Killing Thyme

by Leslie Budewitz

  Carl fetched two beers from the cooler that serves as the fridge in what Andrea calls their outdoor kitchen, a lovely stone structure with empty spaces where the appliances should be, and handed one to Ben. “Ah, the Seattle Freeze. We’re all so nice and polite. Newcomers feel like they’ve finally come home, until they try to break through that friendly veneer and get to know us. Bam! Frozen out. Local legend, anyway. I hope you haven’t actually experienced that, because we need our newcomers. We need your passion and ideas and energy.”

  Not for nothing was Carl on the city payroll.

  But his comments did make me wonder: Was I freezing Ben out?

  “Your father always said he came here because of Bobby Sherman,” my mother said. “After he got back from Vietnam, he saw Here Come the Brides on TV and thought, wow, the skies really are blue and the grass really is green. And the girls are pretty cute, too.”

  They all laughed, but I wasn’t going to let my mother change the subject so easily. “Mom, don’t you want to reach out to Peggy’s family? To Roger—he was her boyfriend, right? You’re the one who always makes the calls, sends the condolence notes.”

  “Let the police take care of it, Pepper.” My mother reached for the wine bottle. “Everyone I knew is long gone.”

  There was something odd about her reply, or maybe it was the way her hand shook as she refilled her glass.

  “Mom, Peggy was your friend. Years ago, yes, but now she’s dead. Murdered. It’s not like you to ignore that.” To let a death go unobserved, a life go uncelebrated, even when the threads of connection had worn thin, as some inevitably do.

  “We are having a perfectly lovely evening, Pepper. Why do you insist on ruining it by dredging up the past?”

  Because you knew her. Because you were shocked to see her, then went back and got into a shouting match. Because you warned someone about her, and you won’t tell me what’s going on.

  I opened my mouth, then closed it as the harmonies played in my mind’s ear. Yoga, meditation, astrology, Feldenkrais, communal child rearing, Montessori schools—you name a trend from the 1970s, it swirled through our lives, first at Grace House and later in our own home. But all through that vortex of experimentation and exploration, there had been one constant: my mother’s love of medieval songs and chants. When she was in the kitchen, or cleaning, or driving our old VW van, she’d pop in a tape and crank up the volume.

  To this day, whenever I am stressed by choices, whenever I sense that people I love aren’t being quite honest, whenever I feel tugged in a direction I do not want to go, those haunting sounds fill my senses.

  There had been a second theme in our lives, best stated by a bumper sticker on that old van: PRAY FOR PEACE, AND WORK FOR JUSTICE.

  The back door opened, and my nephew walked slowly down the steps, bearing a heavy plate. All I could see were three candles, unlit. Cake? Gluten-free, sugar-free, and taste-free, unless the kids had used “Grandma’s here so let’s celebrate Aunt Pepper’s birthday two weeks late” to badger Andrea into relenting.

  I shut my mouth and closed my eyes, letting my hand drop to my dog’s soft head. Why was I acting so snarky, petty, and grumbly?

  Because I was about to do the thing I had sworn all day that I wouldn’t do.

  I was going to find a way to work for justice, for Bonnie Pretty Pots.

  * * *

  What would Brother Cadfael do? I wondered, as Arf and I hopped out of the Mustang Sunday morning outside Chinook’s, at Fishermen’s Terminal. As last night’s family gathering wound down, Ben had seen the fire catch hold in my eyes, and he’d wanted to talk, to figure out how we were going to investigate.

  Not wanting to give him the cold shoulder, but not feeling warm and cuddly, either, I’d pleaded exhaustion after a too-full day. Mostly, I needed to let my own thoughts heat up and simmer a bit.

  So I’d gone home alone and buried myself in my book. I’d been devouring medieval mysteries ever since finding a box of Brother Cadfael books and videos my mother had left in my storage locker.

  Now it was time to pack up my troubles and be social. Laurel had snared a dockside table overlooking Salmon Bay, part of the waterway system that links saltwater Puget Sound to the city’s inland freshwater lakes, Washington and Union.

  After a good hug, I smoothed my skirt—made by a Market vendor from upcycled T-shirts—and sat, feet happy in my pink shoes. Arf accepted the ritual petting, then laid next to my chair, muzzle facing out. Who knew when a sucker—make that a pet lover—might stroll by? Or another comely poodle?

  “Glad I beat Mom here. The oddest thing, last night—” I paused, leaning back to let the server pour coffee.

  Hurriedly, I filled Laurel in on last night’s revelations. “They were friends way back when. Kitchen-table activists, saving the world one hungry kid at a time.” Another household motto. “Now, Bonnie-Peggy shows up, after decades away, who knows where, and my mother goes all crazy-furtive. Then Bonnie turns up dead.” My voice broke, and I reached for my water glass.

  “You don’t think—”

  “I don’t know what to think.” But I knew what Laurel was thinking: that at best, my mother knew things she wasn’t telling me, and at worst—well, I wasn’t going to go there. I wasn’t going to imagine my mother a murder suspect.

  But Spencer and Tracy wouldn’t be so hesitant. What had she told them, while I was off soothing the savage breast of Bridezilla?

  “There you girls are!”

  Did I imagine her hug a little more ferocious than usual, her eyes warning me to stay away from certain sore subjects?

  “What a spectacular day! Laurel, so good to see you.” The server appeared at my mother’s elbow. My mother reached out a hand. “Tell me, where do you source your coffee?” What followed was a Q&A on the beans, their origin, and the roasting technique that lasted a full three minutes—I timed it—before my mother flashed the woman a smile and allowed her to pour.

  “Ahhh.” She inhaled deeply. “The coffee. The food. My family. How I have missed this city.”

  She dithered between the oysters fried with bacon and served with spinach and eggs, or the salmon Benedict, served not on any old English muffin but on a potato pancake. Call it Northwest weird. Call it yummy.

  Our orders in, my mother adjusted the ruffled neckline of her pale green tank and began the quiz session. Either she was nervous, or this was not her first cup of coffee. Or both.

  “Laurel, tell me all about the restaurant and your boat. And Gabe’s college plans.”

  “He’s beyond excited. The local Notre Dame club is hosting a welcome picnic this afternoon. I confess, it’s hard to watch how eager he is to leave Seattle.”

  “That’s a good sign,” I said. “He’s ready to explore the world. Then if he comes back, you’ll know it’s his choice.”

  “Heck, I didn’t leave Seattle until I turned sixty,” my mother said. “Never considered leaving for college. If I had, I wouldn’t have met your father.”

  “Seattle must have been so exciting back then,” Laurel said. “What, 1970? The antiwar protests. Feminism. The environmental movement.”

  “We accomplished a lot,” my mother said. “For a bunch of hippies.”

  I wanted to ask about Peggy. I wanted to ask where all the energy and ideas came from, and what causes mattered now, what we could do to improve the city we’d inherited. But what I wanted most was breakfast. Vegan hot dogs wear off, even when they’re followed by double-decker chocolate cake and decidedly non-vegan vanilla bean ice cream.

  “Perfect timing,” I told the server as she slid before me a photogenic salmon cake alongside eggs with hollandaise and adorable baby red potatoes. Mom had chosen the salmon Benedict and Laurel the oysters.

  “I was just a kid,” Laurel said, breaking the silence that accompanied our first happy bites, “but I remember hearing about the march fr
om the U-Dub to downtown that shut down I-5. Were you part of that?”

  “May 6, 1970,” my mother said. “It started as part of the student strikes sweeping the country. Tensions had been building, but when Nixon sent the troops into Cambodia, that blew the lid off. Five thousand people—mostly students, but also faculty and residents—marched down the Ave to the freeway.” The Ave, aka University Way, the heart of the U District. “The rest of that week was chaos. Finally, the mayor closed the express lanes, and fifteen thousand people marched downtown. He welcomed us at City Hall.”

  “That’s when you met Dad, right?”

  “Some protesters didn’t want the vets to participate. Called them Baby Killers and worse.” A shadow crossed her face.

  What could be worse than that?

  “The freeway was backed up for miles. Drivers honking and screaming, protestors yelling back.” Her brown eyes grew distant, remembering. “This big farm truck kept inching forward, until finally the driver decided to teach us a lesson. He barreled ahead, right into the crowd. Out of nowhere, this tall guy in army fatigues grabbed me and pulled me out of the way.”

  I stared. I had never heard the story in this much detail.

  “Two months later, I married him.” My mother picked up her fork. “Don’t let this beautiful food get cold.”

  “So how did you decide to establish your group?” Laurel asked. “What was it called?”

  My mother’s sharp-eyed glance ricocheted between us. “Something smells fishy here, and it isn’t in the water or on our plates. Did my daughter put you up to poking into my past?”

  “Lena, she wants to help you.”

  “I am not in any trouble.”

  “Mom.” I leaned forward. “You argued in public with a woman you thought was dead. And three days later, she was found dead. That is the definition of trouble.”

  “It was nothing. Old tensions we needed to get out of our system.”

  “The homicide detectives won’t see it that way,” I said. Her expression told me I was right, that witnesses had reported their argument, and her explanation had not satisfied the police.

  “And how do you know so much about what homicide detectives think?” she snapped.

  “Thirteen years as a cop’s wife.” I speared a potato and held it up. “And two murders solved on my own. Not to mention a few miscellaneous crimes.”

  Her small, lovely face twisted, but she kept herself from crying. “I don’t want you to get involved.”

  I hadn’t planned on it. I’d planned the opposite. Until last night, when it became so clear that my mother did not want to talk about Bonnie-Peggy, alive or dead. Not that I thought for one eenie weenie moment that she had anything to do with the murder.

  But what about the person on the other end of the phone?

  I wanted to push her. But it didn’t feel fair. And I didn’t feel ready. So I followed my mother’s example.

  I changed the subject.

  “Gad, Laurel, I almost forgot to tell you. Nancy Adolfo came into the shop yesterday. Unannounced. Told me she’d made an appointment and my staff forgot to tell me. Sandra was livid.”

  Laurel followed my lead. “That’s her MO.” She explained about the new critic while my mother and I ate.

  “Sounds like she doesn’t realize that people in the food business actually talk to each other,” my mother said. “Eventually, she’ll destroy her own credibility. Oh, what bliss, sitting here with you two on this gorgeous day. I love Costa Rica. Your father is so happy there. But”—she gestured toward the water, the sailboats lined up along the docks, the commercial fishing vessels moored beyond. “I miss all this.”

  Was she thinking of coming back to Seattle? First hint I’d had. What did Dad think of that? You never know your parents the way you think you do, but I was absolutely sure they were solid. When I’d left Tag, I’d asked my mother to tell me honestly if she’d ever considered divorce. “Divorce, no,” she’d replied. “Murder, yes, but divorce, no.”

  The old joke didn’t seem so funny right now.

  “What about your volunteer work? With the kids?” I asked. Her Hungarian immigrant father had been so furious at her elopement—and no, I wasn’t on the way—that he’d refused any more help with college tuition, saying she was her husband’s responsibility now. She’d followed her dream anyway, opening a Montessori school and finishing her degree years later. With help, if I’d picked up on the clues right, not from her father, but from her mother, who’d wanted her daughters to have the opportunities she hadn’t had.

  “Oh, it’s so much fun.” Her face lit up. “The little ones are such a delight.”

  “Good thing you boned up on your Spanish before the move.”

  “And the parents all want to practice their English!” She cackled. “But children are children, in any language.”

  “Mom, yesterday, when you were in the shop—”

  “Pepper, can’t we please stop talking about it?”

  “No, not about Bonnie. Sandra and I keep meaning to talk, but we haven’t had time.” The fib was the easiest way to get my mother to reveal a confidence. “Did she tell you what’s going on? Is she ill?” My stomach started to roil.

  “No. It’s Paul. From the pain, they think it could be prostate cancer. They’re running tests.”

  Holy moly. I sat back, mouth over my hand. “Ohmygosh. I had no idea.”

  Sandra is the rock the Seattle Spice Shop stands on. And Paul—the husband she calls Mr. Right, to distinguish him from her first, Mr. Oh-So-Wrong—is her rock.

  If either shifted, we’d all be shaken. As if the tectonic plates that underlie the Pacific Northwest did the shimmy, the fox-trot, and the Charleston all at once.

  But what hit me in the gut was that Sandra hadn’t told me herself.

  “Lena, are you coming to Flick Chicks on Tuesday?” Laurel asked later as we headed for the parking lot. “It’s Kristen’s week.”

  “We’ll see.” They air-kissed good-bye, and my mother unlocked Carl’s white SUV. I couldn’t help remembering Mr. Adams’s description of the vehicle he’d seen race away Friday night.

  “I thought you might bring Ben along this morning,” she said, hand on the door.

  “Sunday morning is girl time,” I replied.

  “He’s a good man, but even without seeing a chart . . . Well, don’t let him push you into investigating because he wants a big story.”

  As I’d feared when we met, during another unfortunate incident. “That worries me, too. Is his job kismet, making us a good match, or coincidence?”

  She climbed into the SUV, a tiny woman in a big rig. “There are no coincidences, Pepper. Everything happens for a spiritual purpose. Your soul knows what experiences it needs for growth. To raise your vibration and cultivate a deeper meaning.”

  “Mom, where do you get this stuff? It’s like you’re talking Greek.”

  She switched on the ignition. “Oh, honey. This language is much older than Greek. Chalking things up to coincidence means you don’t trust the Universe.”

  Arf’s leash in hand, I waved as she drove away. I trust the Universe. It’s people I wonder about.

  Nine

  Under the wide and starry sky

  Dig the grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die. . . .

  “Here he lies where he longed to be,

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea . . .”

  —Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem”

  I think best on my feet, and my dog never says no to a walk, so we wandered back to the waterfront. Despite its trendy restaurants, Fishermen’s Terminal is a working marina, owned by the Port of Seattle, and home to the North Pacific fishing fleet. A medley of human, bird, and mechanical sounds played around us: laughter and shouted greetings, the squawks of pigeons and seagulls, the cranks, creaks
, and squeals of ocean-going gear. An engine stuttered, then caught hold, punching a stinky blue-gray cloud of smoke into the air.

  Two men rolled a cart of silvery fish to the seafood market, doing a brisk business late on this sparkling morning.

  A shiny new sailboat motored past, its engine barely purring, headed for the Sound in search of wind.

  So much for my view of myself as caring and honest—big-hearted, in Detective Spencer’s words. So caring, I didn’t have a clue what was going on with my assistant manager until I lied to my mother to find out.

  At least I’d never hidden behind any pretense of minding my own business. In HR, we learned to never pry, but to spot potential problems and figure out the best ways to address them. My mother, alas, was resisting my efforts to help her solve those problems, and I feared she was about to run headlong into a bigger problem: our friendly homicide detectives’ need for a suspect.

  Some people say you can’t help those who don’t help themselves, but I’ve never believed it. My childhood had taught me otherwise.

  I stepped around a young couple, arms around each other’s waists as they exchanged murmurs and kisses.

  Why had Bonnie-Peggy come back to Seattle? I wasn’t sure what to call her, the two names hopelessly intertwined in my mind. My mother had not seen her in eons. Bonnie had told the photographer in the Market that she’d been on the move for thirty years.

  Had she meant that figure literally? People often round up to the next decade when they recount time.

  Was it a coincidence that our family had moved out of Grace House thirty years ago?

  My mother didn’t believe in coincidence.

  I paused to watch a fortyish man crouched on the deck of a blue-and-white gill netter, distinguished by its cabin-forward profile and the giant reel mounted on the deck. He appeared to be working on a badly tangled net.

  Near the entrance to the Terminal stands a statue I’ve always loved, the Ancient Mariner in a wide-brimmed yellow hat and a slicker, cut like a nineteenth-century frock coat, his long beard and broad mustache iron gray. This was a modern fisherman, clean-shaven, in brown canvas work pants and a white T-shirt that showed his biceps and pecs quite nicely.