Chapter 22
“Hello, Milton,” Arnie said. “It’s been a long time.”
Why was Arnie wearing makeup? And a dress? And why was he here? Nothing about this scene made sense. Was Arnie related to Milton after all? A cross-dressing brother? I’d read about transvestites, and I’d even had one as a classmate while I was in school back east, but I had never expected to find myself dating one. I groped helplessly for something to say.
Penny finally broke the awkward silence. She put her hand on Arnie’s arm. “Mother, I’d like you to meet Aimee Machado.”
“We’ve met,” Arnie said.
Could it be? Was my Arnie the missing Arnetta Palmer after all? That would explain why Penny had looked so familiar when we first met—she took after her mother.
Arnetta crossed to Milton’s bed, sat next to him and picked up his hand. Penny’s eyes brimmed and a solitary tear slid down her cheek. “We should leave,” she said to me.
Arnetta tore her gaze away from her husband to smile at her daughter. “That would be nice, darling.”
Penny and I left her parents to work out what appeared to be the first tentative step toward a reconciliation. We caught an elevator to the basement, raided the vending machines, and found a quiet corner in the cafeteria.
“I’m so sorry I misled you,” Penny said. “I wasn’t at liberty to tell you the truth.”
“And now?”
“Mother likes you. She trusts you and so do I. We felt we should explain.”
My cup of vending machine coffee grew cold while I listened to Penny’s telling of the Palmer family saga. After Milton’s seduction by Bonnie Beardsley broke up the marriage, Arnetta took a nosedive into depression and hooked up with a third-rate psychologist who convinced her she wasn’t attractive to men because she was a man trapped in a woman’s body.
The psychologist referred Arnetta to a sex-change clinic in Miami. Arnetta and Penny moved to Miami, and Penny enrolled in the university at Coral Gables while her mother enrolled in the Institute for Transformation. Arnie, as she began calling herself, was conflicted, but she eventually decided to start hormone therapy and live as a man for a year.
I was still puzzled. “Why did she come back here? And why didn’t she change her last name? For that matter, why ‘Arnie’?”
“She was lonely in Florida. Miserable. And the name thing? Mom is clueless about sports celebrities. She doesn’t even know who Tiger Woods is. She wanted to keep her name as close to the original as possible until she was sure about the change. Living out of town in a little community like Manton, she figured no one would make the connection to Dad. Palmer’s a pretty common name.”
“I’ve noticed that,” I said.
“I think deep down she always had doubts about the gender switch,” Penny continued, “whether she and Dad got back together or not.”
“Do you think they will?”
“He’s desperate to have her back. It’s up to her now. At first, Dad wouldn’t let me tell her he was ill, but after a few days, when I saw how miserable he was, I told her anyway.”
That answered my unasked question. Arnetta hadn’t known Milton was in the hospital the night she and I were at the ballet. This revelation also debunked my theory that Arnie was Bonnie’s stalker. Because if I’d recognized Arnie in a dress, wouldn’t Bonnie have recognized Arnetta in men’s attire?
“It sounds like their getting back together would make you happy,” I said.
“They’re good people. I love them both.” Penny unwrapped a Milky Way bar and took a bite.
I glanced at the wall clock. The pet store would close in fifteen minutes. I needed a mouse. I wasn’t paying any rent, so the least I could do was feed Jack’s pets as promised.
“Will you be okay if I leave you here?”
“Sure. I’m going back upstairs pretty soon. Mom is going to spend the night with me at Dad’s place. We have a lot to talk about.”
“Then I’d better be going.”
Two questions came to me on the drive to the pet store. First, why had Arnetta been lunching with Lorraine Beardsley? Lorraine must have been in on Arnetta’s secret identity. The two women were members of the same club, Victims of Bonnie Beardsley. Was that what drew them together? Had they joined forces to put an end to Bonnie’s home wrecking? The second question involved another link to Bonnie Beardsley. At the ballet, Arnetta, still in Arnie mode, had mentioned the Underhills’ swinging lifestyle, then struck up a conversation with them. What was that about? For Penny’s sake, I hoped her mother was in the clear, but I couldn’t count on it just yet.
At the pet store I did the grisly job of choosing the unsuspecting mouse that would be sacrificed that evening to a hungry three-foot king snake. When the clerk asked if I wanted a male or female, I was too squeamish to come up with an answer.
“I don’t want to know,” I said. “You decide.”
I picked up a bag of cockatiel food for the demented bird and a catnip toy for Fanny while I was there. On my drive home, the little mouse scrabbled around in its take-out box, niggling my conscience with its scritchy noises.
As I slowed to turn in at the entrance to Jack and Amah’s property, a dark green pickup pulled out of the driveway onto the road. The heap looked so dilapidated I couldn’t determine the make or model. As it passed I tried to get a look at the driver, but the sun was in my eyes. All I saw was a flash of camo and dark glasses as the driver sped away, a cloud of noxious black smoke roiling in his wake.
Hannah’s forensic sketch came to mind: the suspicious character who had been lurking in the alley behind the Happy Ox the night before Bonnie Beardsley’s body was found.
If the pickup driver was Camo Man, what was he doing at the Highland Ranch? When I reached the likely conclusion, my mouth went dry. Camo Man was looking for me.
I stopped in Jack and Amah’s driveway, picked up the little cardboard takeout box with the mouse skittering inside, and unlocked the main house. I checked every room until I was satisfied there hadn’t been a break-in, then dropped the live morsel in the snake cage and left the guest room immediately.
I backtracked to Jack’s office and contemplated his gun safe. I don’t like guns. I can hit a target, but I can’t imagine aiming at a person, or any living thing, and actually pulling the trigger. Before Jack and Amah left, he’d written the safe’s combination on a scrap of paper for me.
“Not likely you’ll need it, but just in case,” he had said.
I’d thanked him, stuffed the paper in the pocket of my jeans and forgotten about it. Those jeans had since gone through Amah’s washer and dryer, but maybe the scrap had survived in my pocket. Much as I hated the idea, I had to look for it.
Driving down the lane to the barn, I scanned the property for any sign of vandalism. The llamas raised their heads and looked my way, but none of them seemed agitated or injured. Little Moonbeam nursed greedily, her white pom-pom tail wagging in gustatory bliss. The turkeys scratched and pecked, which was pretty much all they ever did.
I parked and checked in my rearview mirror. No one in sight. Up on the deck the door to my bunkhouse apartment was secure. I walked around the deck to check each window. Nothing broken. No sign of forced entry. Maybe the man in the pickup had been someone looking for Jack. Most of his friends were hunters, and they wore camo as everyday attire. I held on to that thought.
Inside my hot little apartment, I turned on the water to the swamp cooler and flipped the switch. Nothing happened. I turned the switch off and back on again. Still nothing.
The kitchen light worked. So did the TV. I’d missed all the evening news programs, so I turned the TV off again. No power outage, so the problem must be what Harry predicted: the cooler’s motor had conked out. The wall thermometer showed the temperature at ninety-five degrees. If I didn’t get the thing fixed, I’d have to sleep with my windows open to catch whatever scant breeze the night might offer.
I called Harry about the cooler and got his machine but didn’
t leave a message. He didn’t answer his cellphone either, but I did leave a message there. It finally occurred to me he must be screening his calls because of the Beardsley case. That thought wrenched like a knife in my heart. No matter how brave his talk, he was worried. That he might end up wrongly accused kicked my resolve up another notch. Bonnie Beardsley’s killer had to be found, and soon.
After I changed into shorts and a T-shirt, I pulled both my pairs of jeans out of the closet and dug through the pockets, looking for the combination to Jack’s safe. Nothing in the first pair, and in the second, all I found were a few shredded bits of white paper.
It was almost nine o’clock by the time I finished the chores, and I was hungry. I sat at the little dinette table contemplating whether to read the newspaper first or open a can of soup.
Harry called while the soup was heating.
“Hey, Sis. I got your message. Want me to come out and check the cooler?”
“Not tonight. I can get by with a fan. Do you still have the spare key?”
“In my wallet. I’ll get out there tomorrow. You sure you can wait?”
“I’ll be fine. Any news? I was just about to read the paper.”
“Nope. Nothing new. You doing okay out there?”
“Sure.” I thought about Camo Man in the pickup pulling out of Jack and Amah’s driveway. “By the way, do you happen to know the combination to Jack’s gun safe?”
“No, why?”
“No special reason. He gave it to me, in case of coyotes or something, and I lost it.”
“Give me a break,” Harry said. “You wouldn’t use a gun if you had one. Buy some bear spray.”
“Good idea, thanks.” It was a great idea. I’d kept pepper spray with me for the first year after Tango’s attack, but I hadn’t ever needed it, and eventually fell out of the habit. “I’d better go. Fanny wants in.”
The cat was outside my door meowing her disgust at being ignored long past her usual feeding time. Bosco, who had nodded off on his perch as soon as the sun went down, protested the commotion with his shrill, relentless squawking. When he dared me to make his day, I covered his cage with a towel.
I let Fanny in and heaped her bowl with extra kibble. She scarfed half of it, lapped at her water, and hopped up on the dresser next to the birdcage, startling Bosco, who squawked and flapped under his towel until I moved the cat to the daybed. With the pets finally quiet, I got ready for bed. The more I thought about the stranger in the pickup, the less I liked the idea of leaving my windows open. Instead, I propped my rickety oscillating floor fan on a chair and aimed it at my bed. The fan squeaked and the chair beneath it vibrated, but the feeble imitation of a breeze allowed me to sleep sporadically, despite the night’s sticky heat.
Chapter 23
Friday morning began at five o’clock with black coffee to help me wake up and a cold shower to counter the oppressive air in my apartment. When I arrived at work, things started to look up. Orrie Mercer was missing from the entrance to the library. He had been replaced by a buff young black woman I knew from the dojo. We exchanged greetings and chatted briefly about black belt class. Her name was Shelly Hardesty, and she was filling in for Mercer.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Taking a day off, I guess. I just got the call this morning.”
Maybelline was off on Fridays, so I figured she and Mercer must have made spur-of-the-moment plans together. A romantic trip to Reno? Or a day of bingo at the local casino? I reminded myself not to sneer at other people’s tastes in entertainment, since Timbergate’s gambling enthusiasts far outweighed fans of the ballet.
The library was quiet, as usual. I checked my email. TMC’s daily online newsletter held nothing relevant to my job. Also as usual. The rest of my email consisted of two items. First was a reminder from Dr. Beardsley about the CME Committee meeting, where I was to present an overview of the library’s anticipated forensics collection. The other was a request from Jared Quinn to contact him at my convenience.
Widower Quinn, whose political activist wife had died five years ago. According to Maybelline, Quinn had played escort to a diverse range of available women since arriving in Timbergate.
I couldn’t deny the sour grapes in my thoughts about Quinn’s social life. Not because I cared, but because my ego was bruised. My radar had picked up something beyond the professional interest of an employer in his employee. Either I needed my radar checked, or Quinn had backed off after he witnessed my embrace with Nick Alexander in the parking lot.
There was no going back. According to my rules for romance, both these men were off-limits. Nick’s close working relationship with his ex-girlfriend Rella was a definite red flag. Ditto Quinn’s position as my boss. Meanwhile, the only man I’d actually dated in ages turned out to be a woman. This dismal train of thought reminded me of Vane Beardsley’s awkward dinner invitation. I sighed and turned my attention to library business.
I started by replying to Dr. Beardsley’s email, attaching a copy of the agenda for the CME Committee meeting and a second attachment describing the concept he and I had discussed for creating a forensic resources consortium, including hospitals and law libraries in California’s seven northernmost counties.
My next obligation was to contact Quinn. He had said at my convenience, which on a day this slow was pretty much anytime. Before I placed a call to his office, I reviewed everything I knew about the man: his status as my boss, his great looks and sex appeal, and his wife’s untimely death. I wondered how deeply he had been involved with Bonnie Belcher before she became Mrs. Beardsley. Was it coincidence that his late wife and Bonnie both worked in television, or did he have a thing for glamorous women in the public eye?
What I most wanted to know was how his wife had died. For that, I returned to the bookmarked fan club site where I had originally found references to Quinn’s late wife. I discovered that Blanche Montague had begun her career as a journalist and photographer, and progressed to TV anchorwoman and finally to talk show personality. Her show became a lightning rod for criticism from several world leaders, particularly those whose political interests were in conflict with Montague’s campaign for global recognition of women’s rights.
Montague had received her share of death threats, and her show’s producers had been pressured to take her off the air, but until the time of her death, she remained a compelling voice. There were references to her tragic death, but no details about the actual cause.
My searching finally turned up a remarkable site called the World Association of Newspapers. Under the heading of Press Freedom was a link showing the number of journalists killed in the course of the past several years. The deaths were listed by country and year, so I searched for Ethiopia and found an article dating back five years where the following paragraph appeared:
The body of Blanche Montague, star of a popular French television talk show, was found 25 July on a roadside fifty miles from Addis Ababa with three gunshot wounds to the head. She had been filming a documentary exposing the appalling lack of maternity care for women in the country’s remote villages. Montague had received death threats demanding she abandon the assignment. Her American husband, Jared Quinn, a consultant on the project, was beaten and shot by the unidentified assailants, but survived the attack.
I called Quinn’s office with a new attitude. The man had lost his wife, and nearly his life, in a ruthless, volatile world far removed from the relatively banal simplicity of Timbergate Medical Center. The least I could do was accept him for what he was: a widower trying to get on with his life.
“Aimee, good timing,” Quinn said in that amused tone that gave me a pleasant little buzz. “Do you have plans for lunch?”
“Not really, but—”
“Good, I’ll swing by in half an hour.”
Thirty minutes later, I locked up and met Quinn in the parking lot. He pulled his Navigator into traffic then glanced over at me.
“I hear congratulations are in order.”
&n
bsp; The comment stumped me. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Your recent engagement.”
Chagrined, I realized my lie to Dr. Beardsley had been passed on to Quinn.
“Oh, that.” My cheeks flared hot. “I’m afraid that’s not quite—”
“Is it the fellow from the parking lot?”
“No.” I debated another lie. I could say I had called it off, but that would leave me fair game for Beardsley.
“I see.” Quinn’s lips curled in amusement. “You’re certainly a popular woman. Who is the lucky guy?”
“I hate to admit it, but I lied. I do that sometimes, to avoid awkward situations.”
“Beardsley asked you out?”
“I’m afraid so. To be fair, he called it a business dinner.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I didn’t want to embarrass him with a rejection.”
“Or anger him?” Quinn leveled a quick look at me.
“He seems harmless, but—”
“But his wife is dead.”
“Do you think he could have done it?”
Quinn took a moment before he replied. “It’s hard to imagine. The police are handling it with kid gloves. Beardsley’s been around a long time. He’s a civic leader, generous with gifts to the hospital, and very good at his work. An impressive list of Sawyer County women have shaved years off their faces and various other body parts in Beardsley’s operating room.”
“So a high-profile citizen like Dr. Beardsley wouldn’t be arrested and hauled in unless there was overwhelming evidence?”
“Not a chance. Although Beardsley’s late wife was no angel. She gave him plenty of grief, and the police seem to know that.”
I played dumb. “Did you know his wife?”
“Someone fixed me up with her before she hooked up with Beardsley. It wasn’t pleasant.”
I waited, hoping he’d say more, and after he turned into the Burger King drive-up, he did.
“She had recently broken off a relationship with someone and had her feelers out. A mutual friend introduced us.”
Due for Discard Page 14
