by Lora Roberts
“I exercise when I have time.”
“You’ll have to make some time in the mornings, because it really helps you cope with the stress of being on tour. Eat lots of salads, dressing on the side. Drink lots of water. Your driver can buy it for you.”
“Treat your driver well,” I said, glaring at Hannah. “Don’t abduct her and her friends.”
“I’ll definitely remember that one.”
“Look,” Hannah said, with what passed for patience. “I don’t want to be the bad guy. I don’t want to frighten people. But you don’t understand. I can’t be arrested and questioned, and have suspicion thrown on me. It would ruin everything I’ve worked for.” She sounded defensive. “I did the best thing under the circumstances. They’re sure to figure out how Naomi really died, and then it will all blow over. If I’d been there, it would have turned into some kind of media circus.”
“And it’s not now?” Bridget raised her eyebrows. “It’s all over the TV. Plus, you’ve ruined Liz’s reputation. All that old stuff will be dragged out, all those other murders—”
“Other murders?” Hannah turned to me. “You said you didn’t kill your ex-husband.”
“He wasn’t my ex at the time.”
“I’m sure he’s glad to be now.”
“He’s dead.” I didn’t want to have to go into all this. “Look, I didn’t kill him. He was a scumbag, and someone else killed him later. I didn’t kill any of them.”
“Any of whom?” Bewildered, Hannah looked from me to Bridget. “You’re a mass murderer?”
“Not at all.” Bridget spoke up stoutly. “Liz has actually figured out some murders.”
“And not figured out others—not nearly soon enough.” I didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. “Look. There’s the Thrift Savers.”
“Why don’t you figure out this one, then? Save us all a lot of trouble.” Hannah ignored the big building with shelves of glassware sparkling in the windows. She was intent on me now.
“I thought you said Naomi killed herself. Now you’re saying she was murdered. Which is it?”
“I thought she did kill herself. She was miserable, and it would have been like her to think she would succeed in mixing me up in scandal by making it look as though I did it. But maybe it was someone else. Someone who wanted her out of the way badly enough to kill her.” Hannah shivered, losing some of her iron control.
“You know what that means,” I said, while Bridget parked in the lot behind the Thrift Savers. “Someone in your entourage.”
“I know.” Hannah fell silent.
“Well, here we are.” Bridget spoke brightly, but her eyes were worried. “Are we getting out?”
“Of course. I never miss an opportunity to comb through the secondhand stores.” Hannah gestured with the gun. “I’m keeping this in my pocket, so don’t think you can get away with anything. The two of you stay just ahead of me. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I always do what has to be done, and I am a crack shot.”
Inside the Thrift Savers it smelled of old upholstery and dust. Usually when I’m there I check the towels and washcloths; I’ve found things that have hardly been used. I look at the plates and glassware too. I like interesting plates, so long as they don’t cost more than a dollar, and have amassed a collection of the kind with a landscape picture on them. If a glass or plate breaks, it doesn’t matter, because there are more at the Thrift Savers.
Bridget and I became Hannah’s linen slaves, searching through the stacks of tablecloths and place mats and napkins for those distinguished enough to belong in her collection. I found a hankie embroidered with a little cowboy boot and cactus and wouldn’t let Hannah have it. “No, I found it,” I insisted. “It’s mine.”
Hannah pouted. “You can come here anytime. I’m only here this once.”
“And so is this hankie. It’s mine.” I clutched the treasure to my chest and glared at her.
She shrugged. “Be that way.”
“Children, don’t quarrel.” Bridget spoke absently. She had strayed over to the nearby bookshelves instead of cruising the linens. “Here’s something really interesting. A first edition of Sue Grafton’s A Is for Alibi. I thought everyone knew how valuable this is.”
“It’s valuable?” Hannah eyed the book. It was worn and missing its dust cover, but unmistakably Sue Grafton’s first Kinsey Millhone.
“Not as valuable as if it was in fine shape. But it’ll fetch a few hundred, probably.” Bridget tucked it under her arm. “This one’s mine. Travel wardrobe, here I come.”
“Didn’t you get a good advance for your book?” Hannah stopped shopping long enough to quiz Bridget. “And of course the bestseller list means royalties.”
“Months from now.” Bridget looked gloomy. “Everyone thinks you make a lot of money writing, and maybe you do,” she told Hannah. “I was happy with my advance—some of my friends who write novels get only half as much. But if you look at it as a year’s salary, it sucks. And it still wasn’t enough to remodel the kitchen, especially after the agent’s fee and the estimated taxes came off the top. They’re offering me a lot more for my next book, but I won’t sign anything until I know there’ll be a next book.” She closed her lips tightly; I guessed that she hadn’t meant to say so much. Only to a couple of her writer friends had Bridget confided that she was not getting anywhere with her attempts to write another novel. She had thrown away several promising beginnings because they didn’t move forward. We didn’t mention the dreaded b word (block), but she spent more time with contractors and the city planning department now than she did at her keyboard.
“Well, maybe you should write a mystery.” Hannah nodded at the book tucked under Bridget’s arm. “Then yours would be worth hundreds someday.”
“They’re too hard to write.”
“You’re better at solving mysteries than I am.” I had to put in my two cents’ worth.
Hannah planted her hands on her hips. “Do you all do nothing but deal with murdered people? That does it. You’re going to solve this one so I can get back to work.”
She marched us up to the cash register to buy the hem-stitched damask tablecloth she’d found. Bridget and I paid for our items. Bridget earnestly told the cashier that next time, they should keep back the books that were worth a lot and sell them themselves, but the cashier just looked at her blankly.
“Now,” Hannah announced when we were back in Bridget’s car, “we’re going to sit here until you solve this crime. If you’re both so used to doing it, that shouldn’t pose any problem.”
Bridget and I looked at each other. If we stayed in the parking lot long enough, either the San Carlos police would come to give us a parking ticket or the tow truck would come to take us away. Either way, we’d be out of Hannah’s frying pan and into the uncertain fire of police custody.
“Okay,” said Bridget. She folded her arms across her chest. “Start by telling me the whole story.”
“Wait a minute.” Hannah looked around. “Someone may notice us parked here.”
“You think?” Bridget shrugged. “Probably not.”
Hannah narrowed her eyes. “We’ll go to your house,” she said finally, waving the gun in Bridget’s direction. “They might be looking at Liz’s house.”
Bridget started to say something, but I poked her. If Hannah knew that her house was only a couple of blocks from mine, and that people were constantly coming and going, she might decide to really go to earth. Beneath the rumble of the Suburban’s engine, Bridget said to me, “I don’t like this one bit. I don’t want her waving that gun around at my house.”
“The kids aren’t there, right? Someone will see her or come in and recognize her, and call the cops. Better than having her decide to rent a motel room for the duration.”
“I guess.” Bridget drove down El Camino, her brow creased. “So if the fastest way to get rid of her is to solve the crime, why don’t you fill me in on what happened?”
So that’s what
I did on the drive back to Palo Alto.
Chapter 13
Bridget’s house was one of the Victorian bungalows that used to be far more prevalent in Palo Alto before people decided to tear them down in favor of monstrous lot-hogging fortresses. She and her husband, Emery, were committed to fixing their old house, but everything cost more in a rehab, so progress had been slow. They had gotten so far as to paint the outside and reshingle the roof. It looked very nice from the street.
Bridget pulled the Suburban into the drive and turned around to face Hannah. “I have a no-gun policy in my house,” she announced. “Even toy guns are frowned on. Yours is not a toy.”
Hannah appeared to find this amusing. “Didn’t you say you have sons? I can’t imagine little boys playing without guns.”
“Well, your imagination needs work.” Bridget crossed her arms. She and I both knew that her boys made weapons out of everything that crossed their paths. But Bridget still held fast to her rules. No toy guns in the house, and any visiting guns were put away until it was time for their owners to go.
“Well, I won’t give up my gun.” Hannah scowled. “I need it to keep you from interfering with my plan.”
“You don’t have a plan,” I said brutally.
“And you don’t need the gun,” Bridget added. “Liz has told me the story. I’m not sure how much help we can be to you, but I’m willing to take a stab at it. Though I think the police would do a much better job of figuring the whole thing out. They probably already know the cause of death, which we don’t.”
“Yeah,” I chimed in. “Maybe it was natural, and this whole thing is for nothing.”
Hannah didn’t like my comment. “Naomi was healthy as a horse. We just had our yearly checkups. She did the office workout every morning, like the rest of my staff. Believe me, that was not a natural death.”
“Okay, I believe you.” Bridget made her voice soothing. “But you still don’t need the gun. If you’ll take responsibility when the police find out and want to charge us as accessories or something—”
“And they will want to do that,” I muttered.
“I will gladly clear my schedule for the next few hours and sit down to go over everything.”
Hannah thought for a minute. “I’ll put the gun in my purse, which is where I always carry it. If we’d met under other circumstances and you’d invited me into your home, you would never have known about it.”
Bridget appeared to accept this tortuous logic. We went inside.
The inside of Bridget’s house didn’t measure up to the outside. The floors were scuffed, with finish worn off in spots. The kitchen was still as it had been forty years ago, with the exception of the microwave oven perched on one counter. Nevertheless, the whole house exuded a welcoming warmth that no amount of paint and polish could create.
Bridget went straight to the telephone. “I have to arrange child care,” she told Hannah, who’d made an alarmed grab for her handbag. “I’m not going to fink on you, no matter how much I think you should just go to the police.”
Hannah stood over her while Bridget dialed. “Melanie,” Bridget said into the receiver, “could you pick up Mick and Moira and keep them this afternoon? I’ll be glad to reciprocate next week.”
I could hear Melanie Dixon’s high, carrying voice from where I stood in the kitchen doorway. She would be consulting her enormous book of appointments and finally, after impressing Bridget with how busy and important she was, she would confirm that the Salvadoran woman who looked after her own two girls would be equal to the task of looking after Mick and Moira also.
Moira loved to play with the Dixon girls. I’d picked her up there once after a play date, and she’d been very reluctant to relinquish a pink, frilly ballerina doll. At home, the taste in dolls ran heavily to cartoon action figures, which Moira appeared to enjoy engaging in violent pretend games as much as her brothers did. But when there was pink around, she wanted it.
“Thanks, Melanie. What? Oh, something’s come up. I’ll tell you about it later.”
She dialed again, this time a mom in her older son Corky’s class, and arranged for Corky and Sam to play after school.
Hannah was taken with the dial phone. “This is marvelous. Where did you find it?”
Bridget raised an eyebrow. “We had it put in when we moved here some twenty years ago. It wasn’t particularly cutting edge then, and Emery wants to replace it.”
“Oh, no.” Hannah wiped a smudge off the red plastic casing of the wall phone. “You mustn’t do that. This is—”
“Let me guess. Collectible.” I looked at Bridget. “Like everything in my house, evidently.”
“Well, you do live in a time warp,” Bridget pointed out. “No phone, no TV, no e-mail, no Jacuzzi—”
“You don’t have a Jacuzzi either, or a dishwasher, or a garbage disposal.”
“Yes, but I want them,” Bridget admitted. “You don’t.”
Hannah marched over and sat at the kitchen table, clutching her purse to her midsection. “This is fascinating,” she said in the polite voice that contradicts its words, “but it doesn’t have anything to do with our problem.”
“Your problem.” Bridget put the kettle on.
I got out the teapot and chose a calming green tea blend, while Bridget rummaged in the pantry and came out with a plate of cookies. “I hesitate to serve Hannah Couch anything,” she said, putting the plate on the table. “No doily, and they aren’t fresh baked. I made them yesterday.”
“I’m surprised there are any left.” I took one eagerly. Bridget’s oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies were always acceptable in my book.
Hannah took one, turning it over analytically before she bit in. “Interesting combination,” she said. Then she stopped analyzing and ate the cookie. I had another, and so did she.
Bridget plunked the filled teapot and some cups onto the table, and fetched a pad of paper and some pens. “I think better when things are written down,” she said, uncapping her pen. “Now, we are supposing that Naomi’s death was murder.”
“Right.” Hannah watched Bridget writing. She reached into her handbag, and Bridget and I froze for a moment, before she pulled out a thick leather-bound agenda, the kind that says serious scheduling goes on. She opened it and took out a Cross pen and prepared for jotting down her own inspirations. I felt left out, but my notebook was in my knapsack near the door, and I didn’t want to wander away in case I needed to protect Bridget from any sudden moves Hannah might make.
“So if you didn’t kill her, and Liz didn’t kill her, that leaves who?”
Hannah stirred uneasily. “That’s just the problem. It couldn’t have been Kim, because Naomi was her aunt.”
“But didn’t you accuse Naomi of causing her brother’s death? Seemed to me Kim was very close to her uncle.”
Hannah tapped the pen against her closed lips. “I did say that,” she admitted, then scowled at me. “You must have been eavesdropping.”
“So you said it, but you didn’t mean it.”
Hannah’s gaze slid away. “Look, Naomi said things she didn’t mean too.”
“She said you fed your husband poison mushrooms.”
Bridget scribbled busily.
“Don’t write that claptrap down,” Hannah commanded. “We were arguing. Words were spoken in the heat of anger.
“I’m writing everything down,” Bridget added. “Sometimes it’s the smallest things that lead you to the solution.” I caught her eye and she glanced away. “At least, that’s what Inspector Gadget says.”
“Who?” Hannah looked confused. “I told you, no police. We’ll get to the bottom of this without them.”
“Right.” I thought this was futile. We didn’t have the resources to figure it out. But I would play the game. “So Kim might have thought Naomi poisoned her favorite uncle. You thought she was writing a tell-all book about you—”
“I know she was.” Hannah’s lips tightened. “She sent me pages out of it, where
she talked about the past in a very unflattering way.”
“The part about Roxy—”
“Don’t go there.”
Bridget was curious. “Roxy who? What?”
“It’s nothing important.”
“It’s not important now,” I pointed out. “Now that Naomi is dead and you can keep anyone from finding out. Unless she had her manuscript with her, in which case the police have already found it and figured that into your motive.”
“I don’t have a motive!” Hannah threw her hands into the air. “I keep telling you. None of this mattered. I could always squash anything Naomi tried to do, and she knew it. Besides …“ She stopped talking, looking from one to the other of us.
I felt as if Bridget and I were the jury, sitting in judgment of Hannah while she had to drag all the tawdry bits of her life out and justify them for us. There is a certain amount of power attached to feeling like that, but I didn’t care for it. The whole thing was starting to make me want a shower.
“Besides what?” Bridget was made of sterner stuff. She meant to get to the bottom of this and reclaim her life.
“I found her manuscript. Last night, when she was dead drunk.” Hannah spoke in a rush, the words tumbling out as if it was a relief to her to let them go. “She had it in her suitcase, and I found it and sent it down the hotel’s incinerator chute.”
Bridget and I looked at each other. “Was it computer generated?”
“What?”
“Had she written it on a computer? If so, it’s still on her hard drive, and maybe copied on a disk.” Bridget spoke patiently, as befits a Silicon Valley resident to a member of the technically challenged class.
Hannah brushed these objections away. “It was typed, but the only computer Naomi has is in her office at Couch Productions. I can secure that with one phone call.” She started to reach into her handbag, then remembered that her cell phone was turned off for the duration. “Damn.”
