Here Comes the Ride

by Lorena McCourtney

  “The truth,” Pam repeated, sounding dazed.

  “It seems Michelle decided she had to do something about your totally unsuitable relationship with me. So she made my sister an offer she couldn’t refuse.”

  “What kind of offer?”

  “I don’t know the exact amount, but not long after Kathleen told me you were breaking off our relationship she suddenly had money enough for a down payment on one of those fancy new houses on Randolph Hill, and a new Lexus to boot. At the time she said the money came from her ex-husband, who finally paid up what he owed her.”

  Pam just sat there looking as if that suspended hammer had smacked her between the eyes.

  “Michelle paid Kathleen . . . paid her . . . to break us up.”

  We were all silent for the moment, thinking of the enormity of that deception and betrayal. Betrayal from two sides.

  “But your sister,” Pam finally protested, as I had. “I can’t believe she’d do something like that. I always thought she liked me.”

  I noted she didn’t say anything about doubting Michelle could pull such a heartbreaker stunt. Though my question was Why? Why was breaking up Pam and Mike’s relationship important enough for Michelle to spend a bundle of money on it?

  “Liking you didn’t matter, not when Kathleen had a chance at all that money. Anyway, when she told me all this a couple days ago, she said that at the time she didn’t think it was any big deal. You and I were just kids. We’d break up sooner or later anyway. So she might as well have the money.”

  “For a house and a Lexus. She sold us out for a house and a Lexus.” The furious sparks in Pam’s voice could have set that house ablaze.

  “As you might guess, my relationship with Kathleen is a little strained right now. She has the house up for sale, by the way. The payments are way more than she can keep up. Come to think of it, maybe I’m giving her too much credit saying conscience was what made her tell me about the lies. Maybe it was the fact that Michelle had never paid her all the money she’d promised. It’s not exactly something you can take to small claims court.”

  “Now wait a minute,” I cut in. “How do we know you aren’t just telling us some wild story? Why would it have been worth a lot of money to Michelle to keep Pam from marrying you?”

  “A yard-care guy with dirt under his fingernails in the family?” He held out his hand as if to show me, although I didn’t see any dirt there. “She’d have been humiliated.”

  Okay, maybe Pam’s marrying Mike wouldn’t have enhanced Michelle’s social prestige, but could it really have been that important? Couldn’t she have just cut Pam out of her life and let it go at that?

  “Or I suppose it’s possible Michelle really did think Pam would be better off without me.”

  An unladylike snort from Pam. “Yeah. Right. Like my welfare kept her awake nights.”

  “Anyway, if you don’t believe me, you can check with my folks about whether I’ve ever had any wife and baby. My mother anyway. I’d rather you didn’t talk to my dad unless you have to. Finding out the sneaky deal Kathleen pulled might be hard on his heart. He always liked you.”

  “I-I don’t think that will be necessary. I believe you.”

  I was inclined that way too, but I still thought there must be more to this than what we were hearing here. Although, setting aside exactly why Michelle was willing to invest some large amount of money in breaking up the relationship, she’d shrewdly picked the perfect person to carry out her scheme. Neither Pam nor Mike would have believed these stories coming direct from Michelle, but Mike’s sister made them gold-standard solid.

  “But what were you doing at the wedding?” Pam demanded.

  “That’s what I want to explain before I go to the police. I didn’t want you to see something on TV or in the newspaper before I had a chance to tell you myself.”

  Pam’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Tell me . . . you killed Michelle?”

  I leaned in closer to Mike with the cell phone. Because we had it now, the motive for murder that we hadn’t been able to come up with earlier. Revenge. Payback. Fury. Greedy sister Kathleen may have sold out to sabotage Pam and Mike’s relationship, but Michelle was the buyer.

  “No! Yes, I was there.” He groaned. “I was there with the dumbest, strangest, most idiotic scheme ever concocted this side of a Keystone Cops plot. But it was the only way I could think to stop the wedding at the last minute, and it had nothing to do with murder.”

  He got up, paced to the edge of the dock, then came back to stand in front of Pam, hands jammed in his jacket pockets again. I stood up, jockeying to get the cell phone in better position and also keep from making some ignominious splash over the side of the dock. These undercover spy techniques aren’t as easy to pull off as they look on TV.

  “I tried to call you at the house as soon as Kathleen told me. I thought, hoped, that knowing we’d both been lied to would make a difference in your marrying that guy. But I never could get through. Some woman always answered the phone, and I couldn’t give my name because I knew you wouldn’t talk if you knew it was me, and she wouldn’t put me through without a name.” He sounded frustrated. “I came out to the house, too, but I couldn’t get past the gate. I think the same woman had control of it.”

  “Shirley, the housekeeper,” Pam said. “With the wedding so close, Michelle gave her strict instructions about letting anyone in or calls through.”

  “She’d make a good prison guard. Don’t let her get her hands on an AK-47.”

  “So how’d you get through on the phone tonight?” I challenged.

  “I lied,” he said flatly. “I told the woman I was from the sheriff’s department and had to talk to Miss Gibson. Maybe I should have tried an outright lie earlier. It would have made more sense than what I did instead.”

  He paused and kicked at a clamshell lodged in a crack between boards on the dock, though I had the feeling where he really wanted to kick wasn’t anatomically possible.

  “Drastic measures with the fog machine, Mike?” I asked. I maneuvered closer and spoke into my chest, trying to get it all on the answering machine. Under normal circumstances talking to one’s chest would probably make someone suspicious, but Mike was too agitated to notice.

  “Remember Simon? Simon Edelson?” He spoke to Pam.

  “He played guitar in that band you were with.”

  “Right. And usually operated our fog machine, although we all worked it at various times. He’s a plumber now, but he does some part-time fog machine work for an outfit over in Olympia. I see him fairly often, and I knew he had a wedding scheduled for Friday night. After Kathleen dropped her bomb on me about your wedding, it occurred to me that Simon’s gig could be your wedding. Which it was. He did the set-up, but I talked him into taking his wife out to dinner that night and letting me handle the fog machine at the wedding.”

  Oh yeah, he’d handled it.

  “At first I just planned an overdose of fog to disrupt the wedding, so I could get a chance to talk to you. But then I was afraid fog alone wouldn’t be enough.” He paused and looked as if he’d like to step off the end of the dock rather than go on. “Okay, I’m not proud of this. But I was desperate. I went to a place in Olympia that sells gag supplies and got some stuff to dump in with the liquid in the fog machine. They didn’t know what I had planned, of course, but they said the stink would be strong enough to break up a riot.”

  “I don’t know about breaking up a riot, but it almost caused one,” I said.

  He groaned again, put his hands over his ears, and closed his eyes as if trying to shut out the voices that were apparently shouting to him about what an idiot he’d been.

  I added mine. “That was an idiotic thing to do.”

  “Yes. And just after I did it, after I sent enough fog and stink into the tent to practically asphyxiate everyone, I crawled out and looked over the flowers. And just for a second before everything disappeared in the fog I saw Pam there in her wedding gown. Holding her flowers.
Looking scared and beautiful and . . . angelic, as if she were standing on a cloud.” He blinked and swallowed. “Then it finally got through to me. Pam probably loved this guy. This should be the happiest day of her life. And I was wrecking it.”

  He dropped to the bench, head down, hands between his knees.

  “So why didn’t you turn the machine off instead of letting it just keep spewing?” I asked.

  “I did. Though by then the fog was so thick and smelly that I was coughing, and my eyes were watering so bad I could hardly see. It took me a little while to crawl back under the flowers and feel around to find the machine and then the controls.”

  But Uri Hubbard had said he turned the machine off. Making himself look like a hero? Or was he doing something considerably less heroic, like trying to account for a few moments of time when he was stabbing Michelle in the back?

  “You didn’t see the murder, then?”

  “No, I just got out of there. Another of my bad decisions. I should have stayed around to apologize and make amends. Instead I ran back to where I’d parked my pickup outside the gate. I figured that after the fog and smell cleared out, you’d all decide it was just some terrible malfunction and go on with the ceremony. A little later I heard sirens, but I didn’t know anything about the murder until the next day when it was all over the news.”

  He took a choked breath, as if it was hard to get air into his lungs. “Pam, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. And I know that my being sorry doesn't begin to make up for all the hurt and damage I’ve done to you. And even worse to Michelle. Because it was the fog and the smell that made it possible for someone to murder her.” He pounded his thigh with a clenched fist. “It was my fault. My fault.”

  Pam was studying her feet as if she’d never seen them before. She didn’t say anything, so I did. “Now what?”

  “Now I go to the police and tell them everything.”

  Pam looked up. “They may think you killed Michelle!”

  Yes indeed. Plenty of motive and opportunity for murder for Mike Andreson. But means?

  “What about your butterfly knife?” One side of me leaned toward his innocence, but the everybody’s-a-suspect side was still taking potshots at that innocence.

  “Butterfly knife?” He looked at me so blankly I knew he must be thinking I had a few butterflies loose in my belfry. Pam also gave me a baffled look. I shrugged and didn’t explain.

  Mike went back to Pam’s comment about the police. “I’ll just have to take that chance. I can’t not tell them. What I did was probably a crime—”

  He paused as if considering what that crime might be. Assault with a dangerous fog? Stink stalking? Bridal mayhem?

  “But you’re not a killer,” Pam filled in.

  “No. Just stupid, foolish, ridiculous, weird, over-the-top, unbalanced . . . and whatever other derogatory adjectives you want to pile on.”

  That list seemed sufficient. Though I wondered about temporary insanity. Or maybe it was lovesick insanity.

  “I never doubted what your sister said. Never once.” Pam shook her head in self-recrimination. “How could I have just believed her?”

  “I believed her too.”

  Which was the beauty of Michelle’s scheme, of course. Who’d doubt what Mike’s very own sister said?

  Mike knelt in front of her and took her hand. “I love you, Pam. I always have. But love doesn’t justify what I did. I can’t say it enough times, how sorry I am. On the news they said the wedding had been postponed, but I hope somehow it all works out for you.”

  “The wedding isn’t postponed, it’s off. Permanently. I’m not sorry about that.” Pam flicked her fingers in a small gesture of dismissal. Then her fingers clenched into a fist. “But Michelle . . .”

  Yes, Michelle. Whose death lay like an anchor on Mike’s shoulders.

  “You didn’t see anyone who wasn’t running to escape the fog?” I asked. “Someone who could have murdered her?”

  “I didn’t see anything, except that momentary glimpse of Pam. Then the fog covered everything. But it’s my fault Michelle is dead. If it weren’t for what I did, she’d still be alive.”

  Make that two anchors on his shoulders.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Why did you ask Mike about—what did you call it—a butterfly knife?” Pam asked on our way home.

  I hesitated. The authorities were apparently being very tight-lipped about what kind of weapon had been used on Michelle. Yet surely they must be checking into its ownership.

  “Did you see the knife?” I asked.

  “I-I realized there was a knife in Michelle’s back. But I didn’t really look at it.”

  “I described it to Fitz. He said it sounded like what’s called a butterfly knife.” I described it to Pam, including the jewels and scrollwork.

  “Dragons?”

  “I think so. Dragons and flowers. The scrolling was very intricate. A valuable, collector’s-type knife probably. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “My dad was never a hunter. His allergies kept him from doing a lot of things. But he liked to let people think he was more of a rough-and-tough outdoorsman than he was.” She made the admission with a shrug, as if it was just a quirk she accepted about the father she loved. “He was a great father.”

  “But that leopard skin in the office—”

  “He bought it. Along with several high-powered hunting rifles. They used to hang in the office too, but Michelle took them down. I don’t know what she did with them. I kind of remember something about a knife collection he bought from an estate.”

  “Where would that be now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  ***

  Fitz called before I left for church the following morning. He said he’d tried to call my cell the previous evening, but couldn’t get me. I told him about the meeting with Mike Andreson and how we’d recorded it. We agreed to meet at the CyberClam that evening.

  At church the limo drew some second looks. I usually drive my old Toyota on Sundays, but by now most people knew the limo service was my occupation. I’d intended to invite Pam to come along, but she didn’t show up at breakfast, nor did she answer my tap on her attic door. I wondered if she was already meeting Mike somewhere. He hadn’t pressed to see her again, and she hadn’t said much when we came home last night, but I knew she was into some deep thinking.

  It was a drizzly day, though much too early in the season to mark the start of the fall rains. A scent of wet grass and trees blended with the sea scent, the feeling in the air almost more springy than fall. The tide was rushing up the inlet when I drove back to the house after the service, bringing with it a stray log and some floating branches. I punched the remote control, and the gate opened to let me in. I was curious about the ice sculpture, but the crime-scene tape still circled the tent even though there were no sheriff’s cars in the driveway now. It seemed a shame to waste all that ice, but a bride and groom in Popsicle form probably wasn’t a donation the homeless could use. I wondered if it was time for me to go on home. I couldn’t see what I could do for Pam here now.

  Well, there was one thing I could do, I realized as I drove up the sloping driveway and saw Pam sprawled on the curb.

  The girl's stepmother has been murdered, and Pam herself is probably on the suspect list. Her wedding is down the drain, and she’s just learned the guy she was once in love with pulled one of the strangest capers outside an Animal House movie. She has lawyers and legal entanglements and a funeral to face. So what is she doing in the midst of all that turmoil? Skateboarding, of course.

  I stopped the limo, got out, and helped her to her feet. “Are we having fun yet?” I inquired as I turned her arm to look at her skinned elbow.

  She shook off her helmet, and her hair sprang out to its pre-wedding halo of frizz. “I don’t always crash. Yeah, I know, both times you’ve seen me I’m crashing, but I made a half dozen good runs before this one. It helps me think. I just shouldn’t have tried a kickflip
when I haven’t been practicing.”

  “Crashing helps you think?” I asked doubtfully.

  “No, I don’t think while I’m skateboarding. But it clears my head. On a good day, you feel as if you’re one with the skateboard, as if it’s an extension of you. It flushes out the cobwebs so I think better afterward.”

  A thinking aid. Every generation to its own, I decided. And skateboarding was probably as good a response as any to the troubles she had looming over her. It also occurred to me that a skateboard crash was how she’d met Mike, so maybe there was some emotional connection there.

  “Okay, I know what you’re thinking,” she muttered. “That I shouldn’t rush back into something with Mike.”

  “Probably a good idea,” I agreed. “But actually, I was thinking maybe you could teach me to skateboard. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

  “You want to skateboard?” She looked at me as if I were Phreddie expressing a sudden interest in quantum physics.

  “There’s an age limit? No cellulite or wrinkles allowed?”

  She ignored my grumpy challenge and raised a different point. “You can’t do it in those clothes. Did you go out to breakfast or something? You look very nice.”

  “I went to church. I didn’t have anything here to wear, so I stopped by my place and changed.” To burgundy skirt and black, high-heeled boots, which I had to agree were not suitable skateboarding attire. “I was going to ask if you’d like to come along, but you didn’t answer when I knocked.”

  “I got up early and went for a long walk on the beach.” She gave me a speculative glance. “So what was church all about today?”

  What was it all about? I looked at her in dismay. Was I supposed to have taken notes? I hadn’t realized there was going to be a test.

  You’re doing it again, aren’t You, Lord? Making me pull stuff deep down inside and think about it, not let it just sit up there on the surface like an imitation tattoo.