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

by Gillian Roberts

  “No real reason.” Maybe the emerald would turn out to be paste, left at Gavin’s for the next Halloween party. “Okay if I ask a few more questions?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Veronica pushed another wisp of a plant into a hole. “I germinated too many,” she said. “I thought there would be a second person here. And they all flourished and I don’t want to kill any, so if you want pole beans, or squash.…”

  “Thanks, I’d turn them to dust. Maybe when they’re actual veggies. But I have to ask whether notes were part of what the police took. A diary, maybe. A journal.” She knew the answer to that. There hadn’t been anything listed in the inventory that seemed remotely like a notebook or pages with writing.

  “From here?” Veronica shook her head. “I don’t even know that she ever kept anything like that. Notes about what?”

  “I have no idea. Life. Her life.”

  “Why? Do you think she wrote something incriminating about him somewhere?”

  “You mean Robby?”

  “Who else? If so, he probably still has it. Or he’s burned it.”

  She finished the row. “It isn’t here. And I’ll tell you what, I don’t think there ever was one. Where’d you get that idea?”

  “Gavin’s housekeeper. Tracy asked if she could stash something Ana called ‘notes,’ but Ana didn’t want it at Gavin’s. According to her, Tracy didn’t want it left at home. It would have made Robby jealous, the housekeeper thought, and she was afraid of his jealousy.”

  “If she didn’t want to leave it here, either, then it must have been about me.” Veronica straightened up.

  “I have no idea what it was about. If it even was.”

  Veronica slumped back down. “There aren’t any notes. I can’t imagine Tracy keeping a diary. She was an action sort of woman. A runner, a biker, a hiker. It doesn’t fit her. Besides, if she wanted to leave stuff at Gavin’s, she wouldn’t have asked Ana—or listened to her. She didn’t like how Ana made rules for Gavin all the time, even if she meant well. Tracy called her ‘Big Nurse’ behind her back.”

  That left the emerald ring, an object Veronica obviously was unaware of. “Let me ask whether you think Tracy might have…did she have any…wealthy admirers?”

  Veronica stood and brushed off her jeans, then removed her gardening gloves. She kept the cardigan on, even though Billie thought she was probably too warm. “Admirers?” she said in a high thin voice. “Admirers! You sound like Jane Austen.” Her expression was intense and her voice back to normal. “You mean lover? A rich lover? And you’re asking me?”

  “Not because I think it’s so, but if there was a third party you knew about, somebody she was involved with, that would be…well, you understand. Especially if she, say, dumped him for you, and—”

  “Do you realize what you’re implying? If she had another lover, a man—even another woman—somewhere, a rich lover, then what does that make me? A convenience?”

  “Of course not! I never meant to—”

  “The closest free bed? The closest sucker? Is that what you’re saying? Whenever things seem as bad as they can be somebody like you comes to make things worse!”

  “Please, Veronica, you’re overwrought. Don’t…”

  “You’re making it out to be trash. Making whatever I can still feel good about into nothing! Worse than nothing!”

  “I’m not. I didn’t say anything that—”

  “She confided everything in me.” Veronica tossed her gloves onto the ground and started back toward her house and Billie followed. “Maybe…maybe she wasn’t an angel, who is? But she wasn’t a calculating bitch, the way that makes her sound. She wasn’t a user—she didn’t use me and she wasn’t seeing some sugar daddy on the side, either!”

  “I never meant to suggest she did.” It wasn’t easy making a case while rushing behind a tall woman with a long stride. “I only know that some things don’t fit.”

  Billie followed Veronica into the kitchen. The house had been straightened, and all drawers and cabinet doors shut tight. Veronica opened the refrigerator and took out chilled water and, without asking, poured two glasses.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry. That was….I’m sorry. I don’t seem able to take in anything—”

  “It’s completely understandable.”

  “I acted like an imbecile.”

  “No problem. Honest. Now, would you mind,” Billie asked, “if I used your phone? It’s a free call.”

  Veronica gestured toward the wall, and Billie punched in the number on the scrap of paper, explaining what she was doing. “In case it’s relevant.”

  “I guess it isn’t a sugar daddy with an 800 number.”

  “Not unless he’s made it a business—” Billie stopped as a mechanical voice said she’d reached the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She repeated the words to Veronica, whose response was “What?”

  Options for various sub-services were being recited by the voice, so Billie hung up. “Can you think why Tracy had their number?” she asked.

  “She didn’t fish, if that’s what they do. Maybe she was making a call for Gavin. Like for one of those groups he was in.”

  It did not seem a profitable path to pursue. Billie sipped ice water instead.

  Veronica gestured her to sit down at the table. “Listen,” she said once they were both seated. “What did you mean when you said that something didn’t fit?”

  “There was a piece of jewelry. Just found. Possibly expensive, although it hasn’t been appraised yet. It might be fake. In any case, Tracy left it at Gavin’s.”

  Veronica tapped a finger on the table. Her nails were cut short, the taps soft sounds. “Maybe he gave it to her,” she said. “Gavin’s the only person she knew with money.”

  “He didn’t. She wanted it kept a secret from Robby. The housekeeper thought she was going to sell it and take the cash and that she didn’t want it to be part of the divorce. Didn’t want to divide its worth.”

  “I wonder if Ana’s telling the truth.” More soft taps of the pads of her fingers. Then she looked up, the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled, her expression meditative and worried. “Maybe that’s what it was. I’ve wondered.”

  “What?”

  “The bad thing. That expression sounds childish, doesn’t it? But that’s the way she labeled whatever it was. She said she’d done a bad thing. Actually, she asked if I’d ever done anything so bad that I knew I’d feel guilty about it forever, because she had.” Veronica sat back, her eyes closed, revisiting another time.

  Billie waited. Veronica would get to it in her own time.

  “Maybe it was a shipboard romance,” she said. “Because after she went on that cruise, she was distracted and tense. Mostly, I thought—and think—because she’d finally decided to leave Robby. She said she could now. Something or somebody on the trip convinced her. But she wouldn’t talk about what it was. Maybe it was the ring. It meant money, and she wanted some security before she left him.” She looked at her hands. “She didn’t have to feel so guilty about it. I could have told her so. Those things happen. I wish she would have talked about it.”

  A shipboard romance, a ring, a decision to leave your husband and that degree of guilt? Billie wasn’t as sure it tied up into such a neat package. “You never asked?”

  “She didn’t say, you could tell she didn’t want to, and I thought it showed my faith in her not to ask. I thought she’d tell me when she…I thought we had a long time together ahead. I didn’t say anything to you or anybody because it was private, a thing between us and because what’s to say? I don’t know what she meant, but I tried to think of what could have been so bad. After all, Tracy wasn’t exactly a nun about things like sex or partying, so sex wouldn’t be it. But the jewelry could. Especially if it was…payment, more or less. Her ticket out. Being mercenary. Money was her worst issue. Didn’t have it, but really wanted it.

  “Anyway, that cruise was before the two of us were on solid ground. So i
t isn’t as if…besides, she said she’d thought of a way to make up for it.” Veronica’s voice lowered to a near whisper. “She probably meant being true from now on. Us. She moved in about a month after that.” She looked down at her folded hands.

  “I’m sure that’s what it was,” Billie said. “And I hope that having talked about it, you can set your mind at rest.”

  But Billie’s mind was at anything but. The loose ends had multiplied, and all the way back to San Rafael, she counted them. A hidden ring. A guilty secret. Missing notes. A plan to make up for the guilty secret. Money lust. And to add to the confusion, the phone number of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in her pocket.

  None of it implicated Gavin Riddock.

  All of it suggested a secret life. The life somebody had felt it necessary to end.

  Thirty-Three

  It was better that they were on strictly business terms. Not that it had felt great when his interest plummeted the other night. But it had been for the best. There weren’t even remnants of a subtext now. Just the job. “About the ring?” she said. “If the DA decides it’s more proof against—”

  “What ring?”

  “The ring that…Oh.” He hadn’t given the ring over to the DA’s office.

  “It has no known relevance.” He paced his office, gesticulating as he spoke, as if she were a jury he needed to convince. “The law has a little give here. There are alternative ways of looking at what has to be done with the ring. One is to let things remain as they are—not introduce a potentially damning and in any case inconclusive Trojan horse. That’s my pick. We don’t even know how and where the housekeeper came by it.”

  “Or, I guess, if it’s worth anything in the first place,” Billie said softly.

  The lawyer stopped pacing and stood at his window, his back to her, as he regarded his view of sky. Then he half-turned and said over his shoulder, “That much we know. It’s worth around thirty-five grand.”

  “Jesus. How did she get it?” Billie asked.

  “An interesting question to discreetly pursue,” Michael said. “But meanwhile, it is not my job to put my client into additional jeopardy. It’s not as if this was deliberately withheld, certainly not by Gavin, and in the wrong hands, wrongly interpreted, it could play right into the prosecution’s hands. Look here: a shiny bright thing he had to have.”

  “Gavin’s nothing like that.”

  “We know that, but how do you prove he isn’t? All anybody knows is that he’s not normal. They’ll believe just about anything. And he’s so inarticulate, he’d make their case for them.”

  She couldn’t think of a counterargument.

  “Anyway, who’s to say this ring was actually there at the time when the police searched? Maybe the housekeeper had removed it long before then. For whatever reason. Maybe it’s evidence of nothing. Maybe it never belonged to Tracy. All kinds of maybes, so don’t worry about it, okay?”

  Okay, but there was no way to forget about it.

  She took a deep breath and moved on. “When you went through the evidence box, did you find notes? A journal? A diary? Anything close to that? I’m assuming not, because I didn’t see mention of it.”

  His expression was strained, as if he were translating, with serious difficulty, her words. “From whom? To whom?”

  “From Tracy. By Tracy, actually. Anything?”

  “Nothing like that in there. Nothing that meant much at all. Running gear. A paperback about how to be successful—”

  “Did you riffle the pages?”

  His silence was pointed.

  “Something could be stuck between them,” she said, regretting the words even as they exited her mouth.

  “Like a notebook?”

  She bit at her lips. “It might not have been a book.”

  “Where are you getting this from?”

  “The housekeeper. She said Tracy wanted to leave notes there. The housekeeper didn’t allow it. She thought the notes would make Tracy’s husband jealous. But maybe it wasn’t about Tracy’s love life. Maybe that was the housekeeper’s misinterpretation.”

  “Man, but this housekeeper stirs up trouble. The suddenly discovered ring and now a secret notebook. Maybe she’ll produce it, too, eventually.”

  She ignored that. “It could do with whatever Gavin meant about not helping Tracy. That she never told him what to do— Maybe that report, or diary, or note was what he was to do.”

  “Do when? Where? About what?”

  “Maybe about Veronica’s ‘bad thing.’ Maybe it matters.”

  He looked not at all pleased and about ready to say so, but then he stopped himself and made it clear he was doing so reluctantly. “Interesting theories you’ve got going,” he said. “In any case, yes. I always riffle pages. Besides, I asked him about it again yesterday. I asked him what he thought Tracy had meant and how he was supposed to have helped her.

  “He doesn’t have any idea. He just cries and makes himself sound more and more guilty by saying things like he should have helped her and he didn’t so it’s his fault she’s dead. I asked whether she’d given him hints as to what he could do. I asked him whether it had to do with the groups he belonged to, the way you suggested. I asked him what exactly that cockamamie group did—I didn’t use that word—that CoXistence. I asked him a dozen questions and he didn’t have a clear answer to one of them. Not even about what he’d said the first time, to you. You can’t hang on to each of his words as if it deserved interpretation and commentary.”

  Gavin didn’t like Michael Specht, and Billie couldn’t blame him. Every “cockamamie” showed contempt for his client, however brilliant and clever his courtroom tactics would be.

  He glanced at his watch. “I’m going to see him in twenty minutes. I’ll ask about the ring, and I’ll ask about the mysterious whatever it was again.”

  And a lot your kind of questioning will get you, she thought. Wasn’t a definition of mental illness doing the same thing and expecting different results? Michael would push and bully and emit “you’re guilty” rays and Gavin would back off and balk and grow ever more disoriented and fearful. “May I come along?” she asked. “I was going to ask to see him, but since you’re—”

  “Wouldn’t you say that’s overkill? How can I justify that to my client?”

  “Gavin?”

  He looked startled, then annoyed. “My client’s mother. I stand corrected.”

  “Don’t bill Mrs. Riddock for my time, then. This is on the house. Don’t pay me for that hour.”

  He looked at her appraisingly. “Why?”

  Was she supposed to say “Your client doesn’t like you”? “He’s more at ease with women. It makes sense. His dad walked out, he’s lived with his mother, then this housekeeper, and then there was Tracy, his best—maybe his only—friend. I think he gets more muddled if he isn’t at ease. As do most of us.”

  Michael Specht’s facial muscles registered defensiveness, then belligerence, and finally, a chilly form of amusement. “You could be right,” he said. “But all the same, I don’t like waste or redundancy, and having both of us go is just that.”

  “But please, I—”

  “So you go. And I will bill Mrs. R and pay you—if you get answers out of him. And only if. Not further theories. Not wispy, maybe leads. Answers. Because if you can’t, then I’ll still have to make the trip. Fair?”

  For once, life was fair. Michael Specht was fair. He was also snide.

  She wouldn’t have liked him. It might have taken awhile, but ultimately, the snide part would have overshadowed that winning smile.

  She felt as if she’d managed to leap, painlessly, to the far side of a potentially disastrous, ultimately wretched relationship without scars. She was over and beyond him without having had to experience him.

  A whole new reason to be grateful for the existence of her son: He saved her time.

  *

  Gavin had pulled in on himself. He seemed to be withdrawing into a form of solitary impri
sonment that even the legal system couldn’t impose.

  It must be hell, she thought, for someone who ran every day to be cooped up this way. He seemed restless behind the glass. Fidgety.

  “I was at your house,” she said. “I met Ana and saw your cats and heard—”

  “Ruffles,” he said softly.

  “Ana’s taking good care of them.”

  “I miss them.”

  She wished she could put her hand on his shoulder, offer some human contact and comfort. He looked—he was—alone and isolated.

  Perhaps a change of topic would help. “I saw your collection of movies and music, too,” she said. “Quite impressive.”

  “They won’t let me have my Walkman.”

  Not a great conversational gambit, then. “Well,” she said briskly, “it will all be waiting for you when you’re released. But tell me about your music. Who do you especially like?”

  He named groups, none of which Billie knew, but he was able to summon a long list of names, and that surprised her. His memory was obviously selective. “And the tapes Tracy made,” he said. “The mixes. They’re good, too.”

  The mention of Tracy made it easier to ease into the purpose of the visit. “Did Tracy leave things at your house?”

  He nodded. “Running stuff, I guess.” His eyes wandered around the room even though his answers were polite, as if he were paying as much attention as he could. “Did you find them?” he asked. “Are you here because you found them?”

  “Excuse me? You mean the things Tracy left?”

  He shook his head. “People say things and then I never know.”

  “What’s that? I’m not following…” She felt a stab of sorrow.

  He really was as confused as Michael Specht had said.

  He leaned closer to the glass partition. “You said you were going to look for other people who were sure that I didn’t hurt Tracy. Like you said you were sure. Did you find them?”