“Yes, indeed! I’ve noticed that a lot of networking and business gets done on the golf course, and I need to be able to play a respectable round to get in on that. I need to develop a wider customer base. Does Tuesday afternoon work for you?”
Betty blanched but then caught my grin. “Had me going there for a moment. Now, what can I really do for you?”
We worked out the details for a best-ball tourney and she blocked out the tee times. “I’ve hired two vans to get them all here on time,” I told her. “I’ll let you know by Monday how many of the players will need to rent clubs.” I made a note to ask Doug how many of his guests were traveling with their own clubs.
“Things go smoothly when you’re in charge,” Betty said.
Her compliment made me feel surprisingly good. “Thanks, Betty. Back atcha.”
The clicking of plastic spikes heralded the approach of multiple golfers. I turned and found myself facing the Troy Widefields, Junior and Senior, and a man I didn’t know. They were kitted out for golf and discussing the terms of their bets for the day. “Five bucks a hole,” Brooke’s husband said.
“With a hundred for the winner to make the round worthwhile,” her father-in-law replied. “No mulligans.”
The stranger assented with a nod.
They noticed me and Betty and greeted us. Troy Jr. looked away from me and made a big production out of picking out a scorecard. I guessed he wasn’t over our tiff at his house.
“Is our fourth here, Betty?” Troy Sr. asked.
“Ready and waiting with the cart at the practice green.”
I couldn’t help wondering, as I said my good-byes to Betty, whether it was Junior’s or Senior’s name in Clay’s ledger. Who was the big bettor? If it was Senior, well, he might be a bit embarrassed to have it come out that he placed bets with the city’s CFO, but if it was Junior . . . I didn’t think Brooke and her husband could afford to lose a fifteen-thousand-dollar bet. Also, if Troy Jr. was about to run for state senator, it wouldn’t do his campaign any good if word got around that he had a gambling problem. The question was: Did he care enough about it to silence Ivy? My eyes slid to his father, handing Betty a credit card to pay their greens fees. Troy Sr. certainly cared enough about his son’s future to take care of any problems that arose. Would he, though, resort to murder to solve those problems? Maybe I should just ask, seeing as they were both standing here in front of me.
“Did you see the article about Clay Shumer in the paper this morning?” I asked, directing the question impartially toward the four people standing at the counter. “Hard to believe, wasn’t it?”
Troy Sr. looked down his nose at me. “Speculation. Shumer’s a good man.”
“You’re not still on about that, are you?” Troy Jr. asked, a hint of exasperation in his voice. “Give it a rest already, will you?”
“Give what a rest?” Troy Sr. asked, looking from his son to me.
“Nothing,” Troy Jr. muttered. Then, as if unable to keep mum, he added, “Amy-Faye is convinced that someone murdered Ivy Donner and is now out to get her.”
Troy Sr., the stranger, and Betty all looked at me and I flushed. “Not exactly,” I said, wishing I could punch Troy Jr. “You’ve got to admit I was right about Ivy being murdered. The police have reclassified her death as a homicide.”
“Even so, why would someone be out to get you?” Troy Sr. asked with a slight frown.
“They’re not,” I said shortly, hoping that would end it. I was sorry I’d started this conversation.
“Because she found a ledger page at Ivy’s, written in code allegedly, that she thinks is connected to Ivy’s death.”
I glared at Troy Jr. I’d known he was immature and spineless, but his betrayal of my confidence, of what I’d told him and Brooke privately, hurt and enraged me. Still, would he have mentioned the ledger page if he was afraid his name might be on it?
Troy Sr. made a dismissive gesture. “I suppose you decipher it with the secret decoder ring from a box of cereal?”
The three men laughed, Troy Jr. a bit shamefacedly, and Betty looked at me with sympathy.
“Have a nice round,” I said, hoping they each put half a dozen balls into the several ponds on the course and lost a few more in the woods that bordered the narrow fairways. Maybe Troy Jr. would get bitten by a rabid gopher. I said another good-bye to Betty and headed toward the door.
My encounter with the Widefields put a damper on my mood. I was feeling bummed out as I reached the van and unlocked it. As I drove away, I glanced toward the course and saw a foursome bumping their way to the first tee box in two carts. Troy Jr. and the man I didn’t know were in the lead, with Troy Sr. driving the second cart and Chief Uggams seated beside him. I watched until they rounded a bend and I couldn’t see them anymore.
* * *
I was driving back to the office when, on impulse, I detoured to Brooke’s house. Troy was on the golf course; we could talk privately. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I was wrong to hide what Maud and I had discovered on the ledger page from my best friend. She had a right to know. Now that the police had the decoded page, it was in severe danger of becoming public and I didn’t want Brooke’s first hint of trouble to be an article in the Herald. Besides, she might be able to tell me whether it was her husband or her father-in-law who enjoyed wagering a sum large enough to pay my annual mortgage on a NASCAR race.
I called ahead and discovered she wasn’t home; she was pulling her shift at the animal rescue shelter she had helped found a few years back. I pulled up outside Heaven Animal Haven ten minutes later. HAH was located on five acres of land on the east side of Heaven. Bordered by a scraggly line of lodgepole pines and set three-quarters of a mile off the road, it wasn’t the kind of place you’d run across by accident. A mobile home served as the office, while two buildings housing animal kennels and runs took up the rest of the clearing. HAH cared mostly for abandoned cats and dogs, but people sometimes brought in wild animals, which volunteers rehabbed, if possible, and released to the wild. The wild animals stayed on the far side of the compound, completely separate from the domestic pets and the people who came to adopt them. HAH didn’t always have wild animals on hand, but since Brooke’s car was parked outside the rehab complex, I deduced that there must be at least one critter in residence.
A painful screech startled me when I walked into the concrete-block building. I whirled and found myself facing a tiny screech owl in a flight enclosure. Unblinking golden eyes were set in the white dish of feathers that made up his face. He let out another ear-piercing shriek and turned his back on me.
“Brooke?”
“Back here.”
I followed her voice to the nursery, where I found her seated on a chair, a tiny red fox kit in her lap, nursing from a bottle. The kit’s sibling mewled from a blanket-lined box set atop the table.
“Oh, how darling,” I cooed, completely forgetting why I’d come.
“Hersh brought them in yesterday. He found them when he was replacing fence posts in his orchard. He heard them crying and located them in an old tree stump. He got his youngest to keep watch for half a day, but when the mom didn’t show up, he brought them here. She was probably hit by a car, or maybe coyotes got her. Here, you feed Copper.”
She passed me the kit, wrapped in a hand towel, and stood to get another bottle and the other kit. “This is Penny. I don’t know if she’ll make it—she’s awfully weak. I think the mom must have been gone for a day or so before Hersh rescued them.”
Copper resembled a newborn kitten, except for his fuller tail and his pointy snout. His eyes were closed now as he suckled, but he’d opened them when Brooke passed him to me, so he must be a couple of weeks old. I ventured to stroke the top of his head with one gentle finger.
“Ah-ah,” Brooke said, shaking her head. “We want to release them eventually. No bonding. No making them li
ke people.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to name them, either,” I said.
She gave me a guilty look. “I have to call them something.”
When the hungry foxes had had their fill of milk or formula or whatever it was, we placed them gently in the box and Brooke slid it into a plastic-sided kennel. They had curled around each other, tails over their noses, and were fast asleep. Brooke made notes related to time and amount of milk they’d drunk, and led me into the hall.
“You should do this full-time,” I blurted. “You could raise funds, get professional staff, get people trained. You’d be great at it, and you’d love it.”
Brooke looked startled and pushed her heavy hair off her face. “I do love it, and it’s important work.”
“You could build a Web page and advertise the pets for adoption across the country. I’ve seen animal rescue places that do that. You could put a Web cam in with the foxes, or the owl or whatever animal you’re rehabbing, and get donations from everywhere.” I was getting excited by the idea, completely forgetting why I’d tracked Brooke down.
“I’ll think about it and talk to Troy,” she said.
That reminded me why I was here. As we trekked across the gravel parking lot from the rehab building to the adoption center, I said, “I saw the Troys at the golf course this morning.”
“What were you doing out there?”
I told her.
She gave me a searching look. “Are you coping okay? With Doug’s wedding?”
I answered as if I’d misunderstood her. “Oh, yeah. It’s a simple one. No live animals or roller skaters in the wedding party, only a hundred fifty guests, reception at the Club. I could plan it in my sleep.”
She blew a raspberry. “You know what I mean.”
I shrugged. “I’m not thinking about it much.” Realizing I’d drifted away from my purpose again, I said, “Maud decoded the ledger page. It’s a list of names of people who placed bets with Clay Shumer. You saw the police took him in for questioning? I guess he was a bookie, running a pretty significant betting operation.” Not that I’d know what was small potatoes and what was big-time. “Anyway, there are lots of names there and, of course, it’s only one page, probably from a while back. Maud thinks anyone on there might have been afraid of Ivy making it public and killed her.”
Brooke’s eyes widened. “Really? What do the police say?”
I felt vindicated that Brooke immediately assumed the police should have the page. “They’re interviewing people.” We had reached the entrance to the adoption center, and muffled woofs came from inside. We pushed through the door and heard another volunteer telling a dog to hush up and eat. The place smelled like disinfectant and animals—not in an unpleasant way—but such that you knew immediately there were plenty of dogs and cats in residence. Of course, the bags of dog food and kitty litter stacked against one wall were a big clue, too.
“Donation from a pet store going out of business in Grand Junction.” Brooke nodded at the bags. “Help me move them into the storeroom?”
“Sure. In a minute.” I bit my lip. “One of the names on the ledger page was Widefield,” I said.
Her smooth brow wrinkled. “Are you telling me that Troy—?”
“Or Troy Sr., or your brother-in-law, or Clarice, for that matter,” I hastily added. “It was a big bet—fifteen thou on a NASCAR race.” She went silent and I asked, “Do you know who—?”
“No.” She bent to pick up a forty-pound bag of dog food, hiding her face. She lugged it to an open storeroom door and I picked up a similar bag and followed her. “It’s not my Troy,” she said, letting the bag fall with a rattle of dog kibble. She nudged it against the wall with the side of her foot.
“Okay.” I accepted that for the moment, sensing that it would only alienate her if I pushed. “Troy Sr., then?”
Putting her hands on her hips, she faced me. “Why are you doing this, Amy-Faye? Why are you trying to make it look like someone in my family killed Ivy Donner? If she was blackmailing the people on that list, she deserved what she got.”
I jerked back as if she’d hit me. Where had that come from? “Ivy wasn’t a blackmailer. Clay could have told his clients Ivy had copied the page, warned them that she might make it public.”
“I didn’t mean that. Of course she didn’t deserve to die.” Brooke’s voice was hoarse, and I suspected she was fighting tears. “Didn’t the article this morning say Clay probably killed her?”
“Not in so many words, but I think the police consider him a solid suspect.”
“Well, then. There’s nothing left to investigate. The police—and you—should burn that list, forget it ever existed.”
“Someone tried that.”
She gave a tiny gasp, but then silence stretched between us. Dust motes floated in a sunbeam from the room’s one small window set high on the wall. A rhythmic skritching sound puzzled me for a moment, but then I decided a mouse was enjoying the dog food before it was dished out to the shelter’s canine residents.
“Brooke, what’s wrong?”
She sniffed and headed out the door. “Nothing.”
We transferred the bags in silence for twenty minutes, and then she fetched a broom to sweep up litter and dog food dust where the bags had been stacked. I didn’t like seeing her like this—silent, withdrawn, and obviously worried about something—but I didn’t know how to help. Music from an oldies station drifted in to cover the silence, and the splat of water on concrete told me the other volunteer was hosing down the dog runs.
When Brooke emptied the dustpan into a trash can, I said awkwardly, “I should be going. Al will think I drove off a cliff.”
Brooke had been giving me her classic profile for the past twenty minutes, but now she faced me. The hollows under her cheeks seemed more pronounced than usual. “Let it go, Amy-Faye. Can you do that? For me? The police have their killer. Does the rest of it really matter?”
I studied her face, troubled. Brooke was my best friend. Ivy was dead and nothing was going to change that. In all probability, Clay Shumer had killed her. Did the details, the whys and wherefores, really matter? Not more than my friendship with Brooke, I decided.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
Relief lightened her face and she hugged me. “Okay.”
I left, not sure anything was really okay.
Chapter 25
I was abstracted on my way back to the office, thinking about the names on the ledger page and about how little each of us knows about our neighbors, and even our friends and family. Undercurrents roiled beneath smiling surfaces meant to convince others that everything was moving along smoothly, that there were no submerged logs or boulders in the stream of daily existence. The encounter with Brooke had me wondering exactly what was going on in her marriage. It wasn’t my business, but I loved her and I was worried. In all honesty, I had to point a finger at myself. I mean, how many people realized how torn up I was about Doug getting married? Bad example. How many people knew I worried about growing my business so I could meet my mortgage every month and keep Al and me employed? Who knew I felt guilty about not making it to church more often and the fact that I didn’t keep in touch better with my sister Natalie? We all had issues that we covered up or disguised almost as a matter of course; others—like whoever killed Ivy—were more proactive and deliberate about their cover-ups.
My thoughts distracted me, and I was halfway from the van to my office door when I noticed someone lurking at the end of the walkway where it emptied into the garden. There was something vaguely threatening about the figure backlit by the sun, something stiff and tense. It was early afternoon on a sunny day, but the walkway was shadowed by the house, and there were only a couple of small windows—bathrooms—in the brick façade. For a moment, I felt isolated, and a remnant of the fear I’d felt when I found the “mind your own beeswax” threa
t prickled through me. I stopped. The figure took a step toward me. I half turned, prepared to make a dash for the safety of the street, when a voice stopped me.
“Wait! Amy-Faye, it’s me. Fee. Fiona Shumer.”
I paused and she came toward me. She stopped a few feet away, clutching her purse tightly to her chest with both arms, and we studied each other. She looked like a different woman from the sleek blond yoga goddess who had taunted me yesterday. Red eyes testified to copious weeping, binge drinking, a sleepless night, or all of the above. Her hair and skin looked dull and her shoulders drooped. She’d apparently dressed all by guess, or in the total dark.
“Fee, are you okay?” I asked, taking a step toward her.
“You’ve got to help me,” she said, her eyes pleading with me. The hands clutching her purse shook.
“Of course. Let’s go into my office—”
“No!” She looked over her shoulder, as if expecting to see a werewolf sneak around the corner and come after us.
“Okay,” I said in a calm voice. “Not my office. When did you last eat?”
She waved an impatient hand. “I don’t know. Last night? Yesterday lunch? Before . . .”
Before the police picked up Clay for interrogation? No wonder she looked so bad. “You need food. You’re eating for two, remember? You’ll feel better with a little soup in you. Let’s go to the Divine Herb.”
Her dull gaze sharpened and she looked down at herself. “I can’t. Not looking like this.”
I thought. “Okay. You wait here, or better yet, in the garden.” I pointed. “I’ll get some lunch to go and then we can talk.”
She nodded but didn’t move. When I made a little shooing motion with my hands, she turned and walked like a zombie toward the garden outside my office. I watched her shamble away, then trotted toward the café. In about five minutes, I was back in the garden, two take-out containers of minestrone soup cradled against my chest and a couple of cookies in a bag dangling from my hand. Fee sat on the stone bench under the apple tree not yet in bloom, and I sat beside her. Silently, I handed over one of the soup containers, several cracker packets, and a spoon. We ate in silence.
The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco Page 21
