The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  Moody had recited most of his information from newspaper articles and magazine profiles, and was trying to learn more about Hendricks without raising questions. But that could take time and it might be time spent pointlessly. More disappointing, Kurt Kitner had finally stopped by the station as he’d said he would, but only to leave word that nothing new had occurred to him. He was driving north to Illinois to visit a cousin. He didn’t leave a written statement, nor did he leave a number where he could be reached.

  Claudia gazed at a plant wilting on a desktop. The plant was a philodendron and it took a lot to kill them. Someone was killing this one, though. She swallowed the rest of her coffee, then rinsed it in her office sink and filled it with water. She poured it into the planter. Some of it slopped over the side. She plucked a few dead leaves from the plant and stepped back to examine it. With luck, it would survive.

  “So, Hershey, how come you never told me you have a sister?”

  Claudia jumped at the chief’s voice. She turned and said, “I thought you’d gone home.”

  “Headin’ there now. So what’s the story on your sister?”

  “There’s no story. I don’t see her often.”

  “So I gathered. How come? Family’s important.”

  “Sydney and I aren’t particularly close.”

  Suggs grunted. “I got a brother like that. But at least his name comes up in conversation now and then. You’ve never even mentioned your sister.”

  “She travels a lot.”

  “All the more reason to stay in touch.” He gave her an appraising look. “You oughta go home, too, Hershey. You got a life outside the job, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, then, if there’s not a lot to keep you chained to your desk right now—and the way I hear it there isn’t—go on, get out of here.”

  Claudia nodded and said she would. When the chief was gone she sopped up the water on the desk, then went back to her office to make one more call.

  * * *

  Sandi Hemmer didn’t sound overjoyed to hear from Claudia, but at least her voice registered inflection. Still, the girl asked for no updates on the intrusion in her father’s office and after a few strained pleasantries passed the phone on to her grandmother.

  “Hello, Mrs. Bayless,” Claudia said. “I was calling to see how Sandi’s doing, to see how all of you are holding up. I know these have been some tough days.”

  “A week tomorrow,” Mrs. Bayless said.

  Claudia didn’t hear an accusation in her tone, but the reminder of how much time had passed since Stephen Hemmer took hostages and lost his life made her wince. She toyed with the phone cord and murmured a regret.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Bayless, “if there’s anything good to be said at all right now, I suppose it’s that we’ll be out of this motel sooner than we thought. With luck, we’ll be able to leave Wednesday morning. Sandi can start to put this all behind her.”

  “You’ve decided to come back later to clear out the house? I thought—”

  “As it turns out, we won’t have to. We’ve got a buyer for it.”

  So Robin had it right, Claudia thought. She started doodling on a phone message Peters had left on her desk. The Cavalier couldn’t be repaired. She rounded out the “C” in Cavalier, turning it into a circle. Then she colored it in and asked Mrs. Bayless if she wasn’t rushing things.

  “I’m sorry if this sounds morbid,” she said, “but it’s unusual for someone to buy a house that experienced violence so recently. I hope your buyer isn’t trying to take advantage of you.”

  “I don’t think so, not in this case. The builder at Willow Whisper stepped up with the offer. He said he feels badly for what happened. He’s buying it at full market value.”

  “The builder is buying it back?”

  “I know, and I’m not kidding myself. I’m sure he’s also trying to deflect some of the stigma from the whole community. He mentioned that Hercules has more land to develop at Willow Whisper. He’s a businessman, and what happened at Steven’s house won’t help him sell it.”

  “Mrs. Bayless, we’re not finished with our investigation there, and—”

  “I know, but I’m sure Mr. Manning will cooperate with you.”

  Mr. Manning. Claudia tried to flush the name from an earlier memory. Carella had brought it up during a briefing, but that wasn’t it. Something else, somewhere else. She drew a box around “Cavalier” on the phone message and almost in the same moment it hit her. Manning. Boyd Manning. The name first surfaced during her confrontation with Arthur Lane outside the mayor’s house. The mayor’s wife used it in passing when she interrupted them. Manning was running late because he had a flat tire. Manning wasn’t just the mayor’s supporter. He was a personal friend.

  “Mrs. Bayless,” she said, fumbling to think of a way to delay the transaction, “our investigation aside, what about your son-in-law’s property? You’re still going to have to go through everything, aren’t you?”

  “My ex-son-in-law,” Mrs. Bayless said firmly, “and no. Mr. Manning said he’d box the property up as carefully as if it were his own and have it trucked to us in Maine at his own expense. He’s setting up a closing date for Tuesday.”

  “That’s . . . generous.”

  Mrs. Bayless lowered her voice. “My husband and I aren’t young, Detective Hershey. We’ve got a traumatized granddaughter to think about. As for the builder, he’s got a business to think about. His sincerity doesn’t matter to me. Helping us put this behind us does.”

  Chapter 22

  The book itself was oversized, too tall and too wide to sit upright on an ordinary bookshelf, and the pages within the book were glossy, or most of them, anyway. Each chapter was separated from the next by a heavy sheet of parchment, light gray in color and overlaid with a faint watermark of a swan. The swan, the gray . . . they lent the book a quiet sophistication that somehow made death elegant in a way that it never was or ever could be.

  This was Sydney’s version of dealing in death, thought Claudia, though she recognized that her twin probably had nothing to do with the book’s slick design or size. But the substance of the book—those black and white photos—it was Sydney all the way, her style of photography as much a signature as the name she had penned with a personalized dedication on the title page.

  She read it once more: To Claudia, who carries on the celebration of life with me when those who gave us life no longer can. Love, Sydney.

  The cat leaped onto the couch beside Claudia, nearly upsetting the glass of cabernet she held in her hand. It was her second glass. She’d needed the first just to get the book out of the closet and remove it from its wrapping. Boo turned a few times on the couch, then settled down and began doing the milk-tread on Claudia’s thigh. He purred lightly when she stroked his fur.

  Claudia’s intent was to view the book objectively, to put some distance between the images on its pages and the feelings that roiled within her. To the degree that she could manage that, she conceded that Sydney was right about a few things. The book wasn’t just about their parents. In fact, each chapter was devoted to other people, people Claudia didn’t know and whose deaths had come about in a variety of unexpected ways. Some of those strangers had also plummeted from the sky: hot-air balloon riders, sky divers, a hang glider. Others had departed life from closer to the ground in professional racing competitions, mountain-climbing adventures or white-water rafting mishaps. They’d all died doing something they passionately embraced. Claudia supposed that meant, in Sydney’s words, that they had been “embracing life.”

  “Who would buy this book?” she asked aloud. “Who in their right mind would want this on a coffee table?” Boo stretched indifferently, then curled up in an impossible position and closed his eyes. “Yeah,” Claudia said softly. “Not me, either.”

  She turned more pages. Obviously, as resourceful as Sydney was, she hadn’t caught on film the moment life stopped being life for all of the people in her book. I
ndeed, it seemed that she’d actually been on hand for just three of them, including her parents. But somehow she’d been near enough to the others to capture the aftermath—the torn canopy of the hot-air balloon fluttering listlessly on the ground, a cleat from the mountain climber barely affixed to rock . . .

  The photos were grim, but not gruesome, and to Claudia’s surprise most of the pictures depicted Sydney’s subjects and their families in much happier times. Family members had supplied a few. In others, they posed with a photo of their doomed husband or son or wife or daughter. Claudia couldn’t imagine how Sydney had talked them into it. Then again, maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe they’d cherished an opportunity to etch their loved ones into some sort of permanency that the world could see. Markers on a grave.

  When she’d first thumbed through the book eight years earlier, Claudia had focused only on the airplane shots. There were others of her parents, though. A wedding picture. Her mother on a hospital bed, looking bedraggled but proudly showing off two identical babies. Her mother and her father washing down the plane. Her father hoisting Claudia as a toddler, so that she could touch the wing of the plane. They must have been shot with color film, but on the pages they were black and white. Claudia thought artistic license had no business in a book like this, but she was suddenly riveted to another shot and her objection fell aside. The picture showed her days after the wreckage had been cleared from beside their house. She stood where the plane had landed, gazing at the earth still torn. Her face was barely visible, but grief showed in the slump of her shoulders. She remembered standing there, but didn’t remember Sydney taking the picture.

  Claudia took a shaky sip of wine. Her nasal passages felt clogged and her breath seemed loud and ragged. She was not a crier, and even when she fumbled with her jeans pocket to pull out a rumpled Kleenex, she vowed that she wouldn’t cry now. But a few of her tears stained the page. She blotted at them, and she blotted at her eyes, cursing Sydney, damning Sydney and working furiously to not think about how they’d both been abandoned. Then it was over. She disturbed the cat long enough to get a fresh Kleenex and blow her nose properly.

  A while later, she finished—not looking at the pictures or reading the brief accompanying text; that she’d been done with that for some time. But she was finished dwelling on the book, and though she didn’t like it any better and didn’t believe she genuinely understood it any better, she thought that perhaps, finally, she could persuade herself that Sydney had created the book because for some reason, she had to. Maybe it was all right to leave it at that.

  Claudia’s legs tingled when she finally moved her feet from the coffee table and stood. Boo hissed at being bothered for a second time, then immediately took the warm spot she’d vacated. It was nine-thirty. She strolled with a cigarette and half glass of wine into the backyard. Whole weeks could pass without her going back there to do more than mow the infernal lawn.

  The property was fairly large. When she and Robin first moved to the house she’d laid a patchwork of flat walking stones in alternating colors of Cleveland gray and Florida pink. Her back ached for days afterward—it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d first need to dig out the sod—but the stonework made a decent patio. It held a small round table and two chairs. That was it, though. The rest of the yard was all about trees and hedges that grew two feet the minute she turned her back.

  Claudia took a sip of her wine and a drag on her cigarette. She listened to the night noises. You could always count on frogs and katydids to lend their raspy song to a Florida night. She wondered where the birds went after dark, but before she could complete the thought a rustling in shrubbery caught her attention. There was just enough moonlight to see movement, but not enough to determine the animal making its nocturnal rounds. Probably a raccoon or opossum, she thought. Nature was great; she loved nature. But nature sometimes foraged in dismaying ways, overturning trash cans or clawing holes that later needed to be filled. Claudia’s mind flickered to the trespassing call Sally had dispatched an officer to in the morning. The officer—“Charlie 12” on the road, Ryan Richardson otherwise—had concluded in his report that some “varmint” had been “working the ground” on private property. But the officer was a rookie and he’d written the same thing on another trespassing report from a day or two earlier. Claudia hardly knew Richardson. She made a mental note to read his reports again, this time more carefully. He was probably right, but his job was to record details, not draw conclusions.

  For now, though, she put it all out of her mind and concentrated on her wine and her cigarette and the beauty of the dark world around her. When she’d had her fill of it and the bugs started to bite, she went back inside. It wasn’t quite ten o’clock, ordinarily too soon for bed. But she still felt weary from her all-nighter earlier in the week and so that’s where she headed, hesitating only long enough to rummage through her kitchen trash and retrieve the festival tickets she’d thrown away that morning.

  Chapter 23

  A bell on the bookstore door jangled when Claudia walked in shortly after eleven o’clock Friday morning. A sales desk slapped together with unfinished wood stood near the entrance. The desk was unstaffed, although a smoldering cigarette rested in an ashtray on top. She called out a hello. A man’s voice replied from somewhere in back that he’d be with her in a minute; she should go ahead and browse, take her time. Claudia looked around. The store was small and shaped like a boxcar. Used paperbacks with yellowed pages and cracked spines nested on six-foot-high metal racks, so tightly aligned they appeared locked together. Hand-lettered cardboard signs taped to the racks announced the categories. Romance dominated.

  Claudia glanced impatiently at her watch. She moved toward the back of the store to seek out the source of the voice. A blue curtain so filthy it almost looked black blocked entry to what she supposed was the owner’s office or stockroom. It hung limply from a shower curtain rod. She reached to pull it open when it abruptly parted and an old guy emerged. He yanked the curtain closed and clutched his chest in a signal of surprise.

  “Jeez, lady, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “You almost gave me one right back,” said Claudia. And she meant it. He’d blown through the curtain like a leaf caught in an unexpected gust of wind. She pointed toward the front of the store. “You’re cigarette’s about to go out.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Thanks. I figured I could sneak one in before the store gets jammed with customers.”

  Sure.

  He walked her to the front, then eked one last puff from the filter, coughed, and stubbed it out. “Dell Martinlow,” he said. “Most people call me ‘Boxer.’ I used to be fierce in the ring. Being a gal, you probably aren’t much into that.” He reached to shake hands. “Welcome.”

  Claudia reluctantly took his hand. It was dry and leathery, and sported a pricey ring studded with diamonds. Then she said it was nice to meet him, but didn’t introduce herself. Since he didn’t seem to recognize her she might get better mileage acting the part of a shopper rather than a cop.

  Martinlow apparently didn’t notice the breach of etiquette. “Not too many women go for boxers, but the ones who do . . .” He wriggled an eyebrow suggestively, then shrugged when she didn’t react. “I never went big-time, truth be told. Could’ve, but the whole system’s rigged.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Anyway, you looking for anything special?” he asked. “I’m the owner and I know most of my customers, but you”—he wagged a finger at her—“I know you’ve never been here because I’d never forget a foxy gal like you.” He winked. “I may be old, but I’m not dead.” He winked again and cackled.

  The guy never gave up, thought Claudia. She watched his laugh sputter into a cough that left him breathless.

  “Whew,” he said, pounding on his chest. “That was a seven on my personal scale of one to ten.”

  “I bet it was,” Claudia said wryly. When he recovered enough air to carry on a conversation, she asked whether he t
ook trades or simply sold his books outright. He did both, and while he described his collection of used books and system for trades, she took the opportunity to catalog his features for future reference. His face was weather-worn and lined, but he had astonishingly thick hair that men much younger would envy if not for its white color and some unpleasant streaks of yellow. Her eyes strayed to an expensive watch on his wrist and stopped. He had what looked like candy wrappers tucked beneath the band.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing. “Some kind of bookstore abacus?”

  Martinlow threw back his head and roared. “Good one!” He held out his arm so she could get a better look. “These here are from butterscotch candies. I suck on ’em when I’m desperate for a cigarette but can’t light up because of a customer in the store.”

  “Why don’t you just put the wrappers in your pocket?”’

  “Used to. Problem is, I’d forget about them and they’d mess up the laundry. This is just easier. You want a butterscotch?”

  Claudia almost declined, but then thought better of it and said yes. Martinlow reached below the sales counter and brought out two. He popped one in his mouth and crammed the wrapper under his watch band with the others.