety percent of the murders in this country, statistically.”
Josiah replied, “Not exactly. The women are too smart to get caught.”
Market, the last to leave even though the stench turned his stomach, doubted that. “Maude was a good five feet ten inches. The road’s back a stretch. The strongest among us was Kelly. The next strongest is Fair. No one else could have carried her, other than Jim Sanburne, and he has a bum back.”
“A four-wheel-drive could have come up here.” Josiah watched the animals as they moved closer.
“Cooper said no tire tracks,” Market volunteered.
“She walked? So what?” Josiah thrust his hands into his pockets.
“Where was Fair last night?” Hayden asked, none too innocently.
“Ask him,” Harry shot back.
“She walked out here in the middle of the night?” Market was thinking out loud. “Why?”
“She liked her jogging and usually ran along the track,” Harry told them.
“Damn good jogger to get all the way out to Greenwood,” Market said.
“In the middle of the night?” Hayden rubbed his chin.
“Beat the heat,” Josiah offered. “Hey, how about Berryman getting squeamish like that?”
“He wasn’t squeamish in school,” Market recalled. “Hell, I saw the trainer stick a needle in his knee once during a football game. Took a bad hit, you know. Twisted his knee a bit. Anyway, Kooter Ashcomb—”
“I remember him!” Harry smiled.
Kooter was an old man by the time Harry attended Crozet High.
“Yeah, well, Kooter stuck a hypodermic needle right in his knee and drew out the fluid. Played the rest of the game, too.”
“We win?” Harry wondered.
“You bet.” Market folded his arms across his chest. Market liked remembering playing fullback a lot more than he liked the present.
“Back to Maude.” One line of perspiration rolled down the side of Harry’s face. “Did she come out here alone? Did she come out here to meet someone? Did she come out here with someone?”
“I had no idea you were so logical, Harry,” Josiah observed.
“Obvious questions and I’m sure Rick Shaw and company have asked them too.” Harry wiped away the sweat.
“Wish we could find some tracks.” Hayden, not being a hunting man, wouldn’t even know how to look.
In the distance, the finger of a dark thundercloud hooked over the Blue Ridge.
“No tracks if you walk on the train bed.” Harry felt bad. The reality of Maude’s death, the blood, began to press on her head. She felt a throbbing at her temples.
“There’s nothing here”—Josiah’s voice dropped—“except that.” He pointed up to the stained site.
“But there is! There is!” Tucker barked.
Mrs. Murphy and Tucker swarmed over the site of the murder. Harry mistook this for attraction to the blood.
“Get out of there!” she shouted.
“Don’t be mad at them, Harry. They’re only animals,” Market chided her.
“There’s something here! That same smell is here!” Tucker barked.
Harry ran up to the dog and collared her. “You come with me right now!”
Mrs. Murphy ran alongside Harry. “Don’t do that! Come back. Come back and sniff!”
Harry couldn’t go back and it was just as well, because if she’d gotten down on her hands and knees to catch the scent she would also have seen a few strands of Maude’s blood-soaked hair missed by the Sheriff’s Department. That would have done her in.
Tucker and Mrs. Murphy had thoroughly investigated the area around the murder location. Not until they examined the exact site did they catch the faint amphibian odor. No track, no line. But again it was in one place, although this time there was more of it than a dot. There were a few dots, fading fast.
But no one would listen to them and they rode home in disgrace with Harry, who thought the worst of her best friends.
Later that evening the thunderstorm lashed Crozet. Marilyn Sanburne was put out because the power failed and she had a soufflé in the oven. Jim, just back from his business trip, said the hell with it. They could eat sandwiches. He was also being driven wild by the telephone ringing. As the mayor of murder hamlet, as one reporter called it, Jim was expected to say something. He did. He told them to “fuck off,” and Mim screamed, “I hate the ‘f’ word.” She would have left to go visit one of her cronies, but the storm was too intense. Instead, she flounced into her room and slammed the door.
Bob Berryman drove around aimlessly. A huge tree ripped out by the high winds crashed across the road. He avoided hitting it. Shaken, he turned the truck around and drove some more. Ozzie sat next to him wondering what was going on.
14
BoomBoom Craycroft thought the worst of everybody. Much as she tried to keep her emotions to herself they kept spilling over, and since she wouldn’t express her sorrow, what she expressed was anger. Right now she was furious with Susan Tucker and she took a sabbatical on manners.
“I don’t give a good goddam what you think. And I don’t care if whoever killed Maude killed Kelly. I want whoever killed Kelly and I’m going to get him.”
Susan hung her head. To a passerby it would appear she was addressing her golf ball with her five iron, an unusual choice off the tee. “BoomBoom, calm yourself. You were the one who wanted to play golf. You said sitting home would drive you crazy.”
BoomBoom, warming up, swung her wood and dug up a clump of Farmington Country Club turf. If the greensman had been there he would have suffered a coronary. Susan, wordlessly, replaced BoomBoom’s divot, then hit a beauty off the tee.
“Been a woody and you’d be on the green,” BoomBoom advised. “I don’t know why I kept this golf date with you. You do the screwiest things on a golf course.”
“I still beat you.”
“Not today you won’t.” BoomBoom stuck the tee in the ground, put the ball on it, and without a practice swing, socked away. The ball rose with a pleasing loft and then veered left, only to disappear in the rough.
“Shit!” BoomBoom threw her club on the ground. Not satisfied, she stamped on it. “Shit! Fuck! Damn!”
Susan held her breath during the indiscriminate rampage, which concluded with BoomBoom turning her expensive leather golf bag upside down. Balls and gloves fell out of the open zippers. Exhausted from her fury, BoomBoom sat on the ground.
“Honey, it’s the pits.” Susan sat next to her and put her arm around her. “Would you like to go home?”
“No. I hate it there more than I hate it here.” BoomBoom shook when she inhaled. “Let’s play. I feel better when I’m moving. I’m sorry I yelled at you when you were giving me the third degree. I didn’t mind Rick Shaw so much but those grotesque news-people ought to be horsewhipped. I slammed the door in their faces. I just didn’t want to hear it from you.”
“I am really sorry. Harry and I think if those of us who know one another as friends snoop around we might find something. It’s a horrendous strain and I haven’t helped.”
“You have. I got to scream and holler and throw my bag on the ground. I feel better for it.” She nimbly got up, righted her bag.
Susan picked up the balls. “Here.” She noticed the brand name. “When did you buy these?”
“Last week. Ought to be gold-plated, the expensive buggers. See my initials on them.” She pointed to a red B.B.C. carefully incised into the gleaming white surface.
“How’d you do that?”
“I didn’t. Josiah did. He’s got tools for everything. He cracks me up, buying this gilded junk, making repairs on it, and then selling it to some parvenu for a bundle.”
“He is funny, though.” Susan reached her ball.
BoomBoom waited until Susan was midway into her backswing. “Josiah said Mim has a purse with a lock on it. Isn’t that perfect?” She laughed.
Naturally Susan’s shot was ruined. “Damn you.”
The ball plunked into the water, sending up a plume.
That made BoomBoom temporarily happy. She found her ball, walked around it as though it were a snake, and finally hit it out of the rough. Not a bad shot.
“If you do think of anything, you will tell me?”
“Yes.” BoomBoom picked up her bag. She wouldn’t use golf carts because that defeated the purpose of golf for her. On weekends she’d use one because the club forced her to, and she complained plenty about it. She even pointed out one fat board member at the Nineteenth Hole and declared if he’d get out of his golf cart and walk, he might stop resembling the Michelin tire boy.
Wish You Were Here (Mrs. Murphy Mysteries) Page 9
