The Confidence Woman

by Judith Van GIeson

  “I belong to a group that protects quail,” Lynn said. “I keep them for a few days before they are released back into the wild. I don’t have any at the moment, but that’s where I keep them.” She pointed to a pen on the far side of the driveway. “Last year the group released four hundred quail. Those birds wouldn’t have survived without our help.”

  Lynn was a gentle environmentalist who resembled a quail herself, unlike the hawkish Elizabeth. Claire knew there was room for both types in the environmental movement. Lynn was so proud of the group’s accomplishment and her role in it that Claire didn’t have the heart to point out that quail were predator fodder. The more quail that survived, the more rattlesnakes and hawks would survive. Nature was full of checks and balances. Claire thought more of all of them would be a good thing, but she didn’t have to worry about stepping on a rattlesnake in her garage.

  There remained the issue of the unfinished sentence, so she picked up where she had left off earlier. “You didn’t tell me what Evelyn took from your house that you valued,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Steve,” Lynn replied, staring into the desert as if she were hoping some wildlife would come along to divert Claire’s attention and change the subject. “I started eating when he was in the hospital; I was so afraid I would lose him. The only thing that made me feel better was eating. Then he survived and came home and now all he can eat is low-fat food. It would be cruel to pig out in front of him. I wake up in the middle of the night scared to death that he’ll have another heart attack, and I get up and eat. I can’t fit into any of my old clothes. All I can wear are these baggy jeans and T-shirts. I had a couple of caches of food hidden in the garage. Evelyn must have found one and taken it. I know that now, but when I first noticed it was missing I thought Steve might have found it and thrown it away. I didn’t dare say anything because I was afraid to reveal I was secretly eating if he didn’t already know.”

  How could he not know? Claire wondered, watching the wings of skin flap under her friend’s arms. “Did you tell anybody about the food theft?”

  Lynn’s eyes searched the desert as she answered. “Only Miranda.”

  “She knew Evelyn had visited you?”

  Lynn nodded.

  “Did she suspect Evelyn when you told her the food was missing?”

  “She did, but I didn’t believe Evelyn would steal from me until Amaral called. He found the box of food in her house. When he described it, I knew it was mine.”

  “It would have been very easy for Miranda to take the next step and assume that Evelyn had framed her back in college.”

  Lynn didn’t respond.

  “Did she?” Claire asked.

  “What?” Lynn asked.

  “Make the leap that Evelyn had framed her in college?”

  “Yes,” Lynn admitted.

  “Did you know that Evelyn had moved to Santa Fe?”

  “Not until Amaral called. Don’t tell him about Miranda and Evelyn, Claire. I don’t want to make any trouble for her.”

  “Somebody needs to tell him,” Claire said. “Evelyn was murdered. He suspects one of us, but Miranda would have had more of a motive.”

  “It wasn’t Miranda. She wouldn’t kill anyone, and I know it wasn’t you either,” Lynn added, squeezing Claire’s hand. “Amaral could be wrong. Maybe it wasn’t any of us.”

  “Maybe,” Claire said. “Wouldn’t Miranda have told Erwin about the food theft and that Evelyn was here? He just said that he didn’t know who Evelyn was.”

  “I asked her not to tell him. I didn’t want Erwin to tell Steve about the food.”

  Claire, who knew well enough that promises made not to confide in spouses were not always kept, wondered just how good an actor he was.

  “It was awful the way Evelyn died.” Lynn shivered even though the temperature had already risen above ninety degrees.

  “You mean being hit on the head with a blunt object?” Claire asked.

  “No. That would have been quick.”

  “Not necessarily,” Claire said. “Maybe she was incapacitated and she lay on the floor until she starved to death or died of dehydration.”

  “I didn’t think of that. What was awful to me was dying all alone and not being missed until the body had decomposed.”

  “I thought that was just the fear of people who live alone,” Claire said.

  “It’s the fear of everyone,” Lynn replied. She shook her baggy T-shirt as if she was shaking crumbs out of her lap and stood up. “Can you stay for lunch?”

  “I should get going. It’s a long drive, and I have to be at work tomorrow.”

  ******

  Driving up I-17 to Flagstaff, at the point where the road began to gain elevation just north of Black Canyon City, Claire got stuck behind an oversized load with flags on the tail end. It appeared to be a prefabricated house. On its own plot of land, it would be a very small house, but on the road it was an insurmountable obstacle that symbolized the way Claire was beginning to feel about the death of Evelyn Martin. She hadn’t intended to be doing Amaral’s job when she visited her former classmates in Arizona. She wasn’t an investigator. All she’d planned to do was share a bad experience with others who’d had the same experience. But now she had learned something that Amaral probably didn’t know, and the question of what to do about it nagged her. Miranda had left school shortly after the theft. Claire had never seen her again except for the TV appearances and commercials that Lynn told her about. All she knew about Miranda now was what she had witnessed on the screen, heard from Lynn and could surmise from meeting Erwin. But Miranda had a motive the other sisters did not. The rest of the women had been wounded and inconvenienced by the thefts, but Miranda had been forced to drop out of school. There must have been a time when she felt embittered by the experience. Although Claire didn’t know her anymore, she was reluctant to point the finger at anyone, even if it meant pointing the finger of suspicion away from herself.

  As she poked along behind the house, she thought about New River, where Miranda and Erwin lived. In some ways it resembled Cave Creek, but it was farther from Phoenix and less developed. It was tempting to turn around to get out from behind the house. By now there was a half mile of impatient vehicles behind her and she felt squeezed between them and the hard place of the prefab house. But Erwin was playing golf with Steve and Miranda was on location in Mexico. There was no one to visit in New River, and she remained stuck behind the house until it turned west at Flagstaff.

  Claire made good time the rest of the way. There was an hour of daylight left when she got home, time to tend her roses. Nemesis was so glad to be let out of the house that he darted out the door without even acknowledging her return. She checked the messages and found one from her daughter asking about the funeral. Hoping to take advantage of the daylight, she planned to call Robin later. She put on gardening gloves, grabbed a pair of shears and went into her yard. There were ten large rosebushes along the east-facing wall planted by the previous owner of the house. Claire loved the roses, but she wouldn’t have planted them herself; they required too much attention and too much water. She felt guilty about pouring so much water on a plant. But since the roses were already there, she was obliged to tend them. They rewarded her in spring with a wall of color. There were three different types of roses on her wall. The Don Juans were a deep, dark red. The Saint Joseph’s started out yellow then turned orange and red as they opened. The Sweethearts were almost magenta in color. There were places where the branches of one type of rose crisscrossed the branches of another, continually forming new and rich color combinations and reminding Claire that colors in nature never clashed.

  She had a drip irrigation system that allowed her to go away in the summer. It was enough to keep the roses alive, but not enough to keep them blooming. The roots required deep and regular watering, which she accomplished by moving a hose from plant to plant and letting it run slowly until the ground was saturated. While she waited for
the roses to drink, she cut off spent blossoms, a process known as deadheading.

  Claire considered concentrating on the task and the beauty of the blossoms as a form of meditation, a meditation that could be interrupted at any time by the prick of a thorn. It was always a surprise that something so small could cause so much pain, but knowing the thorns were in the roses increased her level of concentration. Claire knew that the solutions to problems were often found by concentrating on something else. When she finished trimming and watering the roses, she cut the best blossom from each plant, took them inside, put them in a vase and filled it with water. While she arranged the flowers, it occurred to her that she should call Miranda, explain her dilemma and hope that Miranda would contact Amaral herself. It might be an unrealistic and naïve hope, but it could relieve Claire of the burden of telling Amaral.

  She didn’t have Miranda’s number, so she dialed information and learned that the number was unlisted, which made sense for an actress. Claire could have gotten the number from Lynn, but Lynn might want to talk her out of contacting Miranda. She asked information if there was a listing for Erwin Bush and got his number. She supposed having a listed number made some kind of statement about Erwin’s career.

  He answered with a gruff “Hello.”

  “Erwin,” she said, “this is Claire Reynier. I met you this morning at Lynn and Steve Granger’s.”

  “My pleasure,” Erwin replied. “Are you back in Albuquerque?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope you had a good drive.”

  “It was fine, thank you. I’d like to get in touch with Miranda. Could you tell me how to reach her?”

  “It’s hard for Miranda to talk when she is on location. I would be happy to give her your number and have her call you. Would that do?”

  “All right,” Claire said. “My number is—”

  Erwin rattled off the number before she could. “I have caller I.D.,” he said.

  “It didn’t surprise her that her number would come up on caller I.D.; it happened all the time. Claire never felt a need to hide who she was from the people she called. She hadn’t blocked her name from coming up along with her number. She was surprised that Erwin hadn’t used her name when he answered the phone; people usually did once they discovered who was calling.

  After she finished talking to Erwin, she called her daughter in Boston. “What did you think of the funeral?” Robin asked.

  “It was a lovely funeral, the right funeral for Nana,” Claire replied.

  “Dad called this morning. He’s so sad.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “He said you were looking well. I believe he misses you, Mom.” There was a wistful note in Robin’s voice that Claire didn’t want to hear.

  “Your father has a new wife, Robin. Our marriage is over,” Claire said, even though she knew that when there were children involved a marriage was never really over.

  Chapter Seven

  WHEN CLAIRE GOT TO THE CENTER THE FOLLOWING MORNING she called the rare book dealers to see if they had any information about her Confidence-Man. No one did. Then she called her friend John Harlan and asked if he could meet her for dinner. John bought and sold rare books for Page One, Too in Albuquerque. A book of the caliber of The Confidence-Man wasn’t likely to end up in Albuquerque, but it might pass through on its way somewhere else. The fact that it was stolen not far from the store by someone who might not have appreciated its worth could have landed it at Page One, Too. If John had come across an exceptional book on the Southwest, he would have told Claire, but there was no reason for him to tell her about a book by Herman Melville. She had never told him she owned a copy of The Confidence-Man. Perhaps she just wanted to talk to him. She had fallen into the habit of discussing her professional problems with him, although not her personal problems. John had known Evan, and Claire had known John’s deceased wife, but they rarely talked about either of them.

  She left the center early. Traffic was lighter than usual crossing town, and she got to Page One, Too sooner than she expected. She walked through the store, said hello to the people she knew behind the counter and went to the door to John’s office. As always, it was a mess. Price guides, papers and books were scattered everywhere. John sat in front of a blank computer screen wearing jeans and a rumpled shirt. She hadn’t expected him to be deep in conversation with an attractive woman with auburn hair. Could they be talking about books? Claire wondered. Somehow she didn’t think so. She glanced at the clock on the wall, noticed that she was ten minutes early and slipped out of the doorway. Then she didn’t know where to go. If she returned to the store, the staff would wonder why she was wandering around by herself. There was a small room between John’s inner office and the store where his most valuable books were kept. She checked the shelves to see if there were any Melvilles. There weren’t. The most valuable books here were all about the Southwest. She couldn’t hear John’s conversation, yet she felt as if she were eavesdropping. Not knowing what to do next, she was thinking about leaving when the woman came to the door, flashed a toothy smile and walked out through the store. Claire entered John’s office and found him standing up and smiling, too.

  “Claire,” he said. “I haven’t seen you for a while. How have you been?”

  “Fine,” Claire replied. “And you?”

  “Good. Where would you like to go for dinner?”

  Claire had eaten enough dinners with John to know that his taste in food ran to barbecue, chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes. He had been raised in Texas. You could take the man out of Texas, but you couldn’t take Texas out of the man. Every time Claire had tried to introduce him to new foods he just picked at them. The one place they had been able to compromise was on Italian food. The prickly part of her wanted to choose a restaurant that she knew he wouldn’t like, but she repressed it and suggested Emilios.

  “Sounds good,” John said.

  They walked out to the parking lot and got into their respective vehicles. Emilios was a short drive down Montgomery, long enough for Claire to remind herself that when John had tried to be romantic she had rebuffed him, but not long enough for her to come to the conclusion that he had only been selling books to the woman in his office.

  He ordered spaghetti with meat sauce. Claire ordered the most unusual entrée she could find on the menu, spaghetti with clam sauce.

  “What have you been up to?” John asked, leaning forward and resting his arms on the table.

  “Evan’s mother died. I went to Arizona for the funeral.”

  “That must have been uncomfortable.”

  “Very.”

  “Evan’s a fool, but I am sorry to hear that his mother died. No matter what kind of dumb mistakes you make in life, your mother’s the one who’ll understand and forgive you.”

  It wasn’t the relationship Claire had with her own mother, but she let that slide. “Did I ever tell you that I had a signed first edition of Melville’s The Confidence-Man?”

  John shook his head. “I would have remembered if you had. A signed first edition is worth at least eight thousand dollars.”

  “Ten thousand,” said Claire. “My copy was stolen from my house by a former classmate at the U of A. She replaced it with the Oxford World’s Classics edition. I didn’t notice the substitution until the police told me it had been stolen. There’s always a possibility that my first edition will turn up at Page One, Too.”

  “It’s possible, but it’s not likely. The people I would try are Tom Butterworth, Simon Collins and Brett Moon. There’s a very limited number of buyers for a book of that quality. It’ll end up where people have real money, not in Albuquerque.”

  “I called all of them. No one has seen it.”

  John leaned back in his chair. “For a bookworm, you sure lead an exciting life.”

  “It’s getting too exciting,” Claire said. “The woman who took Confidence-Man was found dead in her house in Santa Fe, hit on the head with a blunt object.”

 
“Not a book, I hope. I’ve seen some that were heavy enough to be a murder weapon.”

  In spite of herself, Claire laughed. When John was in the right setting, he could be an entertaining companion. “I suspect the weapon had something to do with cooking. The body was found in the kitchen.”

  “Maybe it was a cookbook.”

  “Maybe.”

  The spaghetti arrived and John began twirling his around on his fork. “There are people who would consider a stolen book cause for murder, but I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t even consider it.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Claire said.

  ******

  She climbed into bed that night surrounded by her favorite books. The flames in her gas fireplace leapt to life as she clicked the remote. It was getting too warm for a fire and this could be the last one of the season. Watching fire led to speculation and her thought was that the more men a woman let into her life, the more complications she would have. It had been simpler to let one man—her husband—epitomize all men, but when he walked out it left a crater. The foreboding sensation she’d had when she saw John talking to the woman in his office left her feeling that she must still be suffering a hangover from Evan’s betrayal, or maybe the wound had been reopened when she saw Evan and Melissa together. She and John had made no commitments to each other. She had liked the ambiguous quality of their relationship. They were friends now. Maybe someday they would be lovers. But how long would John remain interested in a potential love affair if a warm body showed up? Was the woman in his office a warm body? Would a relationship with her end his friendship with Claire? She had no way of knowing, but John hadn’t acted any differently at dinner, and she fell asleep wrapped in that comforting thought.