Saturday Night Cleaver (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #4)

by Cantwell, Karen

  Howard cocked an ear and listened for a minute. “I don’t think that’s a leaf blower.”

  “Lawn mower?”

  He shook his head. “No way. Chain saw maybe.”

  I looked at the digital display on our bedside alarm clock and plopped back into bed. Ten after ten. “Who saws something this late?”

  “Do they both work? Maybe this is the only time for him to get stuff done around the house. Fixing his deck maybe?”

  This comment burned the feminist in me. “What? You’re so sure it’s him fixing the deck? How do you know it’s not her out there sweating over those deck boards?” Truthfully, I don’t have a hard-line feminist bone in my body. I’m pretty much middle-of-the-road in all of my philosophies. I was just cranky and looking for a fight. The beauty of this particular moment was that Howard knew this.

  “Still mad at Colt and Peggy?”

  “They stood me up.” I was pouting again, although, I’ll admit, even I was getting tired of my pity-party. “I’m more worried about Colt, though. If we don’t hear from him tomorrow, I’m going over there. As for Peggy, well, she’s a traitor. Plain and simple.”

  “You don’t think you’re over-reacting?”

  “About Colt or about Peggy?”

  “Peggy.”

  “She bailed on me. For Dandi Booker.”

  “Did you talk to her and find out why?”

  “Do I need to?”

  He looked at me over his half-eye reading glasses. “You do this, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Go to the worst conclusion first. Isn’t she your friend and don’t you always say your friendships mean everything to you?”

  “What do you mean, I go to the worst conclusion first?” I did not like his accusatory tone.

  He flicked a glance to the ceiling, then back to me. “I remember some episode a year or so ago when you were up in arms because Peggy and Roz were doing things without asking you along. You were so sure you were being excluded from lunches and shopping dates, and you even drove by Peggy’s house late one night when you thought Roz was over there without you...”

  Howard never seemed to have a good memory for things I considered important, why all of the sudden was his recollection of this embarrassing moment in my life so clear? I had driven by Peggy’s house that night with my lights out to avoid detection and totaled Simon’s old Ford parked at the curb when I careened into it. It was a black car. I couldn’t see it. I had to make up a story on the spot that I was out searching for Indiana Jones and a deer darted into the road causing me to swerve. Howard remembered, because our car insurance went up two hundred dollars a month.

  My face flamed from anger and shame. I crossed my arms while working hard on a justification for my actions that would make me feel better.

  “It seems to me,” he continued on like Buddha or Ghandi, “that if you value friendship the way you say you do, you’d...I don’t know exactly how to put it. You know—assume your friend’s intentions were good. I just always see you going to the worst conclusion first.”

  I know. He’d said that already.

  This was beginning to feel like a scene in To Kill a Mockingbird with Howard playing Atticus and me portraying Scout, but without the Alabama drone.

  “Gee, why don’t you whip up a meme for Facebook and share that one around, Mr. Deep?”

  The justifications weren’t coming quickly enough so I had resorted to name calling. And when I realized my name calling was really lame, I resorted to the very mature you-do-it-too argument.

  “You should talk,” I huffed. “How about the way you’ve treated Colt all of these years? Huh? Do you feel good about that?”

  He didn’t produce the answer I expected. “No,” he said simply. Then he elaborated after an especially effective pause that even the great Gregory Peck would have been proud to have delivered. “I don’t feel good about how I treated him at all. One thing nearly dying did was help me put my relationships in perspective.”

  He kissed me on the forehead and then softly, but shortly on the lips. It was the kind of kiss that says, “I love you and now I’m going to sleep.” Evidently his marital relationship perspectively did not require a romp in the hay.

  Fine by me, because even if we’d been active in the lovemaking department, I wasn’t in the mood after his one-two punch-attack on my character. He might have been right, but I wasn’t going to like it.

  And yes, I know: perspectively isn’t a real word.

  Chapter Four

  Thankfully, a good night’s sleep can cure just about any foul disposition. Saturday morning found me mostly simpatico with Howard again.

  He had agreed to see Dr. Sadistic, I mean Dr. Sadjik, for a discussion of his overall health and the prescription of a superior diet like the one I had abandoned in three days flat. He still needed to see his orthopedist for a final pass on the leg and collar bone, and he’d be visiting the neurologist for an undetermined amount of time because of the head trauma, so you’d think we’d be sick of medical practitioners. But after coming so close to losing him, I was determined to see Howard live a good long time whether he liked it or not.

  Off we motored to Natural Life Wellness Clinic after telling Mama Marr, sadly, that I had forgotten this appointment and would not be able to make our first art class together.

  She shook her head in disappointment. Creak, pop, snap. “You can not make this appointment for another time?”

  “Nope,” I said. Which was not a lie. Dr. Sadjik and her husband shared the care of their two young children, so she worked early evenings and held Saturday and some Sunday hours. Her schedule booked out weeks in advance since she was only one of a handful of naturally-oriented physicians in the area.

  “Too bad for you. Such fun we would have together.”

  “Yup. Too bad.”

  “I will take the notes so you can be prepared next Saturday, okie dokie?”

  “Okay,” I said, while making a mental note to find something urgent to do next Saturday at 11:30.

  For the record, it wasn’t an art class with poor creaky, canary-less Mama Marr that put me in a panic. It was an art class with Mama Pushy-Pants Pettingford. Really and truly, because my mother would have been running the show. Telling me my apple was too oval or that my vase looked like it was melting onto my oval apple, or that my pear (was that a pear?) was upside down. I already had a teen-aged daughter at home telling me I was wrong at least fifty times a day, I didn’t need any more criticism. And besides, I knew my mother wouldn’t boss Mama Marr around, so the two of them would sketch away happily together and never even notice my absence, I was quite sure. There. Phew. Absolution complete.

  While I drove us to the clinic, I asked Howard to call Colt again. Unfortunately, this produced the same results as the previous day. Just voicemail at home and on his cell. Something was wrong now, and we both knew it, so after Howard’s time with Dr. Sadjik where he walked away with the same bad-food tome as mine (except he could keep drinking coffee, which annoyed me greatly), we made a bee-line for Colt’s condo. We did not stop at Go, we did not collect our two hundred dollars.

  That little trip didn’t solve any mysteries. His prized GTO wasn’t in the parking lot. We knocked on his door to no avail and peeked through the sliding glass door as well as his bedroom window, which luckily were easy to access since the condo was on the ground floor. We did not see Colt’s dead or comatose body lying on any floor, but we also didn’t see a live body in bed or eating lunch at the tiny two-person kitchen table. In retrospect, we both realized that we should have thought to stop at our house for the spare condo key we kept.

  As we backed out of our parking space to motor back home, a dark blue sedan pulled in two spots over. An Asian woman in a slick suit and small heels exited the driver’s side door.
She was pretty. Probably in her mid-to-late thirties.

  “Slow down,” said Howard. “Let’s see where she’s going.”

  It became quickly apparent that where she was going was Colt’s condo. Without a moment of a second thought, I threw my gear shift into park and leapt from the van. The lady was knocking on the door when she spotted me. Fear shone in her eyes, which she quickly dropped to the ground as she began hoofing it back to her car.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “Are you looking for Colt?” I was following her now. “He’s my friend.”

  “No speak English,” she spurted, shaking her head. “No speak English.”

  “I’m worried about-”

  She cut me off. “No English!” Her car door slammed and she peeled out of that parking lot faster than Bill Clinton chasing down a lead on a party full of young and eager interns.

  Howard was standing outside of the van when I returned, writing on a piece of paper.

  “License plate?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I’ll ask Lamon to run this for me.”

  “Is he allowed?”

  “Officially, no. Will he do it for us? I’m sure he will.”

  It was good to know good cops. Especially cops that looked like Brad Pitt.

  At home, Howard went straight into the house to call Erik while I stepped down the mailbox to see what bills and junk mail Mr. USPS had delivered to us that fine autumn day. In the process, I ran into our new neighbor and possible deck-fixer, Melody Penobscott.

  “Hi Barb!” she waved as she opened the door to her mailbox. Her face was lit with a mile-wide smile. “How are ya?”

  Melody was about my height, but as skinny as a stick. Her dirty-blond hair was always pulled back in a ponytail that bounced around as if it were its own entity. It was kind of creepy, that ponytail. I never asked her how old she was but she looked like she was fifteen pretending to be thirty. She and her husband, Neil, moved to the area from Wisconsin and that was about all I knew about them. Oh, and she liked sushi.

  They had moved in right after Howard’s accident, so I hadn’t really had the time or energy to venture into making-friends-with-neighbors territory. Colt had actually talked to them more than I had. I did like our short meet-in-the-street chats though, because she sounded just like Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo, dontcha know? She said my name Bea-rb, kind of like she was about to say Bear, but then changed her mind at the last minute and changed it up to get that “arb” at the end.

  “I’m good,” I said, returning her smile but with a little less enthusiasm. “How are you?” I waited, anticipating with relish the response which I knew would be filled with Canadian sounding O’s and lots of nasally other vowels.

  “Oh, ya know, things are just grand. We love our new house ya know.”

  I nodded. Someday I would have to get to know her better so I could have a long conversation with her over coffee and dohnuts. I’m not making fun. I really loved her deep, mid-western accent. And now of course, there was the added curiosity to find out if she and her husband had dipped their toes into the marital trading pool. “You must be making some improvements,” I said. “We heard you working away last night.”

  That bright smile dropped from her face so fast and hard I thought she might have had a stroke. “Heard what, Barb?

  I hesitated. “A chain saw...we thought.” Was Howard wrong? Was it a leaf blower? It was probably a leaf blower. I’m always right.

  She shook her head, but not very convincingly. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. Not in our backyard. Nope. Musta been someone else.”

  Hmm. I didn’t say I heard the saw in her yard.

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “Could have been the Perkins.”

  “Oh, ya know, it mightve been them now thatcha mention it.” She seemed relieved, but she was ending our conversation and skedaddling anyway. She snatched her mail from the box and pasted on the blinding smile. “Bye, Barb! Good seein’ ya!”

  Howard was limping down the driveway as she dashed off. I stared after her, wondering what the heck was up.

  “How is...” Howard was trying to be interested, but he had the worst time remembering our neighbor’s names. “What’s her name?”

  I lifted the mailbox door back up and clamped it closed. “Melody. Penobscott.”

  “Did you ask for any deck repairing tips?”

  “I mentioned that we heard a saw and she said it wasn’t them. But she seemed a little weird about it.”

  He took the mail from my hand and leafed through the contents. “They sure burn the candles at both ends, I’ll tell you. She was up before dawn loading something into the trunk of her car.”

  Now I was the one to be surprised. “You were up before dawn?”

  “Woke up around four. Couldn’t get back to sleep. When I went to get a glass of water, I looked out the window because I heard something in their driveway.”

  Melody’s odd reaction to the saw inquiry took a backseat to my concern that Howard wasn’t sleeping well. Insomnia had been a problem right after he came home from the hospital, but I thought he’d been sleeping better in the last month.

  “Maybe they killed that guy whose parts you found in the woods—they’re sawing him up slowly and spreading limbs throughout Rustic Woods for the foxes to eat.”

  I slapped him playfully on the arm. “Stop that. That’s not funny!”

  He stopped smiling and grew more serious. “No, and neither is this—Clarence left a message on our machine. Colt was supposed to meet him yesterday for lunch followed by an interview with a reporter at the TV station for a piece they’re doing on local PIs, but he never showed.”

  Clarence Heatherington was Colt’s long lost son born out of wedlock. Sounds like a cliché plot trick, I know, but it’s all true. Clarence was also the new movie reviewer for Channel 3 serving the Washington, DC Metro area. Admittedly, Colt was way more than surprised—actually, horrified is a better word—that he had fathered a son he never knew, but he chilled pretty quickly. Despite the fact that they are as different as baby pandas and werewolves, Clarence grew on him, as did the idea of being a father. Fairly soon, Colt was taking a Bill Huxtable approach to fatherhood and it didn’t matter a hoot that his kid was twenty-eight years old. Clarence even lived with him for over a month while he hunted for an apartment closer to his job at Channel 3. And as for that interview, Colt also loved to talk about himself, so the fact that he’d miss lunch with Clarence and a chance to wax enthusiastic on all things Colt Baron, was a bigger red flag than his forgetting to make us tacos.

  This news was seriously unsettling. “I wonder why Clarence didn’t try my cell phone? He has my number.” I pulled the cell from my purse and realized I had set it for silent mode while waiting in the doctor’s office. Sure enough, two missed calls from Clarence. I didn’t listen to those though, because I spotted something that relaxed my knitted brow: a text from Colt.

  I opened the message.

  Time to start worrying again.

  The message read, sos.

  Chapter Five

  “SOS?” I blurted.

  Howard peered over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s a text from Colt!” I could hear the distress in my own voice as it cracked.

  “What does it say?”

  “SOS! Didn’t you hear me?” I stomped a foot and began mumbling all sorts of half-thoughts and incoherencies. “S-O-” I started. “What does that-”

  I attempted a reply to the message, but must have touched the wrong button and I was sent back to my main screen. “Stupid phone! I can’t-” I clicked to view messages again, but my screen went dark. “SOS. Something’s...what is wrong with this phone?!” I shook the phone like it was a catatonic person that needed a jolt. Admittedly, I was out of control.

  Howard
relieved me of the wayward device and clicked calmly, stopping to read the message, then clicking again.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Texting him back.”

  “SOS. What does that mean? He’s in trouble, right?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Howard perused through the menu and tapped another button, then placed the phone to his ear.

  “Are you calling the police?”

  He shook his head. “Trying his cell phone. If he texted, he must have it on now.” A moment later, he shook his head again, then talked into the phone. “It’s Howard. We got your text. Call Barb’s phone.” He hung up and handed it back to me. “Don’t panic. He could have lost his cell. Someone found it and now they’re having some fun.”

  For a minute, Howard’s scenario proposal calmed me. Of course. Silly kids playing games. But then my mind shifted back to the scarier alternative. “He might not have lost it, though. And this could be real.”

  He nodded, his face firm and serious, his eyes fixed on mine. “In which case, what we don’t do is lose our cool. I left a message for Lamon. As soon as he calls me, I’ll ask him to run that license plate.” He held up a key chain with a single key dangling. Colt’s spare condo key. “Meanwhile, let’s go back over and see if there’s anything lying around his place that could give us a clue.”

  Thank goodness Howard had found us something to do. Sitting around and waiting for Erik to call didn’t exactly make me feel empowered.

  Callie drove up just then in the Camry. I had forgotten that she was putting in some volunteer hours at the local library, which reminded me that I needed to get in the house and check on Bethany and Amber just to make sure they’d eaten and didn’t need anything. When Callie climbed out of the car, she walked with us up to the door. “So this is weird,” she began. “I dropped Isabella off at her house and Colt’s car was parked in the street out front.”