John B. Drake turned her around and bent her over the buzzard. She thought he was going to enter her from behind, but he pushed her head down on top of the display. “I made a mistake. People do. You’ve sure made a bunch lately. See?”
And Charlie did see.
She also could not believe her luck. He turned her around but forgot to spread her legs before he moved his hands from her shoulders to pull her shirt away from her chest.
And for the first time in an incredibly long life Charlie got to use her mother’s sagest advice. She gave it everything she had left.
The producer/director of Return of an Ecosystem careened off her with a roar of pain and the canned voice continued calmly, unaware of breaking glass, grunts, falling signs, and crashing room dividers. “The river itself has cut deeply into the Paradox Formation. The Paradox …”
“And I’ll show you something else, Charlie Greene, I’ll show you I’m twice the man I ever was …” His voice was soft and silky now but his S’s hissed like an angered buzzard’s.
The struggle must have reached the source of the recorded voice because it had finally gotten the message.
“Paradox,” it said clearly, “Paradox, Paradox, Paradox.”
Chapter 34
Maybe it was the fact that Charlie was completely naked now. Maybe it was because the producer/director of Return of an Ecosystem was concentrating more on his self-delusions than the reality of his chances of getting away with one more murder. Everybody knows about DNA and semen and stuff these days. And if the sheriff and the press had gone home, the rangers were still here, weren’t they?
Whatever the reason, Charlie managed a last emergency squirm out of John B. Drake’s grasp and nearly made her getaway good.
But she slammed into Mitch Hilsten at the bottom of the stairs and they both went down hard.
Charlie staggered to her feet first, only to be bowled over by Scrag Dickens as he vaulted down the stairs. This time she just lay still.
And the manic electric voice kept repeating, “Paradox” over the sounds of rage and scuffle and swearing.
Actually, it did seem paradoxical that someone so concerned over ecology as to make award-winning film about it thought nothing of murdering four people. It didn’t fit anywhere in Charlie’s stereotype file. Then again, she drew most of her perceptions from the writers she worked with and they were almost all liberal to the core. Any environmentalist would be the hero in their works because that was the natural order of things.
“Charlie?” The voice belonged to Mitch. “Go away.”
“What’s happening?”
“Scrag and John B. are slugging each other somewhere between the Kayenta and the Mesozoic. Where the hell’s that twit of a sheriff?” Charlie intended to live at least long enough to make Ralph Sumpter’s day.
But Mitch was off to join the fray before she’d finished speaking.
It took her a while to figure that out. And to become aware that the “Paradox” voice had stilled, the lights in the displays had gone out. In her present and injured frame of reference, time was not a stable commodity.
There was still plenty of commotion from the men though, but it sounded far enough away for her to try again.
Charlie, still buck naked, was on her hands and knees at the top of the stairs when the press arrived. Somewhere between camera flashes Rita Latham, still dressed for the press, tried to block Charlie’s present image from exposure while yelling lawyer talk about legal ramifications if they persisted.
Charlie did notice Sheriff Ralph getting in a self-righteous ogle or two first, though.
But it was Sidney Levit who removed his starched white shirt to cover her battered nakedness. Not only that, he lifted her, once wrapped, in his arms like the big rat had the fake ranger in the Animal Aliens army scene and carried her off.
She buried her head against his bare chest to ignore the media demands. “Sid? I’m sorry. I had to suspect everybody.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Charlie. I even sort of suspected your mom, just because it was easier. But I began to suspect Drake after Earl’s death. I just couldn’t understand what he had against Cabot.”
“That’s just it. He didn’t have anything against Cabot.”
“Poor Mitch.” Charlie rode beside Rita Latham on the long road out of Dead Horse Point State Park, dressed once again in borrowed ranger clothes.
“It would have been ‘poor Charlie’ if Mitch had gone off with the rest of us,” the lawyer said ruefully and rolled down her window to let the chill air in to poor Charlie. “I can’t believe I let myself get suckered in that way. Or Scrag Dickens either.”
“I can,” Charlie said.
“You’re just lucky Mitch didn’t fall for Scrag’s story.”
John B. Drake had offered Scrag Dickens the only human role in a proposed nature series to be aired on prime time cable. John B. offered this morsel to the desert rat while the two were teamed up to look for Mitch at the cowboy line camp stop on the fated river trip. The series with Disney was a done deal but still a secret until certain financial matters were settled. Scrag was a perfect “character” for the part of host-narrator. No question, the one-time camp follower would accrue fame and fortune and travel the world.
“He even described how the show would open, with me in front of a campfire, playing my guitar and singing.” All Scrag had to do was to lie then, and again tonight.
Scrag had to claim that John B. and he were together the whole time when in fact the director/producer planted Scrag in the shadow of a rock and went off to kill Earl Seabaugh. He smashed Earl’s camera and exposed its film—the possible incriminating evidence of Tawny’s murder. John B., meanwhile, had stolen Homer’s knife before the teams had even parted to search for Mitch, simply slipped it carefully from its sheath before Homer or anyone else noticed. The director was good at shell games, and the river guide wore the weapon more for his image than for actual need so he didn’t miss it.
Scrag claimed to have been terribly shaken by the cameraman’s murder but the lure of fame, fortune, and world travel is very powerful to someone whose libido demands an image that life consistently thwarts. And so tonight, he had been asked to lie again, this time to prove his prowess as an actor.
‘“An audition,’ John B. called it,” Scrag told them after the sheriff and his powerful deputies had pulled the fighting men apart. This time Scrag had been supposed to convince as many people as possible that a UFO sighting had happened out on the tip of Dead Horse Point.
While Charlie Greene had been greasing herself up again with soothing lotion in the bathroom—the press, the sheriff, a good many campers, most of the rangers, Sidney Levit, and even the lady lawyer had fallen for Scrag’s acting and hurried out to the overlook at the end of the Point.
Looking out the car window at the alien scenery now, Charlie could see how all those people could fall for the desert rat’s story. Jagged black tree skeletons pointed at dark heavens blinking with misty starlight. Every bush, every cactus, every stunted tree, every mound or weed or sand hill had an angular moon shadow. It was like driving through an unfocused cubist landscape. It could all easily put you in an “alien” frame of mind. Then again Charlie had experienced near-death, near-rape, and been hissed at by a big live buzzard.
“It’d be dead easy to see flying saucers and little green men and stuff in this place. That’s why Hollywood comes out here to make it all happen,” she told the lawyer. “Did you see anything out at the overlook?”
“No, but we wasted a lot of time looking, or imagining we saw something. Then we noticed Scrag, who’d sent the rest of us packing out there, hadn’t bothered to join us. That alerted the sheriff and Sidney Levit.”
Scrag had stayed behind to try to convince Mitch, who should have been an easy target for that sort of thing, but Mitch began to smell a rat (a human one) and started looking for Charlie. Scrag eventually let his conscience catch up with him and began worrying about her too.
<
br /> “I wonder why Mitch didn’t fall for it,” Charlie said. “He really believes in UFOs.”
“Maybe he was more worried about you. Or maybe he’s not as naive as you think,” Rita said and suddenly stood on the brakes.
“What?” Charlie hit the end of the seat belt and bounced back.
“That stupid rat, it ran right out in front of me.”
Charlie let that sit in her weary brain until they reached the highway and headed for Moab and the motel and Edwina before she asked, “Was it—the rat—like, staggering drunk?”
“Yeah. Really weird.”
“Did we hit it?”
“Yeah, yuck.”
They drove in silence for a few miles, then Charlie asked, “Would you really have used menopause as a defense for Edwina?”
“If it came down to it, I’d have used anything. And you know, from what I’ve learned of the whole situation tonight, that was a large part of the problem.” Rita shivered, and sent the windows back up to close out the night. “Except it was male menopause.”
Chapter 35
Charlie sat ensconced in the breakfast nook of her modest but costly nest in Long Beach, scarfing down Mrs. Beesom’s hot tuna noodle casserole with peas and potato chips. And Maggie’s homemade rolls and salad.
“Tastes like hot lunch in grade school.” Libby’s elegant features warped with distaste. She pushed the Tuna Supreme to the edge of her plate and buttered another roll. “Why does she always bring this over?”
Charlie thought it tasted wonderful, real comfort food. She was so grateful to be alive. And home. And sitting across from Miss Pucker Puss.
Maggie Stutzman grinned at Charlie and passed the beautiful brat the salad bowl. “Try some veggies. You need more than bread and milk.”
Libby speared a tomato wedge and a carrot slice. Everything else was the wrong color.
Besides the casserole, Betty Beesom, who lived behind Charlie’s patio, had brought over a clip from one of her birding magazines about turkey vultures. Charlie had thanked her profusely and dumped it in the trash with a shudder the moment her neighbor left.
The house had been returned to reasonably good order, but Charlie would have to replace most of the blinds. What had they done, swung on them? There was not a lot she could say now though.
Libby’s indiscretions had at least been passably private, while Charlie’s were broadcast worldwide in living color. When Charlie reluctantly broached the subject of her own misdeeds, Libby blushed a deep red with ugly white blotches.
“I just don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
Charlie’d been stunned. First of all, because she didn’t know the kid could blush. And second, Libby never missed a chance to criticize her mother or gain leverage in the Greene household’s battle of wills.
“She’s not sick,” Maggie had assured Charlie. “But nobody wants to think of their parents in a sexual context. How would you approach Edwina if she were the one on national television accused of an affair with a famous sex object?”
Charlie got the point. She also knew she hadn’t, by any means, heard the end of this.
Mrs. Beesom had blushed, too, when she handed over the casserole and buzzard clip. Charlie didn’t even want to think about what was going on in that mind. It was a toss-up as to which topped the woman’s priorities—her church, or wild birds, or her neighbors’ private lives.
Maggie was all cool amusement and patient smirks, knowing she’d get the whole story in due time. And then, of course, there was thegoddamnedcat. Tuxedo took a header into the side of the refrigerator while riding the area rug that had been in front of the sink, did a 180, and gallumphed back into the dining/living room and up the stairs. The gallumphing continued above their heads.
“Probably just took a dump,” Libby informed Maggie, throwing several feet of platinum hair over a haughty shoulder. “Always turns him on.” The kid pried a tomato bit out of her braces with a fingernail and asked Charlie, without quite meeting her eyes but with the return of the interesting coloring, “So, uh … is Grandma going to be all right?”
“Well, she’s no longer in any trouble with the law obviously—but something’s still the matter and was, even before Gordon Cabot got his brain carved with her ax. She won’t talk to me, but I know I haven’t heard the last of that one either. I sure hope it’s not her job. I will never understand that woman, never.”
Edwina had presented her daughter a hangdog look and a pat on the arm when they parted, and given a long weary sigh.
“Oh Jesus, there’s trouble coming down the freeway on that one,” Charlie said grimly now. “But all I can do is wait for the collision.”
Her daughter and her best friend rolled their eyes knowingly at each other. They always sided with Edwina when Edwina was safely off in Colorado.
“Was she really in that much danger of being accused of Cabot’s murder?” Maggie asked.
“Boy, was she. Those dried blood chips in Howard’s Jeep were Gordon Cabot’s. We all wondered what had happened to the murderer’s clothing.” John B. had owned several sets of his standard locationwear—jeans, red-and-black-plaid flannel shirts, and hiking boots. He’d stashed those with the blood and brains somewhere outside the campgrounds and hitched a ride back on the generator truck, appearing to Mitch to have been the last of the diners at his RV to arrive that fateful night.
In reality, he’d been among the first and had sent Earl Seabaugh off to invite Sid to dinner to discuss Cabot’s misuse of the landscape as a ruse. He’d grabbed Edwina’s ax and set off to murder Earl.
“You see, both Earl and Gordon Cabot were bald as buzzards.” And in the dark and in his haste, the director had struck down the wrong man. “He thought that Earl and Tawny had discovered his murder of Tawny’s husband, Ben, years ago. I don’t think they had a clue, but it must have been working on him all these years and living with Tawny had to keep reminding him of Ben. She told me he was going through some kind of change of life and that might have made him unstable.
“John B. planned for Tawny and Earl to meet accidental ends on a dangerous location. But then when he saw me and Edwina—who was acting like a true nut case—arguing over dinner and the ax so handy, he suddenly had an even better idea.”
When Lew flew in the reporters and John B. took Howard’s Jeep to intercept him, the director had picked up the incriminating set of clothing on the way, leaving the blood chips. Then he threw the clothes over a cliff into an all but inaccessible canyon before he reached Lew’s plane.
Only recently, and after two more murders, a group of rock climbers had brought out the plaid shirt and alerted authorities, thinking there might be the body of a fallen climber somewhere below.
“Well, what about the rats and bats?” Maggie dished herself another helping of Betty Beesom’s casserole and then dished half of it back, ruefully.
“There’s this hilarious show on the local cable channel I watched my last morning in Moab.” Charlie slid out of the nook’s high-backed bench seat to make coffee. There were still plenty of sore places on and in her poor body to remind her of the Canyonlands of Utah. “And this guy, sitting behind a bouquet from the sponsoring local mortuary, was wondering if the strange animal behaviors around Moab lately had been caused by the release of uranium into the Colorado River from the tailings pile next to the shut-down mill at the edge of town. And the APC’s pumping of that water into the potash holes. Something about wildlife getting nuked from the evaporation process, or getting into its salty leftovers, or something.”
Only blank looks from the two at the table.
“Potash, it’s used as a slurry in oil drilling and in fertilizers and it’s a basic mineral for all kinds of things, even dietary supplements.” Charlie had learned this from one of the canned messages in the Visitors’ Center’s basement that fateful night at Dead Horse Point State Park.
Still no reaction that made sense from her audience.
Charlie tried again. “Hey, the drunken rats a
nd bats I saw were two thousand feet above the river. That’s not where they get their drinking water and they don’t take vitamins.”
Maggie and Libby stared at Charlie expectantly, waiting for the punch line.
“But Edwina thinks their strange behavior is because of all the filming and tourist disruption in the area. Mitch Hilsten and the National Inquirer now, they think it’s an alien presence that we can’t see or hear that disrupts the bats’ sonar system and drives the rats drunk because they, too, can hear what we can’t.”
Charlie stopped laughing when she realized she laughed alone. She ought to be the expert on aliens. She lived with them.
“You know, after the weird time you had in the Canyonlands,” Maggie said, “that doesn’t sound so far-fetched.”
“Potash—potassium carbonate, hydroxide, any of several compounds containing potassium—particularly soluble compounds such as potassium oxide, chloride, and various sulfates,” quoth the blond metal mouth, fresh off a chemistry exam cram. Full of half-digested facts she’d soon forget when her brain cells were needed for something more important. Cute guys, for instance.
Libby wrinkled her forehead with effort. “One of those is also used, I think, to help out the way hormones work or something … maybe the guy behind the funeral flowers is right.”
“Libby!” Charlie burned her finger on the stove burner under the teakettle and grabbed a paring knife to cut an end off the aloe plant she’d picked up in Oregon several years ago.
The goo you can squish out of the cut ends of the cactuslike leaves seems to erase the pain and prevent blistering. It was the only houseplant his royal highness hadn’t eaten down to the potting soil and then barfed all over the carpet.
“I wonder if rats have PMS.”
“Maggie!”
“What,” the most formidable teen in the world said, meeting Charlie’s eyes head on now, “you’re such a big deal you know everything? You know for a fact everybody else’s ideas are wrong just because you can’t explain it all? Like, who are you to say there’s no such thing as an alien presence?”
Murder in a Hot Flash Page 22
