by Lora Roberts
“You can’t call from here, either,” Bridget said. “Unless you want them to know where you are. The police have probably got every phone you might call under surveillance.”
I had a moment’s chill. Would they have done that to her lawyer’s phone? Did they know that Hannah had called him from Drake’s line? That might be very bad for Drake. I would hate it if he got into trouble because Hannah made me let her use his phone.
“Well, no one will think to go into her computer.” Hannah seemed uneasy, though.
“And probably the police have already commandeered it. Probably they’re the only ones going through it.”
Hannah thought about that. Her mouth folded down.
“My advice, for what it’s worth,” I said, “is to write your own memoir, and just say very frankly that you were driven to exotic dancing for a brief period before you realized you could make your way through college by cooking.”
Bridget’s eyes grew round. “You were an exotic dancer?” She looked Hannah up and down. “That’s a compliment, in a way. You’re very attractive now, so you must have been a knockout when you were younger.”
Hannah was still glaring at me for letting the cat out of the bag. She brushed Bridget’s comment away. “It’s not the kind of thing I want to be questioned about in an interview, and believe me, everyone wants to dig up your dirt in an interview.”
“At any rate, no one would kill to keep that quiet. It’s no big deal in today’s world.” Bridget spoke briskly. “I’d be more worried about her saying that you killed your husband with poison mushrooms.”
“I did not.” Hannah clutched her handbag closer. “I loved Morton. He was a good man. He really helped me get my career off the ground. He never held it against me that I couldn’t have children. We were happy.”
Bridget raised her eyebrows at me. “If you say so. How did he die, then?”
“It was something he ate,” Hannah admitted. “He had been on a business trip, and he would eat in the little dives, no matter what I told him. He was sick when he got home, and nothing I could do helped. I insisted he go to the hospital, and finally he went, but it was too late—he had a heart attack brought on by his extreme dehydration.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “He was my best friend, more than Naomi. My only friend, really. Now they’re both gone.”
She put her handbag on the table and scrabbled inside it for a hankie. Bridget patted her shoulder sympathetically. “That’s hard on you. Let’s get this finished so you can get your life together again.”
“I would never have killed either of them.” Hannah dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief. “I don’t have many friends. None, actually. I’ve been too busy to worry about friends, and frankly, it’s easier to be the boss if you don’t cozy up to the underlings.” She sniffed.
The front door opened and a voice called, “Bridget? Yoo-hoo.”
Hannah sprang up. “Who’s that?”
“It’s Claudia,” Bridget said, glancing at me.
Claudia was already talking. “I’m worried about Liz,” she said, just before she appeared at the kitchen door.
Claudia Kaplan, one of Bridget’s friends, had helped me out a few years earlier, at a very tense time in my life. One of a circle of writers Bridget and I knew, she had published some well-received and popular biographies of notable women. She looked queenly as usual, her graying hair pinned up with a variety of combs, her tall frame swathed in woolly layers surmounted by a huge turquoise and red shawl.
“I’m okay, Claudia.”
She stopped, looking from me to Bridget, to the interloping Hannah Couch, who stood against the wall, pointing a gun at her.
“What’s this mean? I thought the news must have had it totally wrong when they said you kidnapped Hannah Couch.” Claudia finished unwrapping her shawl, her composure not the least ruffled by being held at gunpoint.
“It was wrong. Backward, you might say. Hannah abducted me, then Bridget.”
Bridget looked sternly at Hannah. “We had an agreement. Put the gun away, or you can’t stay here.”
Hannah was confused. She waved the gun. “All of you, sit down.”
Claudia gave me a meaningful look; I got her message. We closed in on Hannah, one on either side. Her gun waved wildly between us. “Sit down, I say. I will shoot.”
“Why will you shoot? We’re helping you, aren’t we?” Bridget spoke in her reasonable, child-managing voice. “Just put the gun away and let’s get on with it.”
Hannah decided to train the gun on Bridget. “Both of you go sit down, or I’ll shoot your friend.”
This made me very angry. Bridget didn’t deserve to be threatened. She was trying, in her usual generous way, to help.
Claudia and I exchanged looks again. “Hannah!” Claudia’s bellow was loud and imperative. Hannah swung toward it instinctively, and I leaped at her arm and yanked it to the ground. The gun went off.
“Damn it.” Bridget was on her feet. “I told you all, no gunplay. This has gone far enough.”
“Yes, it has.” My ears rang. Using Claudia’s shawl, I picked up the gun. It had hit the floor half a second after the shot.
Hannah stood there, stunned, her arm hanging limply, fingers relaxed. Claudia appeared intact, as well. The room was full of a sharp, smoky smell. A neat, round bullet hole had appeared in the floor.
“So how does it feel to shoot at a room full of people?” Claudia put her hands on her ample hips and glared at Hannah. “You could have killed someone.”
“You should have sat down,” Hannah whispered. She examined her empty hand, then put her fingers to her lips. “You should all have sat down when I told you.”
“We should have,” I agreed. It gave me a terrible feeling to think that Bridget or Claudia could have been hurt. “Let’s do it now. Bridget, do you have a plastic bag or something?”
Bridget found me a plastic bag and put the kettle on again. Claudia led Hannah to the table and pushed her into a chair. “Sit. Don’t make more trouble.” She looked at Bridget, at me. “What in the name of all the muses together has been going on here?”
I tucked the gun into a plastic bag and took it to the only place in Bridget’s house that locked—the filing cabinet in her office. After a moment’s thought, I put the filing cabinet key on top of the tallest bookcase in the room, which required me climbing on a chair to reach it. Then I did something I knew would make Claudia and Hannah hate me. I used the phone on Bridget’s desk and punched in the number for Drake’s private work line.
Of course I got his voice mail. I whispered, “Drake. I’m okay. Hannah made me go with her, and we’ve ended up at Bridget’s. Hannah’s been disarmed and we’re all safe. The others don’t want me to call you until we’ve figured out what’s going on, but I wanted to let you know I’m all right.”
I hung up the phone gently, hoping that some good would come of my call. I didn’t know how often Drake was picking up his voice mail, but I was willing to bet, with me in trouble again, pretty often.
When I got back to the kitchen, Bridget had filled Claudia in on the morning’s events; she had also filled the teapot and cookie plate.
Claudia ate her way through a cookie while she looked at Bridget’s page of notes. Hannah seemed shrunken sitting there. I poured her a cup of tea, and she seized the warm cup gratefully in trembling fingers.
“Excellent,” Claudia said, slapping the notepad back onto the table. “Okay, let’s get back to it. I’ll help.”
Hannah roused herself. “Aren’t you going to call the police now?”
“We should.” I wanted the legitimacy of telling them I’d already done so, but I couldn’t bear to hear the resultant outburst from Claudia and Hannah, both with powerful lungs, both unafraid to use invective.
“Not yet,” Claudia protested. “I haven’t gotten to play Nancy Drew yet. Let’s figure it out, then we can just hand it to the police, a fait accompli.”
Bridget pursed her lips. “I did get rid of the childre
n for the afternoon, so we have until four or four-thirty.”
“Shouldn’t take that long.” Claudia hitched her chair closer to the table. “So where did you leave off?”
Hannah glanced around the table. “You’re not turning me in,” she said slowly. “After I forced you to go with me, and even shot at you, you’re going to help me?”
“Just call us stupid,” I said with a little bitterness.
“No. I can think of a lot of names for you all, but stupid isn’t one of them.” The first genuine smile I’d seen from her blossomed on Hannah’s face. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“Don’t thank us yet,” Claudia said. “Wait till we actually figure it all out. Here. Have a cookie.”
Chapter 14
“I like Kim for it,” Claudia said, chewing on the end of the pen. “She heard you say that Naomi had killed her uncle, and she wanted revenge.”
“But that runs into the same problem. How did Kim kill her, and why was she carrying some kind of poison around?”
Hannah listened to us as she had for the last half hour, like a spectator at a three-way tennis match. Claudia was a vigorous player, lobbing many wild hits; Bridget knocked them all down with forceful sweeps of logic.
Undeterred by all the talk of poison, Bridget put down a plate with the cheese I’d brought from my house, some crackers, and a bowl of apples.
Hannah looked at the arrangement critically. “You can get beautiful paper cheese leaves through my catalog, dear. They are especially nice when you’re serving a soft goat cheese or a Brie like this.”
“It’s not Brie.” Bridget stuck a little spreader in the top of the cheese she’d added to my more pedestrian cheddar. “It’s fromage d’Affinois.”
“Hmm.” Hannah tried some on a melba toast. “It’s very nice.” She used my pen to write the name on a piece of paper from my notebook, which she tucked into her handbag. “You’re not getting anywhere, are you, dear?” Her voice when she spoke to me carried the same hint of criticism. “Lovely doodles.”
I was doodling, and trying to summon Drake with mental telepathy. It was taking him a lot longer to respond to my message than I’d thought. I wondered if he was just washing his hands of me and turning it all over to the San Francisco police, who’d have to drive down in heavy traffic to secure our band of intrepid amateur detectives.
In fact, none of us were getting anywhere. I munched on a cracker spread with the fromage, which was so creamy it seemed as if the cow could have produced it without human assistance. Bridget refilled the cookie plate. It was getting late.
“If it comes to that,” I said, “why would anyone carry poison around?”
Hannah looked up from the apple she was peeling. “Naomi might have brought poison, if she meant to kill me.”
We were all silent for a moment. “Did she?” I ceased doodling to write down Naomi’s name, with three significant underscores.
“I thought she might.” Hannah shivered. “I thought, if she’d killed Tony, nothing would stop her from killing me.”
“What made you think she’d killed—Tony?” Claudia consulted her notes. “Her brother?”
Hannah nodded. “He was actually very good at running our gourmet take-out operation. Better than either of us would have been on a day-to-day basis. He trained his staff well too. I used him to cater a number of events, and he always did a fine job.”
“So she killed him because he was good at what he did?” Claudia shook her head. “That doesn’t sound plausible.”
“He wanted to buy it, and Naomi was really digging in her heels.”
“He’d be more likely to kill her, in that case.” Claudia made a note.
“They were having screaming matches over it.” Hannah shivered. “Naomi just wouldn’t hear of him buying it. She liked to lord it over him because she was successful, and he was just riding her coattails. He called her some terrible names too. One day they had a really bad fight, and the next day, he dropped down dead. Everyone said it was his heart, that he’d had heart trouble before. But Naomi was so … triumphant. That’s when I thought she probably killed him.”
“She made him have a heart attack?”
“It’s possible.” Hannah sounded defensive. “She majored in chemistry. She’s always been interested in chemical reactions. When we first started out as caterers, she was the baker.”
We were all silent for a minute. I doodled some more, and realized I was writing Kim’s name.
“I can’t believe that Kim had anything to do with it,” I said, staring at my page. “She’s just not the type of person to murder someone.”
“All types commit murder,” Claudia said with authority. She fancied herself a criminologist, and kept a certain rivalry going with Drake in that respect. It was true that she had a first-class brain, but she didn’t always know as much as she thought she did.
“But not Kim,” I argued. “She’s not even twenty, for crying out loud. She’s … obedient, for lack of a better word. She takes orders. I don’t think it would even occur to her to kill someone. And she was looking forward to the tour. This pretty much ends the tour.”
Hannah rooted in her handbag and brought a hankie to her eyes. Counting the one I’d given her, she’d gone through three hankies. “I guess it does,” she said, her voice muffled. “I thought I could just go on. I thought we would have to pick up our schedule. But I can’t go on without Naomi. I know we fought, but she meant so much to me.”
I had decided that Hannah was innocent of Naomi’s death, but this speech made me reconsider. I looked at her with narrowed eyes. After all, it was Hannah who benefited the most. The painful subject of her past was buried now and she was free of the claims of partnership. Her grief at Naomi’s death seemed genuine, but perhaps it was crocodile grief.
“We haven’t really considered Don,” Claudia said, tapping her pen on her pad of paper. Where I had doodles, she had organized columns of notes. She approached this as she did her writing research, with fact gathering and logical thought. I hoped, when Drake finally got hold of us and turned us over to the San Francisco police, that he would be impressed with our industry.
“What’s to consider?” Bridget didn’t really like suspecting anyone.
I understood. I too felt that Kim and Don were nice young folks who were ineligible as suspects. I preferred to pin the blame on Hannah because she was not a nice young person. But nice young people had committed murder before. I had even known a couple of them.
“Don doesn’t seem to have any reason to have killed Naomi, or any connection aside from being the tour photographer.” Bridget took the fruit knife from Hannah and cut up her own apple, with peel on. She nibbled a quarter. “He was just along for the ride, right?”
“That’s not really true.” Hannah looked around the table. “Don was Naomi’s son, actually.”
Claudia dropped her pen. Bridget blinked. I stopped doodling.
“I thought you said she wasn’t married,” Bridget finally said.
“She wasn’t.” Hannah shrugged. “We all have our indiscretions. That was Naomi’s. She had a torrid affair with a married man, but he went back to his wife. When she found out she was pregnant, he gave her money for an abortion. She used the money to buy commercial baking equipment and gave the baby up for adoption. I think at the time she wanted to punish the man; if he didn’t want children out of wedlock, she’d make sure he had one. But he never came around again to be punished, and she didn’t enjoy the experience of childbirth at all.”
“Does Don know?” Claudia leaned forward.
“I don’t know.” Hannah considered this. “Naomi was the one who tracked him down. She seemed to feel that since she never married and had legitimate children, she might as well get the benefit of the one she did have. He hadn’t been searching for her, but she got a private detective to search for him. She told me she wanted to meet him and see what he was like before she revealed herself as his birth mother. When she found out he
was a photographer, she insisted I hire him for this tour. His samples looked fine, so I hired him.”
“But you don’t know if Naomi told him she was his mother or not?” Bridget frowned. “I should think if she’d told him, you would all know.”
“Don isn’t too demonstrative.” I tried to remember everything about the lanky photographer. “He might not have reacted on the surface.”
“But if he thought that his rightful mother had abandoned him, and if his childhood hadn’t been happy, he might have felt a lot of rage,” Claudia said. Her enthusiasm for this scenario glowed in her eyes. “He might have thought she had no claim to him or his affections. He might have wanted to stop any plans she had for trying to get into his life.”
“I don’t know.” None of these scenarios seemed right to me. “I’ve met both Don and Kim, and neither one seems likely to act this way. I mean, I’m not saying they wouldn’t kill if pushed to it. But Naomi wasn’t really pushing either of them. She was pushing Hannah.”
We all turned to Hannah.
“It wasn’t me, truly.” Her voice squeaked. “I wouldn’t have killed her. She was important to me. We haven’t always gotten along, but we’ve always managed to work together.”
Bridget glanced at the clock. I knew she didn’t want this murderous coffee klatch to continue much longer; she had children to see to.
I jumped up. “I’m calling Drake.” I didn’t add, “Again.” No need for them to know I’d snuck around behind their backs. “He’s worrying about me, and I’m sitting here getting absolutely nothing done.”
“You can’t do that.” Hannah put a hand to her throat. “We had a deal.”
“You don’t understand.” I stood in the kitchen doorway, trying to put words to my emotions without revealing too much. “Drake is more than a policeman, see. He’s my neighbor. He’s a friend.”
“He’s going to wring your neck,” Claudia said warningly. “He’ll be really angry, Liz.”
“Well, he has reason to be.” I looked at them, sitting around the table as innocently as if we were just getting together to play cards. “Don’t you see? We don’t have the resources to solve this. The police know how she died, which is more than we do.”
