Starke Naked Dead

by Conda V. Douglas

  “What?” Godiva asked again.

  I pointed at her chest.

  She looked down at the tiny new star riding on her bosom.

  “That pin’s from my father’s Seattle exhibition.”

  “My pin? I got this pin years ago.”

  “Where?”

  “I—” Godiva stared at the pin as if she’d never seen it before. Maybe the ghost of Derek had sneaked it onto her boob as a parting gift.

  “You had to have gotten that pin from the Seattle exhibition.” The exhibition, years ago, remained my father’s one triumph.

  Godiva’s face brightened. “Yes, in fact, that’s where I first got interested in him…his pins.”

  “You just said you found out about him from the article.”

  Her mouth pursed. “I meant that’s where I found out more about him.” Her face cleared. “I was so pleased that Starke had an artists’ community already.” She smiled at me again. “That includes you, Dora.”

  Oh, thanks a lot, that means so much, I now don’t suspect you of anything at all, I wanted to say. But my sarcasm was so not Right Speech.

  What was Godiva hiding? Or did she hide nothing? Was she just thrown by her brother’s death, as anyone would be? Was she always this defensive and offensive? Did I want her to be the killer because I didn’t much like her?

  “Where is he?” she asked again.

  “I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t know?”

  “No, do you?”

  “What? Why would I ask if I already knew?”

  I hesitated and then said, “Maybe you’re covering up.”

  “I never cover up, I’m a naturist.” She pointed at the front door. “You need to leave.”

  I didn’t dismiss that easily. “I’m not leaving until you—”

  “Out.”

  “Why are you so interested in my father?”

  “If you don’t leave this instant, I’ll scream until that sweaty deputy returns.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Good, he might able to get some answers out of you.”

  “All he’ll be doing is arresting you.”

  “Huh? What for?”

  Godiva smacked herself on the cheek, hard. “Oh, officer, she attacked me.” She scratched at her neck and left pink rivulets. “Help, help,” she said, her voice rising on the second “help.”

  I trotted toward the main doors. “I’m going, you crazy woman.” I said over my shoulder as I grabbed the elk antler handle of one of the enormous double doors.

  I caught a glimpse of Henry’s surprised face through the open door. I jumped back a foot.

  He must have rushed to the Cameron Castle before the arrival of the Widows Brigade, hoping to get paid. Post-Widows Brigade, Godiva might not want to pay rent, she might be headed out of town with a scorched naked behind.

  “You tell Bertie I’m the only one who can save him, Dora,” Godiva said, in a low, flat voice.

  Her words made me turn back. “From who?” Did she mean that she knew who was after Rupert? Did she know Rupert was still alive? “What do you know?”

  Godiva crossed her arms over her ample chest, crushing my father’s pin. She showed her teeth.

  “Tell me.” I took a step towards her. If she didn’t, I’d add to her slap marks.

  “Miss Godiva?” Behind me, Henry pressed inside. He looked from Godiva, with her red face and scratched neck, and back to me. “Dora, what have you been doing this time?”

  “I will find out what you’re up to. I’ll be back,” I said to Godiva and winced at the Schwarzenegger inflection in my voice. I left in a cloud of dust and glory. Well, maybe not glory.

  SIXTEEN

  As I entered, Aunt Maddie swept the bits of broken potato salt- and peppershakers from the floor. She’d righted the display case and placed the lone survivor, a peppershaker, back on the case’s top shelf. She’d re-hung the old bell above the door, which jangled.

  My aunt looked up, her face crumpled with fury.

  I reached up and yanked the bell down, sick of its betraying sound.

  “I should have called the cops on you.” She clutched the broom in her hands as if she held a sword.

  I kept a cautious few feet between us. “They showed up anyway.”

  “Useless.” My aunt put a world of disdain in that one word, but whether the word was for me or the police, I didn’t know. “The lot of you,” she clarified and turned back to her sweeping. Rage showed in every knot in the muscles of her back. “First that nudie woman shows up again after god-only-knows how many years,” she grumbled into the mini-dust storm she created, “and then her brother shows up naked and dead. No sense of propriety, these nudists.”

  I shifted from foot to foot as I tried to come up with a way past her anger. “Sorry—”

  She didn’t look up. “Buddhists don’t apologize.”

  “Yes we do.”

  Aunt Maddie paused in her sweeping. “The past no longer exists and believing so only adds to our suffering.”

  I stood open-mouthed.

  She resumed sweeping.

  Bell in hand, I pointed at the broken tourist junk. “No use crying over spilled potato outhouses.” I grinned. If I could make Aunt Maddie laugh…

  I gave the bell in my hand a little shake. It clanged a sour note. “Don’t worry. I’ll replace this.”

  My aunt swept harder. Small bits of potato-shaped outhouses flew. “That bell has hung there ever since Great-grandmother opened this store.”

  “Then it’s high time we replaced it. We can sell it as an antique.” I set the bell on the now upright display case.

  Aunt Maddie pointed with the dustpan at the stacked cardboard boxes of my wax patterns. “Like you sold those pieces to Nance?”

  I took the dustpan from her and held it while she swept the tourist trash bits into the pan. Decades of dust jumped from the planks as she swept. My family was never known for our housekeeping abilities. Criminal, yes, housekeeping, no.

  If I started working with gold I’d need to get a powerful shop vacuum to make sure I recovered my gold dust. When I worked with gold, I amended. Which would be soon, I promised myself.

  “I’ll drive to Boise.” When? The sun already touched Dog Face Mountain peak. And I needed to find my father. Sell it. Now. If Rupert had been trying today to find me to talk to me I’d been with a dead man, then the police and then looking for Rupert.

  “I’ve been detain—a bit distracted today,” I said.

  “You mean by finding a dead body?” Aunt Maddie swept harder.

  My shoulders jerked. I looked up at my aunt and coughed.

  Aunt Maddie patted my shoulder. I coughed again. She thumped harder.

  “I’m sorry, my little one, that should never have happened,” she said.

  I stood up with the full dustpan in my hand. “It’s just dust.”

  “No, I meant you finding th-that—” Aunt Maddie snorted. My shoulders sagged as I remembered the slumped, naked body. “Oh, Dora.” My aunt hugged me tight.

  The full dustpan slid from my fingers. Dust and potato kitsch flew. I took the broom from her, so that I could lean on it instead. I’d spent my whole life leaning on my aunt. “I’ll sweep,” I said. Broom straws flew off the end of the broom as I swept.

  She crossed her arms across her chest. “It’s your own fault.”

  “Of course, I did bump into the case and knock all this over.”

  “No, Dora. How could you go up to that man’s cabin?” She put decades of hatred into “that man’s.”

  I looked up from where I’d swept a neat pile. I wished my life was as easily tidied.

  Thunder roiled across my aunt’s forehead, presaging a storm. “That horrid man.”

  “He’s not horrid, he’s misunderstood.”

  My aunt crossed her arms under her generous bosom. “I understand Rupert perfectly.”

  “Aunt Maddie, I know you blame my father for mom’s
running off, but he’s blameless.”

  “Patty didn’t run off.” Almost 25 years of missing her sister resonated in my aunt’s voice. “Rupert drove her away with his womanizing.”

  “Womanizing?” I stood frozen, the broom clutched high in my hand. “You mean my father…” An image tried to form in my mind of my father as a lady’s man and failed.

  My aunt grimaced. “Now, with what’s happened, you need to know.”

  “Aunt Maddie, you’re talking about my father. He doesn’t even talk to women.” And if he did, they’d be horrified by the rotten stumps of his teeth.

  Aunt Maddie sighed. “Rupert wasn’t always as he is now.”

  On my knees, dustpan in one hand, broom in the other, I swept and remembered my father before my mother left. My handsome father, who always walked tall and laughed and winked at all the girls, myself included. Unrecognizable in the broken man I knew now, as broken as the bits I swept.

  “He went after my mom, to get her back.” I repeated what I so wanted to still believe.

  “Huh, that’s what he said he did,” Aunt Maddie said, “but he went back to Seattle, the scene of his triumphs, and I’m not talking about the exhibition.”

  I gulped again, the taste of that long ago burger stale in my mouth. The exhibition happened in Seattle and my father returned there when? What had happened in those months when my father pursued, or so I thought, my mother?

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Who what?”

  “The woman?”

  “That loser had a whole string of them,” Aunt Maddie said.

  I stood up as I realized the depth of my aunt’s animosity. So, if Aunt Maddie had discovered that Rupert had the necklace…would she force him to sell it? Would she threaten him with death? If so, why do so now—for the money to pay the rent?

  I squeezed the dustpan handle tight. The pain kept my anger centered. “That loser is my father.”

  “He abandoned you a long time ago.”

  “No, he came back. My father came back.” If she would show some leniency, I might not suspect her.

  “Rupert had no place else to go. I’d forgive him for a lot, but not how he acted when he returned.”

  “Why not? I have.”

  “You’re his daughter, you’d forgive him anything.”

  Would I?

  Aunt Maddie shook her head. “Now he’s a killer.”

  “You mean like Charles?” I couldn’t help myself.

  Her face clouded. “What are you saying?”

  “He left, abandoned you; does that mean he’s a killer?” I hated the rage I heard in my own voice. I acted like my aunt’s own flesh and blood in the worst way.

  My aunt flung her arm towards the front door and knocked the dustpan out of my hand. “You need to get out.”

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Maddie, I didn’t mean to say that.” But I lied. Yes I did. I so wanted someone besides me to believe Rupert innocent.

  “You need to leave town, today. Don’t come back.”

  “Aunt Maddie, I will get enough money from Nance for the back rent.” My words sounded inadequate and hollow.

  “You stay in Boise. Where you belong.”

  My aunt always had welcomed me home. Tears came to my eyes. Must be all the dust. “I belong here.” The tears threatened to spill over. I swallowed hard.

  Aunt Maddie’s face softened.

  “If I’m here I can help you.”

  She gave a tiny smile, a quirk of her lips.

  “And Rupert,” I added. Oops.

  Her face closed down. “You get away from the naked dead.” Her lower lip trembled.

  I realized she wanted to provoke me, for us to argue. To protect me, she wanted to drive me away. Make me run.

  I grasped her arm. “I’m not going to leave, not now.”

  She yanked her arm away. “I expect you out of here by morning,” she said. She shook her head again, her red and white hair flying in a raging inferno. She flung open the door and slammed it behind her.

  She stomped off, blind to the truth about her beloved Charles. I wondered what I had as my own blindness. Was I so desperate to see my father as a victim that I didn’t see who he truly was? He was, if I were to believe my aunt, a womanizer at the least and perhaps far worse. Should I go to Lester and tell him everything I knew? Which was not much, maybe not enough to save my father. Everyone except me believed him the killer.

  If I sold the necklace, if Nance would buy it, then would Rupert give me enough of the proceeds to save Maddie’s store? If I could ever find him and if he hadn’t vanished into the mountains forever, then I could—no, I took a deep breath and let it out at a count of four.

  I swept harder. If I focused on the moment in a form of meditation sometimes the path became clear. Dust floated in the last of the dusk light that filtered through the front display window. The motes reminded me of ashes on the wind. I paused and peered out the front window. Most of the smoke had dissipated, leaving only a few thin fingers creeping along the sidewalk, a good sign.

  If I could look past the veil that obscured my mind—Look. Across the street, parked in front of Maureen’s was Lester’s jeep. What was he doing there? Shouldn’t he be at the sheriff’s office?

  Lester sat ramrod straight behind the wheel. He looked right at me. He waved a finger in admonition.

  I bent back to my task. Thoughts tumbled in my mind. Lester must be staking out Maddie’s store. He must expect Rupert to come here, looking for me. If that happened, if Rupert snuck in past Lester, I might be able to get some answers from my father.

  Perhaps I could even convince Rupert to turn himself over to Lester, where he’d be safe. With Rupert’s help Lester might be able to figure out who murdered Derek. Then Lester could leave on a high note. He needed one.

  And I needed to stay here tonight to wait for Rupert. I promised myself to stay awake all night. I finished cleaning up the one mess I could and headed out for coffee and dinner.

  SEVENTEEN

  My head jerked off my worktable. Ohm, I’d fallen asleep. Again. I’d broken a promise, so not Right Action. What woke me?

  Silence. Not even the sound of cars passing on Main Street outside. It must be the early hours of the morning.

  Potato chip crumbs adhered to my cheek. I brushed off the crumbs and peered past the bright light of the circle lamp. Darkness lay beyond. I wanted to huddle in the oasis of light forever.

  I turned off the lamp and crept to the front of the store. My eyes adjusted to the gray light of early dawn that filtered through the front window. Nothing. Nothing moved in the shadows outside. Even the smoke lay still.

  Perhaps it had been only that wretched dream of finding my father in his chair, naked and dead, that had awakened me. My nightmare served me right. Through the front window I saw another nightmare. The dim outline of Lester’s Jeep remained parked across the street. I wondered if Lester lasted the night awake or had fallen asleep like me. I didn’t dare go outside to check.

  I turned the light back on. Beneath it was my wax patterns of the new designs I’d cobbled up for Nance, including a couple of attempts at a Dog Face Mountain pin. I’d decided I’d even sell Nance that design for the ski resort symbol, if I ever got it to stop snarling.

  In my mind, the necklace called to me from its bed of ashes, a black and diamond siren. I could go to my father’s cabin now and bring the necklace home. I remembered Lester parked outside. The necklace would have to wait.

  A few crumbs from my dinner of potato chips had scattered amongst the patterns. I hadn’t wanted to go back to Mama Chin’s for another try at vegan fare so I’d bought the chips and a Coke over at Maureen’s. As a good Buddhist, I needed to honor my body by feeding it with good food. Potato chips and Coke didn’t fill that order, but at least it was vegan.

  I shook my head at the crumbs as I scolded myself. I knew better than to eat anything around my work. Crumbs could sneak onto a wax pattern and destroy it.

  The wastebaske
t hid behind the front door. I pulled it out and with infinite care cleaned the crumbs off my workbench. The salty sticky crumbs joined the fake potato bits of the broken kitsch in the basket.

  Kitsch. Kitsch sells.

  In the cellar were items that made this junk look like classical statuary. When I’d been down there I’d seen the pieces of sixties and seventies tourist stuff—statuettes in sixties dress with arms open wide and big grins and “Groovy, Man” inscribed beneath, inspirational plaques with sayings such as “today is the best day because it is today” with big smiley faces around it, and worst of all, a bouquet of fake plastic flowers, daisies with smiley faces in the center. Ugh.

  Nance could sell all of it. Nance would want to sell it, as art. She had the skill to display such horrors so that they charmed and enticed. So what if the customer got the piece home and thought “Eeuw, why did I buy this?”

  I glanced at my watch. Six-thirty a.m., close to dawn. I could pack up the whole lot of the tourista junk in the tunnel, drive to Boise and get to Nance’s store as she opened. I could be back in Starke with a check for Henry by early afternoon. One catastrophe averted. Maybe.

  I flung open the trap door. My father’s battered face looked up at me. I screamed. I dropped the trap door.

  EIGHTEEN

  The trap door clanged shut. My father yelped, a muffled squeal.

  I yanked up the door. “Don’t run.”

  The tunnel ladder stood empty.

  “Father, please, come back,” I called into the darkness.

  A bearded oval floated disembodied to the bottom of the ladder. Rupert made so little noise that he appeared disconnected from his body.

  My knees wobbled with relief. My father still lived. “You came back,” I said to him.

  He reached out his hand. “Help me.”

  “Always.” I hauled him out of the tunnel and into the light.

  When he stood next to me, I goggled at his damaged face. Deep purple bruises spread out from a cut lip and one eye swelled almost shut. Long scabbed scratches ran across his forehead.