1 Portrait of a Gossip

by Melanie Jackson

  “Any guesses about where the computer is now?” he asked politely.

  “Probably dropped off the cliff and into the river,” Juliet answered, waving at the trail that rose behind Harvey’s cottage. “There’s a gate up there from the days before the cliff started crumbling. No one is supposed to use it because it isn’t safe, but it’s there and we all have keys for it somewhere. They came with the cottages.”

  “Care to show me this gate?”

  He seemed to take for granted that she would want to offer help and wasn’t shooing her away from the investigation in the usual territorial police manner. In Juliet’s experience, there was a lot to be learned about people in seeing what they took for granted.

  “Not really,” she half lied. “But I suppose I must. The trail really is rather dangerous. But let me feed the cat first or he’ll tag along and end up with stickers in his fur.”

  Because the cat also expected things. Like meals and a roof over his head and someone to brush stickers out of his fur. Juliet shook her own head, realizing that she had just acquired a cat.

  Chapter 4

  There was still a narrow band of shade at one side of the trail and Juliet did her best to use it since she was wearing neither sunscreen nor a hat. A woman her age did not look cute with a peeling nose. Heat had begun condensing around the rocks. It was enjoyable for a time since shock had chilled her, but Juliet didn’t want to be up there once the breeze died and the air became breathless. Once the heat set in there was no cooling until afternoon when they got some cloud cover and the wind began running back down the draw. Once in a while they would have fog but it was rare that it reached this far over the mountain.

  “Miss Juliet—” The trail had widened another few inches and Garret came up beside her.

  “Just Juliet, please. Miss Juliet makes me feel like my grandmother,” she answered absently. Her nerves were wrung dry. Being a loner, she wasn’t used to dealing with strangers in the early hours that she usually gave over to painting. Her brain, however, was not in the mood to let the problem go, so she knew it was pointless to try and get back to her paints just yet.

  She was also getting hungry and wished she had something sweet at her bungalow besides some nasty Christmas chocolates that tasted like they were stuffed with antacids and mouthwash.

  “Juliet, can you explain the difference between an artist and an artisan and a craftsman?”

  This exasperated question brought her back to the present and she wondered what Asher Temple had said to him. The sheriff was not an unintelligent man, but he was likely a bit out of his depth. For a here-and-now man who probably played softball, liked fishing, and watched American Idol, a crowd that lived in some mental construct, emoted freely, and had no similar connection to reality or pop culture—not even TV—would be an enigma shrouded in mystery.

  “Who do you think will win American Idol?” she asked.

  “Er … maybe the boy from Georgia. He’s got a lot of personality and a good voice.”

  Juliet nodded.

  “To answer your question, the difference is ego, mainly. Fortunately my neighbors’ eccentricities haven’t blossomed into full-fledged egomania. In most cases.” He blinked at her answer and then smiled a little, making Juliet realize that he had been looking unusually grim since he arrived. That was hardly surprising, of course, but she preferred the friendlier version of the law. Juliet went on attempting to explain. “Artists are often lost in creativity though. Not just focused on a job, but obsessive to the point of being blind to the needs of anyone or anything else. Things that you would think were standard knowledge, writ large in letters of fire, are sometimes missed. You know that poem about no man being an island? That isn’t true of artists—at least not the young ones who know they are destined for greatness and possibly immortality. Think of the mad scientists from the movies.” The sheriff snorted. “The rest of us—the craftsmen—are happy to create, but we are more competent and workmanlike. We remember to feed ourselves and are aware of others’ feelings and reactions. We don’t feel that art exempts us from good manners or entitles us to special behavior.”

  At least, not criminal behavior.

  “Can they help it, the artists, or are they just…?” He sounded frustrated as he searched for a word, and she supposed that for a non-artistic person, dealing with the creative and sometimes egotistical personalities of an artists’ colony could be frustrating, especially when they shared no common cultural denominator.

  “Born weirdoes?” Juliet suggested and then shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’m one of the craftsmen who like to eat.”

  “And remembers to feed the neighbor’s cat even if she has to leave her own work half-done.”

  So he had looked at her painting and identified the work as hers and that it was unfinished. He wasn’t a complete cultural heathen then.

  Twin black shadows flickered overhead. Juliet glanced up and almost fell on her face. Garret’s hand saved her.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A pair of ravens. I think they are following the cat.”

  “They’d have to be crazy to take on that orange puma. He’s got to weigh at least twenty pounds.”

  “Courage in numbers,” she said back. “And some of that is fur.” Only not that much. Marley was pretty heavy. “Still, I hope you are right. Marley wouldn’t enjoy becoming a completely indoor cat.”

  “Any thoughts you’d like to share about Harvey Allen? You’ve never been in to complain about him. Did he get under your skin like he did everyone else?”

  “No, not really. Though I am sure he would have gotten around to it eventually. Or tried.”

  “He wouldn’t have succeeded?” Garret asked. They were both breathing a little harder as the trail steepened. They also had to drop back to walking single file. Juliet’s calves began to protest the second steep climb.

  “I spent most of my career working for some of the most exasperating, egotistical men on earth. I am not certain that Harvey Allen was in their league.” Though she wasn’t entirely certain that he wasn’t and that bothered her. “I will be interested to hear what Dr. Hyder says about time of death.”

  “What do you think he’ll say?” Garret asked curiously.

  He was being so unpoliceman-like that Juliet began to suspect that he had done more than surface digging about her past. If he had searched at all he would have run into her old career. She wasn’t living a secret existence in deep cover, just not dragging her old life behind her.

  And maybe he realized that he was going to need a guide and interpreter because his suspects were such rara avises, and she seemed like the most normal of the inmates.

  “Well, time of death was definitely sometime before the storm which rolled in around four o’clock. But not much before,” she said.

  “Your reasoning?”

  “The wasps—you call them meat bees—hadn’t gotten at him. And he would have taken down the mike before it started to rain even if he were listening to something fascinating.”

  Garret declined to discuss the wasps, which suited Juliet. She had watched them strip a dead blue jay of meat in under an hour.

  “You don’t think he tried for the microphone, maybe after it started to rain, and that’s how it got broken? Things would have been slippery on that roof.”

  “No,” she said simply. “He may have gone outside to remove the microphone and had the killer sneak up on him. But the mike was expensive, not something picked up at the local electronics store. He would have been careful with it and not left taking it down to the last minute. Also, he was tall. He didn’t need to get on the roof to retrieve it.”

  They climbed in silence for a while, the sheriff occasionally taking her arm when the way got rough. Her flat ballet slippers were less than ideal for the uneven ground. She should have gone back to her bungalow and swapped them for sneakers.

  “How would someone know he had it?” Garret asked.

  Juliet was sure that he had al
ready reasoned this through but for some reason wanted her confirmation of his theory.

  “Anyone with binoculars could have seen him putting it up. Anyone in the nearby bushes could have seen too. There’s a place near the trail where someone had been sitting. Or he might have told someone outright that he had recordings of something they said.”

  “Was Harvey Allen that dumb?”

  “Yes—well, maybe not dumb. But he’s made a career out of blackmailing and spying on people. It is possible that he had gotten cocky and didn’t judge the difference between a movie star’s annoyance with the paparazzi and a high-strung artist’s reaction to a threat to their life or career. He was also inclined to let his contempt for his neighbors show. He seemed to think that distracted artist was the same thing as feebleminded and weak-willed.”

  “And you’re sure it was an artist who killed him?”

  “Or craftsman. Pretty sure. No one could have gotten into or out of the compound after the storm started. I tried and ended up with a car full of mud.” Juliet pushed her glasses up her nose. Perspiration was making them slip. “We didn’t have any visitors who came by car yesterday, and only a grocery delivery in the morning. At least I am unaware of any other vehicles entering the compound. Robbie Sykes will be able to tell you about that.”

  “He says no, though he did have to make a brief trip into town.”

  “So that leaves people on foot. We don’t get too many of those since the road up the hill is steep and the other route involves ropes and pitons.”

  Garret nodded.

  “So the death was premeditated, would you say?”

  Juliet thought about it.

  “Perhaps not in the traditional sense of the word. I mean, the killer may have thought for some time that Harvey should die, but I think this was a crime of opportunity. An opening presented itself and the killer said yes to temptation. Frankly, I suspect that if we hadn’t had that storm which would have made this trail into a seasonal stream, Harvey would have ended up in the river too and you would be investigating a disappearance.”

  Garret grunted. It could have meant anything, but Juliet chose to interpret it as agreement rather than mere acknowledgment.

  “You don’t seem very disturbed about things—for which I am grateful,” he added swiftly. “There is enough agitation around here.”

  “Well, I am and I’m not. The killer should be found. We can’t be safe with a neighbor who is resorting to homicide to do away with what annoys them. But I do not feel that I am in jeopardy. At least not yet. Hence the lack of hysteria.”

  “Frankly I can’t picture you being hysterical no matter what the provocation.”

  Juliet was flattered. She had always prided herself on the ability to remain calm and level-headed in a crisis.

  When they reached the gate Juliet took a seat on a convenient stone near a sunbathing lizard and let the sheriff do the police thing alone. While he examined the lock she closed her eyes and listened to the finches twitter, their voices slightly louder than the blood rushing in her ears. After a moment she searched her pockets and came up with a rubber band. Her hair was just long enough to put in a short ponytail.

  Around her there were poppies sheltering in the rock’s deeper fissures. Most had been destroyed by the storm, stripped of petals or buried under leaf-wrack, but a few remained. Vivid, almost opalescent when touched by the sun, they made Juliet wish that she had her paints with her. In spite of her words to Garret, she was enough of an artist to want to capture the moment.

  With the sky so clear and the wind so still, she was able to hear noises from below. Carrie Simmons’ shrill voice was easy enough to make out. Apparently murder was more interesting than rubber stamps, though she was still lamenting the time away from her drafting table.

  It took a moment to place the other voice that answered. Asher Temple sounded annoyed. Carrie had probably woken his mother, Elizabeth, who napped around eleven each morning.

  Artists came in two types: those who were certain that death—even murder—couldn’t be as important as their work and therefore didn’t concern them. And those who knew—because their work was so important—that the death had to somehow be all about them and their work. Carrie was the latter and Asher the former. Unlike Raphael, who was an obvious genius, Asher painted the kinds of things that needed an art dealer’s intercession to make them accessible to collector-investors. There was no hope and no desire to be appealing to the masses who liked pictures of cute animals and English cottages and gardens. His only humanizing feature was his devotion to his wheelchair-bound mother, a lovely lady who hand carved every frame that graced her son’s work. She also did wonderful quilts, made from scraps so small that they looked like impressionist paintings.

  Juliet also heard Mickey’s voice saying something soothing and wondered if the potter was able to see the killing as being part of God’s wondrous plan. Of course, perhaps it was. Maybe Harvey had been called home and the murderer was only the Lord’s chosen machine.

  Mickey was tall enough to have reached the microphone with only the smallest of hops, she thought abruptly. And he was strong enough to move the body to the Adirondack chair, supposing the shooting had happened elsewhere. He could also, barring the rain turning the path into a river, have carried the body to the gate.

  Rose Campion, his sometimes companion, was the other extreme. She was almost taller sitting down than standing. She probably couldn’t have reached the roof even with the aid of the nearby bench. Certainly she couldn’t have moved the body even if she had had the inclination.

  The sheriff very bravely climbed the gate and peered over the top. The eroding ledge was about three feet wide at the gate but narrowed on either side. The views were spectacular, but not great for anyone with vertigo. However, it required very little in the way of muscle to fling a portable computer over the gate and into the river, which was still loud enough to reveal its current state of post-storm torrent.

  Juliet’s stomach rumbled and she stood up. They were wasting time up there. The killer was waiting down below.

  It was still early enough for there to be a few sharp shadows that were charcoal black against the pale rock, but the shade was shrinking and she was beginning to think earnestly about what foodstuffs were in her kitchen. And then about getting back to work. She had a commission and did not want to be late with it. One of her other commercial jobs was supplying illustrations for seed catalogues which they used to demonstrate garden layouts that they didn’t have time or space to do in their own test gardens. This one was for a deer-resistant herb garden.

  “Look, Sheriff—”

  “Call me Taylor. Or Garret.” The sheriff climbed back down from the gate.

  “Taylor, I’d love to talk some more about the case, but I’m about to faint from hunger.” Juliet jumped as something twined about her ankles. Marley had joined them. Had he intuited that she was ready to eat lunch? “Marley says it’s time for tuna. If you like, come have lunch with us.”

  Garret hesitated.

  “I’d like to, but I need to get started searching the bungalow before my deputy leaves. I don’t feel confident that locking the door would make it secure.”

  “You’re right. It wouldn’t. Since every key opens every lock, most of us don’t bother locking our doors.”

  “I figured.”

  “So, I’ll bring you a sandwich instead.” He looked surprised and Juliet wondered if she had been too abrupt. That sometimes happened when she was thinking of other things. “Unless you don’t like tuna.”

  She hoped he wouldn’t decide to send her away. She needed to find the killer and get him out of her Eden but, and here she was sharply honest with herself, she was also doing this because maybe she was just the tiniest bit bored and the hunt was entertaining.

  “Uh—I do. Thank you, but—”

  “The Bible tells us to be not forgetful to entertain strangers.”

  “Well….”

  “I didn’t kill Harv
ey so you needn’t worry about breaking bread with a murderer.”

  “I wasn’t actually worried about that. I was thinking more of appearances. Technically I have to consider you a suspect.” This was said apologetically.

  “Oh, well, if you would rather go without….”

  “No. A sandwich would be good. I think I’m going to be here for a while. I’ll just have to risk people saying I succumbed to a bribe.”

  She smiled.

  “My tuna isn’t that good.”

  Chapter 5

  “Why did you leave your old job?” Garret asked when they reached Harvey’s bungalow and caught their breath. The body was gone, so either the deputy and the doctor had managed, or Robbie Sykes had been pressed into service as a stretcher bearer.

  “You know about my old job?”

  “Only a bit. The records are pretty murky and I was told to stop looking.”

  Juliet digested this and decided not to ask why he had investigated her.

  “It was time to get out. While I still knew enough of the real world to fit back into it.”

  There had also been the matter of her one great failure. Juliet usually could see over horizons, but she didn’t notice what was under her nose, that they had a traitor in their office. It didn’t matter that no one else saw it either, not even the security apparatus that was supposed to be looking for spies. And someone had died when the spy panicked and bolted with some top-secret files. She hadn’t seen it coming and felt that she should have. Would have, if she hadn’t grown so complacent and sure that her life in the think tank was safe and those around her were all fighting the good fight.

  “The real world, huh?”

  “More real than the one I was in.” Juliet turned away. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  She collected her easel and canvas on the way down. She was relieved that no suicidal insect had stuck itself in the wet paint.

  The kitchen offered few embellishments for a tuna sandwich, so she contented herself with the knowledge that at least the bread was fresh. She put out a small dish for Marley, hoping he would be content to remain at her bungalow for the afternoon.