Ladies' Circle of Murder (A Lacy Steele Mystery Book 8)

by Vanessa Gray Bartal

  They’ve got me. Get them off! Get them off! She reached for the door again as it swung open. A little old woman with buzzed gray hair stared down at her. Lacy’s panic fled, to be replaced quickly by humiliation. She could only imagine what she looked like on her hands and knees in a puddle of red rubber balls.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Lacy said.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked. “I heard the strangest sounds coming from this room.”

  “Yes, I’m fine. They spilled and…” her words trailed off as she stood. She kicked a ball away. It bounced off the wall and slammed hard into her thigh. She doubled over and clutched her leg. If they were keeping dodgeball score right now, she would have just tagged herself out.

  The woman opened the door wider for her and moved aside as she exited the ball room. “It happens to the best of us,” the woman said, although Lacy had doubts it had ever happened to her. Though clearly past middle age, the woman still looked trim and athletic, like a former gym teacher.

  “I was trying to find the pool,” Lacy explained.

  The woman eyed her suspiciously. “You were going to swim in that outfit?”

  “No, I wanted to see it. I haven’t been here since I was a kid.”

  “The pool’s through that door.” She pointed to a door marked POOL in glaring neon letters.

  “They should mark it better,” Lacy joked, but the woman didn’t laugh.

  “Good luck,” she called and hurried briskly toward the exit. Lacy lagged slowly behind. She was probably almost late now. Jason would be pacing the floor. He liked to be early for everything. But her thigh hurt and the hateful game hadn’t even started yet. She had no desire to add to her bruise collection.

  She entered the court as the game was getting ready to start. As she had predicted, Jason was waiting for her. He took her hand and led her forward. “Here, she’s here,” he announced. A man on the other side of the court nodded and marked something on a paper. “If you hadn’t shown up, we would have had to forfeit,” he explained.

  Lacy nodded. “Sorry, I had some trouble in the locker room.”

  “What kind of trouble?” he asked.

  “The usual stuff. What do I need to know about playing this game?”

  “Don’t get hit,” he said.

  “Right,” she said. She reached in her pocket and inserted her mouth guard. Jason gave her a quick sidelong glance and then turned to stare at her fully.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Talking was impossible with the guard in. She removed it to answer. “My mouth guard.”

  “Why does it cover your face like a cage?” he asked.

  “My orthodontist made it for me after I tried to play intramural football in college. He said I would need to wear it to avoid cracking another molar if I ever attempted sports again,” she explained. “Is it hideous?”

  “No, I dig the Silence of the Lambs vibe. But I can’t believe your college intramurals let you play tackle football,” he said.

  “They didn’t. It was flag.”

  He blinked at her. “I love you.”

  “Sometimes I’m suspicious you say that to remind yourself.” She smiled before reattaching the mouth guard that didn’t allow for any extraneous lip movement.

  He took her hand and gave it a squeeze as the whistle blew and the game began. Jason didn’t move away from her, even though she had frozen like a statue and was now a glaring target. Around them, balls began to fly. She watched as one whizzed into the face of a heavily made up woman, leaving a makeup imprint on the ball.

  “Oh, that had to hurt,” Jason muttered, wincing. “Come on, we need to get in the game. Stay behind me.”

  Even without the mouth guard, she would have found speech impossible. Her mouth was dry, her tongue thick and swollen with fear. She nodded and ducked low, scrabbling so closely behind him that she scraped his heels. A ball flew toward them. He caught it with one hand and tossed it away, pegging an opponent.

  Another ball zinged toward them. Jason put his hand on her head and pushed her down. As she ducked, the ball whistled by, less than half an inch from her ear. As they advanced onto the court, Lacy began to feel like she was Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. More and more balls were being directed at them, but with Jason there, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. He caught them, tossed them away, tagged opponents, shifted her out of the line of fire, pivoted to catch another ball with his left hand while tossing one away with his right. Lacy stood still and watched it all happen as if in a dream. Meanwhile Jason continued to be everywhere at once. At one point he leapfrogged over her back, caught a ball that had gone impossibly high and still managed to shift Lacy out of the line of fire as he came back down. She had never seen anything like him before. It was as if all her bad luck on the court was reversed by being in his orbit.

  At one point she was sure she was a goner; Jason had traveled several feet to the side when a ball came out of nowhere and zoomed toward Lacy’s head. She stared at it transfixed. It was the ball that had smacked the lady with makeup. The imprint of her lipstick was still visible so the ball appeared to be screaming as it hurled toward her. Lacy couldn’t move. It was going to hit her full in the face. Even with her mouth guard in place, it was traveling with enough force to break her nose.

  Get out of the way, move!, move!, move!, she commanded herself, but she remained motionless. Jason didn’t. With no time to stop the ball, he decided to move her instead. He dove for her legs, taking her down in a full-body tackle. Lacy braced herself to smack the gym floor, but he rolled instead, taking the brunt of the impact on his shoulder while she landed softly on his chest.

  The whistle blew.

  It was over.

  Lacy leaned in for a kiss. Jason’s face mashed between the bars of her mouth guard, smooshing his lips together until they were plump and misshapen. She backed away and removed the guard. “Sorry, I forgot.”

  “’S okay,” he said. He scrubbed a hand over his face to push it back to its normal shape and kissed her succinctly before standing to help her up. “You survived.”

  “Thanks to you,” she said. “That was incredible. I knew you were good at sportsing, but I had no idea you had that kind of power.”

  “What kind of power?” he asked.

  “The power to cancel out whatever’s wrong with me,” she said.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said. “You have to trust me.”

  She nodded. “I do.”

  “Come meet the rest of our team,” he said.

  “We’re on a team?” she asked. The entire night felt like a blur. She thought she and Jason were the team, but now there were others.

  “We have to have at least five members present to play,” Jason said. They headed across the court to meet the assembled group.

  “How did you pick the team?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. The assignment was random, except for Travis.”

  She looked around. “Travis is here? Where is he?”

  “He’s not here tonight because he had to work, but he’s on our roster. Thankfully we had five players without him.” They stopped in front of a group of other players who were all dripping with sweat. Lacy was the only one not wiping herself with a towel or downing a sports drink. Had there been that much movement in the game? How long had it lasted? It had seemed like no time at all, and mostly all she had done was stand still while Jason whirled around her. If she were the sun, he would have been a fast-moving satellite destroying all the asteroids that tried to come near her.

  “Hey. Good game.” A sweaty guy gave Jason a heads up nod. He looked vaguely familiar, but Lacy couldn’t place him.

  “You, too,” Jason said. “This is my girlfriend, Lacy. Lacy, this is Dan Foreman.”

  The name rang a bell, and the face clicked. Dan-the-Man Foreman was a local used car salesman whose ads were on billboards all over town. Now he gave Lacy a glaringly toothy smile and stuck out his hand for a s
hake.

  “This is my wife, Marcia,” Dan said, indicating the overly made up woman to his right. Between being hit by the ball and sweating, Marcia’s makeup had shifted slightly to the side. She appeared to have two faces, one real and a scary one made out of melted foundation, mascara, and lipstick.

  “Hi,” Marcia said. Her voice was perky. She offered Lacy a friendly smile and dainty handshake and introduced the other member of the group, the gray-haired old woman from the locker room. “This is Celia.”

  She didn’t indicate their relationship, and Lacy was curious. Was Celia her mother? The two didn’t match at all. Celia appeared to be no-nonsense, and Marcia had already pulled a tube of lipstick from her pocket and began making repairs. “Are you two related?” Lacy asked.

  Marcia and Celia looked at each other and laughed. “No, we met at a knitting circle,” Celia said.

  “You should come sometime,” Marcia offered.

  Lacy gave a noncommittal nod. She was almost as hopeless with crafts as she was with sports. When she tried to think of the things she was good at, the list seemed despairingly short.

  “We were going to grab some drinks to celebrate. Are you guys in?” Dan asked.

  “Thanks, but we can’t make it. Some other time, maybe,” Jason said.

  “Do we have plans?” Lacy asked after they said goodbye and walked away.

  “Yes, we plan on not spending the rest of our evening with two strangers and a used car salesman,” Jason said. “Unless you’d rather. It’s probably not too late. I could get them back.” He turned to go. Lacy grabbed him and pulled him back.

  “Ha, ha, good one. I should let you go, and then you’d be sorry.”

  “I would be sorry. I don’t want to be with anyone but you tonight. I’m going to grab a quick shower. Do you want to wait here?”

  “I’m going to swing by the Stakely building and make sure all’s well. I’ll meet you at your house,” she said.

  “Okay, but you don’t have to pick up snacks because I took care of it,” he said.

  “What did you get?” she asked, working hard to keep her voice neutral. Their ideas of appropriate snacks were vastly different.

  “Fruit for me. For you, I got cookie dough and gummy bears. The Lacy-approved brand of cookie dough, and not the generic brand. I learned my lesson after last time.”

  “You’re too good.” She stood on her toes to kiss him, and they went their separate ways.

  Lacy started her grandmother’s car and cruised by the Stakely building. Everyone had left for the evening, except maybe Joe. It was hard to tell because he walked to and from work and sometimes napped in her office when he was tired. He kept odd hours and often wandered to work when he couldn’t sleep at home. His come-and-go schedule suited Lacy fine, especially because he was more often at work than he was away.

  She turned down a side street, one that took her by the car repair place. She hadn’t made a conscious choice to drive by, but her mind was still thinking about the afternoon. What was the mysterious connection between Bob and her mother? And why had her mother become so cagey in the man’s presence? If they had a little fling in high school, as Lacy suspected, why wouldn’t she admit it? High school for them had been a few decades ago. Who cared if the popular cheerleader had a brief romance with the guy from shop class? But Frannie had always had snobbish ideas about social ranking, as proved by her treatment of Lacy. She hadn’t known what to do with a geeky, awkward child who was as close to being a cheerleader as she was to being a rhinoceros.

  Lacy came into view of the shop and braked hard in the middle of the street. Riley’s car was sitting outside. Tosh was out of town and Riley was too pregnant to fit behind the wheel. That meant her mother must be driving. But what was she doing at the shop at night? If her car was ready, why hadn’t she called Lacy for a ride? She would need one to avoid leaving the car there overnight.

  While Lacy watched in consternation, her mother eased from the shop, looked both ways and scurried to her car. Despite her earlier caution, she threw the car into gear and squealed away without checking to see if there were any other cars coming.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Lacy thought. Without thinking, she eased into the spot her mother had vacated and turned off the car. Maybe her mom wasn’t forthcoming, but Bob might be. He had been friendly enough earlier. Maybe he was a talker. Maybe he could fill in the missing information of the high school connection between the two. Beyond that, she wouldn’t let herself wonder what her mother had been doing visiting a strange man’s place of business after hours.

  The lights were on inside the shop, but Lacy still knocked on the door. The knock was tentative. When no one answered, she let herself in.

  “Hello?” she called. “Bob? It’s Lacy Steele, Frannie’s daughter. We spoke earlier when we dropped off her car. It’s the silver Toyota with Florida plates.” Why had she felt it necessary to add that? She had no idea, but she was suddenly nervous and babbling. What if she learned something about her mother she’d rather not know? “Hello?” He still hadn’t answered. When she moved from the entrance to the repair portion of the shop, she saw why.

  Bob was lying on the ground, trapped beneath the lift he used to raise and lower cars. A blue Buick was still atop the machine. Lacy took a step forward to help, but quickly realized there was nothing she could do. His body sprawled lifelessly, a pool of blood by his head. She turned and pulled out her phone, not wanting to see any more.

  “Jason?”

  “I’m almost there. Did you let yourself in?” A few weeks ago, he gave her a key to his house. To Lacy, it had seemed like a big deal. To Jason, it had been a pragmatic way to ensure she could get inside when he was detained by work.

  “No, I have a problem. I’m afraid I’m going to need you to come here,” she said.

  She was trying to be calm, but he must have picked up on something in her voice. “What’s the matter? Are you at work?”

  “No, I’m at the car repair place, Bob Hoskins. It’s, um, could you come here, please?”

  The great thing about living in a small town was that he was there almost before she finished speaking. The phone was still at his ear when he bounded from his Jeep. He tucked it into his pocket and opened the door. “What’s the problem?” he said, but then he rounded the corner and saw for himself. “Oh.” He pulled out the phone again and called it in.

  With the cavalry on its way, he stepped forward and examined the body. Using a nearby pen, he lifted Bob’s shirt and looked at his stomach. Lacy had no desire to get closer, but she was still curious.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking to see if the blood has pooled yet. That will give us some indication of how long he’s been gone.” He let the shirt drop and used the pen to touch the lift’s switch. “It’s within reaching distance of his right hand. He must have gotten crushed before he could grab it and turn it off.”

  “You think this was an accident?” she said.

  He turned to look at her. “You don’t?”

  She shrugged. She didn’t know what to think. All she knew was that she had watched her mother leave a building where there was now a very dead body. Something didn’t feel right, but she had no idea why.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. I’ve read a few stories of mechanics being crushed before. Usually it’s because the car slips off the lift, but it’s not such a stretch to see this. He must have gotten pinned somehow. Maybe his clothes got stuck.” He leaned forward and tried to see closer, being careful not to step in the blood. He would have to look when they lifted the car, Lacy realized. She didn’t want to be here for that part.

  “You’re going to have a long night,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but he was distracted, his attention mostly on the dead body in front of him. “Rain check on the cookie dough.”

  “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t called you, the detective on call would have caught this.”

  “I’m th
e detective on call tonight. Either way, it’s not your fault,” he said. “Could you grab a statement form from my car? After you fill it out, you can get out of here before things get gory.”

  She found the form and sat in his Jeep to fill it out. The temperature was dropping, but Lacy’s chill had nothing to do with the weather. A man had died, a man she had just talked to hours before. Even more troubling was her mother’s presence. At some point she was going to have to tell Jason about that, but not now. Now processing the scene distracted him. Anything she had to tell him could wait, especially because it looked like an accident.

  It looked like an accident. Why had she thought of it that way? Who was she to say it wasn’t? Would Jason still think it looked like an accident if he knew Frannie had been skulking around and keeping secrets? Yes. The thought that anyone might think her mother capable of violence was ludicrous. She preferred to take out her anger in more subtle ways, through double-edged compliments and outright barbs.

  By the time she finished with the form, the coroner and an ambulance had arrived. Lacy should take the statement in to Jason and say goodbye, but they would move the car off the body soon. She didn’t want to see that. Instead she left the statement on his seat and jotted a note. “Love you, try to get some sleep. XO, Lacy.”

  In the morning, they would talk and she would tell him about her mother. He would check with Frannie, find out what she had been doing there, and that would be that. In the morning, everything would be resolved.

  Chapter 4

  In the morning, Jason called her. His tone was grave.

  “I have news. I need to talk to you.”

  Lacy’s first thought was that he had found something incriminating at the scene, something that tied her mother to the dead man. “I’m at work. Should I meet you somewhere?”

  “I’ll come there,” he said and disconnected.

  She alternately fidgeted and stared at her phone until he arrived. What had he found? Was Bob’s death not an accident after all?

  He let himself into her office. She rose abruptly to her feet, waiting for the bad news. Jason wasn’t as tense as she was, however. He kissed her and handed her the coffee he had brought before sitting in the chair across from her desk. “I’m leaving.”