Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2)

by Gillian Roberts

  “You’ve never, ever been with a guy who was going with somebody else?”

  “Not married—and with kids!”

  “Like they say, all’s fair in love and war.”

  Paige shook her head. She looked like she knew what was going on. Dressed great, but inside that head, nothing. “It’s wrong. I thought you had all these big plans about having your own business someday. Marlena Designs, wasn’t that it? I thought you said you were working there to learn the ropes, find out how business worked.”

  “And I am. And I did, and all I can say is you must be an imbecile, or still in kindergarten. How do you think the women you read about in the papers got their studios and their contacts and things like that? They married guys with the bucks, guys who could help them. Check out People. Check out Entertainment Weekly. How you going to learn anything if you don’t read?”

  Paige’s bottom lip was puckered and tight. She sulked too much. “I’m not ending up like my mother,” Marlena said. “My dad was nice enough, and then what? When he died, there wasn’t anything, and she has to work her whole life. Not for me. No way.” Paige continued her silence.

  “Be angry if you want to be,” Marlena said. “The truth’s the truth.”

  “David Vincent isn’t even rich,” Paige said. “That is a second-rate nowhere moving company.”

  “He’s rich enough. You notice the ring he wears? That’s a genuine ruby. And his SUV? Plus the Lexus? And he’s bought presents for that awful wife. I saw a diamond tennis bracelet he gave her. Trust me, he’s rich enough.”

  “Do whatever you want, but I still think it’s stupid and wrong.”

  Marlena flipped her cell phone open and pushed numbers.

  “It’s too noisy in here,” Paige said. “You won’t hear right.”

  “She’ll hear. I want it to sound like what it is, a bar.” She waited while the phone rang in his house. She knew he wasn’t there. He was working late, he’d said. Probably out on a date. And she was there, at home, Friday night, with the kids.

  “Hello?” The voice was wary, ready to be angry. Well, it was telemarketing time, Marlena realized. She should be heading home herself, or at least calling her mother.

  “Hi,” Marlena said. “Can I talk to Davey?”

  “Davey?” There was a pause. “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Well, if he’s not there, then I guess…” Marlena paused before she spoke again. “Sorry for all the noise in this place, but I’ve been waiting for him and I thought, maybe there was a problem. He’s usually so prompt. So listen, to whom am I speaking? You must be his sister.”

  “His sister? Where did you get that idea?”

  “From him! He said he was staying with her…Oh, what do I know. I have such a bad memory! But listen, I’m at a pay phone and I’m going to run out of change in about a half a minute, so could I speak with him?” She heard somebody shout in the background. A kid’s voice, an angry kid’s voice.

  “David isn’t here,” Mrs. Vincent said.

  “Did he leave a message for me?”

  “Not for anybody. Do you want to leave him a message? I’m guessing you don’t, am I right?”

  “I guess not. If he doesn’t show, then I guess…he isn’t showing. Kind of rude, don’t you think? But no. No thanks. Damn,” she said with the phone away from her face, but loudly enough for Jeannie Vincent to hear. “Where the hell could he be?” And then she clicked the phone shut.

  Paige had that sleepy face she got when she’d had a few.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Marlena said. “Like I’m a criminal or something. I didn’t do anything illegal. I didn’t do anything that anybody else wouldn’t have done—you, too—if you were smart enough to think of it. If you were a passionate person, the way I am. A person with deep feelings.” She really, really wanted a cigarette.

  “Yeah, right. Feelings like wanting to wreck somebody’s marriage. Feelings like wanting his money. Feelings like making trouble.”

  “That is totally the point,” Marlena said. “That’s what you don’t understand. Trouble can be exciting, and I’m somebody who needs excitement in my life.”

  “Yeah, right. The passionate one, I heard you.”

  Marlena was off her bar stool and on her way for a cigarette, no matter the weather. She patted the phone in her pocket as if it were a lucky stone or charm.

  She’d started it, then. Started it happening. Taken it into her own hands. She couldn’t control the grin on her face, and why should she?

  Sixteen

  Billie studied herself, deciding whether she’d dressed for the part. According to Veronica, Robby Lester was a nightly patron of a bar that was an anomaly in Marin, seemingly left over from an era before the word “yuppie” was invented. It was, if not wild west, then at least mild west.

  Since she couldn’t think of a single reason Robby would want to talk to her if he knew who she was, she’d decided to check him out anonymously. She didn’t want to accept Emma’s offer right now. She needed to act on her own. Besides, she wasn’t going to meet him as herself.

  She’d put on her tightest jeans—which were, alas, tighter than she remembered them being—boots, and a sweater that had seen better days, but not a better fit.

  She stood at the full-length mirror, and declared herself sufficiently “low class,” to borrow her mother’s vocabulary. Funny how after all these long years, and all their estrangement and physical distance, her mother’s voice still criticized her. Her mother with her pretensions and airs, her aristocrat-in-exile persona after Billie’s father walked out on them all.

  Drunk, depressed, and deteriorating herself, her mother would nonetheless have looked at her now and declared her as bringing shame upon the family. As if they were a dynasty with all eyes upon them. As if her mother didn’t have a glass with melting cubes and an inch of golden liquid in it as she stumbled over the word “appearances.”

  “Cheap” she would say if she could see Billie. That was perfect. The last thing she wanted to look was expensive. She worked on her hair, ratting a bit for height, spraying and gooping it into a deliberately rumpled style. Then she applied makeup with a heavy hand.

  Ivan, snuffling into tissues, eyes so watery she was surprised they could see, gaped as she walked into the living room. Or perhaps he was simply mouth-breathing. Jesse had been invited to a Saturday night sleepover at his friend Max’s, which was why Billie had chosen this opportunity to stalk Robby Lester.

  “Halloween again, maybe?” Ivan asked.

  “I’m going to work,” she said. “At a bar.”

  “You are fired?”

  “Work undercover.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Under covers?”

  “An idiom. It means…secretly. Like in spy movies.”

  “At bar? Is safe to go there alone like that? I go with.”

  It was sweet of Ivan, but ridiculous. She imagined him as her bodyguard, an enormous, sniffling, snuffling, glassy-eyed Russian in a bathrobe. “No thanks,” she said. “And it’s ‘I’ll,’ remember? I’llllllll…the tense future?”

  He nodded. Grammar wasn’t interesting him at the moment. She considered the fact that he was just about the same age as Gavin Riddock. Ivan’s life was filled with difficulties, but how much better his bag of troubles was than Gavin’s.

  “You see this?” he demanded. “In paper? A man is in hospital here—in coma, maybe dying—from spider bite.”

  “That isn’t what’s wrong with you.” Make that bodyguard an enormous, sniffling, snuffling, glassy-eyed Russian hypochondriac in a bathrobe. “You’re going to live.”

  “Is huge spider bit him. So big—eats birds! Is Australian animal.”

  “I don’t think spiders are animals.”

  “This man, he collects spiders,” Ivan said with a shudder and a grimace.

  “Serves him right, along with the people who think pythons make neat pets,” she said. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Have some more tea and go to slee
p.”

  “I not sleep. I only dream of spiders,” he said darkly. “Watch TV instead. Wait up for you.”

  “Do me a favor, okay?” she said. “Don’t tell Jesse about that spider.”

  “He have nightmares, too?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. He’ll want one of his own.”

  *

  Sleeping over at Max’s wonderful home would only intensify Jesse’s desire for a pet. Billie sat in front of the store—a detour she’d planned—suddenly shy about going inside in her cheap girl duds.

  She decided that this was no more than another delaying tactic. No time like the present. She zipped up her ancient leather jacket and went in.

  The birds were beautiful and noisy, although the sight of them in their cages caused an echo of the emotions she’d had in the jail that afternoon. Much, much lovelier to see them in an aviary, as they were at Max’s. Or was that just a larger prison?

  “Any questions I can answer?” She caught the clerk staring at her jeans. She had to watch her diet for a while. They were entirely too tight.

  She surveyed the array of cages, with their yellow and green, scarlet and blue inhabitants, bright eyes studying her right back. They were amazing, living art. She didn’t see the one for which she lusted. Surely, she could order one, pay it off over time.

  “Actually,” she said, “I saw a bird—fell in love with it—but I don’t see anything here like it.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “A macaw, but not any of these. Not that they aren’t beautiful, too.” Which they were, but compared to the bird in her memory, they were too splashy, too gaudy. “He was purpley blue and his beak looked almost pale lavender, and he had yellow rings around his eyes and here.” She drew lines down from the corners of her mouth. “Bright yellow. I remember the owner told me its name—the name of a flower. A blue flower, but I…”

  “Not hyacinth,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s it!”

  “You saw a hyacinth macaw?” He made an airy whooshing sound and opened his eyes overwide in a broad pantomime of being both shocked and impressed.

  “Why so surprised?”

  He looked amused by the question, then he shook his head. “Listen, the reason you don’t see one here is that they’re so endangered there’s barely any left in the wild. Maybe a few thousand at most. So they are totally illegal to import. Do not tell me where you saw it, either, or I’d probably have to do something about it.”

  “These are really nice people, they wouldn’t do anything illegal. I mean don’t parrots live a long time? Maybe this one came into the country before they were endangered.”

  He raised an eyebrow and shrugged again.

  “And don’t people raise them here?” she asked.

  “Possibly,” he said, looking as if he doubted it. “And the fact is, your friends were probably told their bird was hand-raised from birds already here. But odds are it was black market. And, incidentally, somebody probably paid around $20,000.”

  “For a bird?”

  He grinned.

  “I thought it might be pricey, but…” She shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

  “The more rare, the higher the price, and, unfortunately, the rarer it becomes because…well…”

  “People steal them in the wild?”

  He shrugged.

  She stood in the middle of the noisy shop, wondering about that aviary’s inhabitants. “I suppose people sell their own birds to other people sometimes.” That must be how Max’s family had gotten theirs.

  “People sell everything.” He raised his eyebrows slightly. “The question would be, how did the person he bought it from get it, and how did that person get it. By the time the buyer here gets one of the few survivors, it’s impossible to track it down to a village in Indonesia or Thailand or Africa. You look shocked. You weren’t aware of what goes on?”

  “Not about this, no.”

  “So you’re wondering about this friend with the bird, right?”

  She didn’t say anything, least of all say how many birds there had been in that enormous aviary. She thought of the one with the plumes and the pithy coral cheeks and was glad she couldn’t remember its name.

  “It’s big business, the animal trade, especially in this country. Right behind drugs in profitability. People get rich, they want fancy toys. A rare fancy toy is even better. And a living rare fancy toy—it’s the best. Of course, these aren’t toys…” He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “None of which means your friend knew he was involved in a criminal thing. If he was. But however he got it, from whomever, one thing is sure. He paid through the nose.”

  “I can’t imagine how anybody could smuggle an enormous, noisy bird like—”

  “They come in as eggs,” he said. “Neatly packaged. But most of them—forty-nine out of fifty—die in the process.”

  “This is too depressing.” She wasn’t going to think about Max’s aviary or what those survivors meant.

  “How about something definitely not endangered, definitely raised right here, and still colorful.”

  “Such as?”

  “A parakeet.”

  She considered it for a moment, but knew it wasn’t going to work. “Nothing against parakeets,” she said, “but…” Jesse wanted a something. A big showy bird that could learn to talk to him, to interact would have worked, but parakeets would not. They were too insignificant, like party favors or garnishes. “Thanks anyway.”

  She thanked him again and returned to her car, letting go of her vivid vision and seeing a fur-colored, four-footed something in her future. At least the Humane Society’s creatures didn’t come with twenty-thousand-dollar price tags, and they were legal.

  Seventeen

  Veronica wanted a drink.

  No, “want” was too weak a word. She might want a chocolate chip cookie, or new shoes, or something good to watch on TV. This was different, the tug of gravity, a force of nature, pulling, pulling.

  “Want” was an ice cube. She had an iceberg.

  She sat on her faded sofa, arms wrapped around herself in the silent house and ached and yearned.

  She wouldn’t.

  She couldn’t.

  There was nothing in the house. Tracy had been so good about it, no matter that she didn’t have a problem with the stuff and liked a drink before dinner. She’d insisted there be nothing. No temptation.

  So getting to the stuff required a goodly drive to the nearest bar or twenty-four-hour market, but if she sat here, stayed here—didn’t even pretend she was going out to recheck the llamas, or getting up to turn on the TV, or check the door locks—just sat here, she couldn’t get into trouble.

  It had been so much better with Tracy in the house. Company, the sound of another animal’s breath against the night. It had been so good, like calming down after a lifetime of being jumpy, that she should have known. She’d tried to warn Tracy. Told her she shouldn’t move in because she, Veronica, was unlucky. Things simply did not work out for her.

  “That is a crock,” Tracy had said, and even now, even in this terrible wanting, Veronica felt a faint smile move her face as she remembered Tracy posing, feisty, wagging a finger at her. “Unlucky is ridiculous. But feeling sorry for yourself? Wallowing in it? Making up stupid superstitions like you’re a doomed person—that’s disgusting. Makes me want to find a two-by-four and hit you upside the head!”

  Self-pity. A drunk’s specialty. “This is a zero wallowing tolerance zone,” Tracy said. Tracy hadn’t believed in luck. She’d believed in herself, in making things change into what she wanted. And Veronica had believed in Tracy. And then, Tracy was dead.

  God, but Veronica missed her. “Talk about it,” Tracy would have said. She was a big one for getting things out of your system. Saying them, shouting them—it didn’t matter—you got rid of the poison. “Then you see, most times, how stupid or illogical it all is.”

  Or, if you were really cooking, you saw the solution.

/>   Veronica didn’t like keeping notes or writing things down. She didn’t even particularly like explanations and confrontations. That was one of the reasons she’d quit the corporate world, where too much information had to constantly be turned over to another person.

  The process never had solved much for her. And right now, there was no one to talk to, and if she unclenched her fists enough to hold a pen, her hands would shake. Besides, what would she write? I miss Tracy. I do not know how to get on with my life.

  And in any case, call it superstition or not, Veronica had been right. She had no luck. That short happy calm time with Tracy had been a lull, the exception to the rule.

  This pain, this all-consuming wanting was the rule. This loneliness, this sense that the landscape had gone empty. As if now, she couldn’t see the trees, the wild grasses, the vegetable garden, the hills, or the llamas—she saw only the empty spaces between them.

  Tracy would hate these thoughts.

  Which she wouldn’t have if Tracy were here to know about them.

  She missed Tracy all the time, but this was different. Worse.

  Saturday night, she thought. Ridiculous. Why should Saturday night be particularly painful? She was long since past “date night” ideas, and it wasn’t as if she went to an office Monday through Friday and had only the weekends free. Every day could be Saturday, so what was this abandoned feeling that filled her bone marrow? What was this Saturday-night craziness?

  She clenched her fists, resisting the only idea in her brain, that if she didn’t find a drink, she couldn’t get through Saturday night. That she had no other alternative. That this was it, her only option.

  No. She could drink herself to oblivion, and Tracy would still be dead, and her lousy husband still wandering free, as if he’d done nothing. And everybody assuming that poor, dumb Gavin Riddock did it because that was easy, and besides, nobody liked his family. The sins of his father indeed. She felt a tremor of rage against Robby and her muscles twinged, wanting to get him. Do something, anything.