I handed her the wrapped blueberry-cream pie. “Don’t know how long you’re going to be at the spa, but this should keep a few days in the refrigerator.”
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be there either. Until I feel better, I suppose. Victor’s been trying to convince me to invest in the place. I told him before I did that, he’d have to improve the food. He said I had no idea how much it cost to provide lovely meals to the clients. But he’d let me stay for as many days as I wanted until he closed in October—” She stopped suddenly and regarded me. “Sorry, I’m running on at the mouth, which is what I do when I’m upset.” She pressed her hands into her closed eyes.
Charlotte most definitely was not someone you hugged, even in church, even if she was crying.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice low. “It’s just terribly sad. We all … we all loved him.”
“I’m not being very polite,” Charlotte said as she walked quickly into the kitchen. “Would you like some coffee?”
I thought of all the caffeine I’d already had that day, and asked if she had decaf. She said she did. Once she’d put the pie in the refrigerator, set the coffee to brew, and placed cups, saucers, spoons, cream, sugar, and an insulated carafe on her breakfast bar, she seemed to have recovered somewhat. As she poured the decaf into the carafe, she even smiled at me.
“It’s good to have company. Oops, I forgot your check.” She reached into her purse, pulled out an envelope with my name on it, and handed it to me. “With all the chaos last night, I just…”
“Don’t worry about it. Thank you.”
She took a tentative sip of her coffee and asked, “Do the police have any idea what happened to Jack when he went outside?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. Didn’t someone from the sheriff’s department come talk to you?”
She snorted. “A young fellow asked me questions very early this morning. Did I see anyone leave the dining room with Jack? No. Did I see anyone leave the dining room right after Jack left? No. So why did Jack leave the dining room? To have a cigarette, I told this young fellow, didn’t you find a butt outside? And he said they found marijuana outside. He thought I was trying to make a joke, which of course I never would.”
“Huh,” I said noncommittally.
“Before Jack was attacked, there just seemed to be a lot of organized chaos,” Charlotte went on bitterly. “Afterward, there was just chaos, period.”
“Chaos,” I agreed.
“Oh, God, I do wish I’d paid attention, but I’m afraid I was more focused on the music getting going, the tables, I don’t know, it all seems like such trivia now. So … have they figured anything out?”
“Nobody’s told me anything.”
“It was probably one of the landscapers, staying to see if he could mug a wealthy guest.”
Inwardly, I bristled, since whenever there’s a theft or any other problem at a party, it had been my experience that the help—which includes yours truly—is always blamed. More often than not, though, it’s one of the guests who starts rifling through pockets and purses in the guest room, not a staff person. We’re much too busy. But I knew in order to get information out of Charlotte, which, I admitted, was my chief purpose in racing over here this morning, I would have to park my proletarian sensibilities at the door.
“Have they talked to the landscapers?” Charlotte demanded. “Were they smoking marijuana?”
“I don’t know. Sorry.” We were both silent for a moment. I glanced down at Charlotte’s shoes—metallic flats—and said, as if it had just occurred to me, “Oh, nice shoes. Very pretty.”
Charlotte looked at me as if I were crazy. “You’re admiring my shoes? Why, do you want to order some to wear at your next catered event?”
“Sorry, Charlotte. I just think they’re lovely. Wait a minute—didn’t Marla or someone tell me you lost a pair in Doc Finn’s car?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “That was another thing this young fellow asked me about. Did I remember when I had left my shoes in Doc Finn’s car? No, I told him, because I’d never been in Doc Finn’s car. I have no idea how they got there. And when I heard they’d been in the car of a person who’d died in a car accident, I wanted to throw them away, but the police insisted on keeping them as evidence.”
“Poor Doc Finn,” I said. “We waited and waited for him at Ceci O’Neal’s wedding, but he never showed. We didn’t know he was dead.”
At the mention of Ceci O’Neal, Charlotte’s eyes became hooded. Well. So … judging by Charlotte’s guilty reaction, the erased name “O’Neal” on the Attenborough blackboard meant something. I just didn’t know what.
“Do you know the O’Neals?” I ventured. “I thought I saw their name on your blackboard when I came over with Jack. But I didn’t see you at the O’Neal wedding—”
Charlotte stood up. “The O’Neals? How are you spelling that?” When I told her, she said, “No, that doesn’t ring a bell. Well, I must be getting over to Gold Gulch. Thank you for the pie.”
“You’re certainly welcome,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. I got to my feet and gathered up my purse. Doggone it, so much for active investigation as a substitute for grieving. I was zero for three in my questioning of Charlotte. She hadn’t seen anyone leave the spa dining room when Jack did—or so she said. She had no idea how her shoes had ended up in Doc Finn’s Cayenne—or so she said. And whatever her connection was to the O’Neals, she wasn’t going to share it.
I had gleaned one possibly useful nugget, though: Victor Lane had asked Charlotte to invest in his spa. So … the spa was having money problems? Was that what Jack had been looking for in the Smoothie Cabin? Indications of money problems at the spa? Why would he do that? I had no idea.
Charlotte had turned to her large living room window, where birds were flocking to her feeder. She’d pulled a hankie from out of nowhere and was dabbing her eyes. My feeling of being ill at ease increased. Funny how we get used to hugging people as a way to comfort them, and then when that’s not an option—
“Do you think he loved me?” Charlotte blurted out. She continued to stare out the window. “He never said he did.”
My mouth turned dry. In fact, I’d been unsure of what Jack’s true intentions, emotions, et cetera in the Charlotte Department had been. But what good—or bad—would it do to say that now? I settled for the verbal equivalent of a hug.
“I know he loved you,” I said emphatically. “He told me he did.”
Charlotte quickly wiped her eyes, tucked the hankie into a pocket of her jeans, and began bustling around the living room. “Take these flowers to the church, would you please, Goldy? They’ll all be faded by the time I get back from the spa.”
And so I said I would. I had to roll the windows down to dispel the pungent, cinnamon scent of the stock in the bouquets. When I got to the church, neither Marla, Father Pete, nor the secretary was in evidence. Luckily, I knew the hiding place for the key to the heavy doors. I placed all the flowers in the sacristy, wrote a quick note to Father Pete, and drove slowly back home.
But again, the thought of going back into our house was not something I could bear. Tom’s car wasn’t anywhere in evidence, but I wouldn’t have expected him to be home yet.
I turned off the ignition in my van and looked disconsolately up at Jack’s house, much as Charlotte had stared at the wild birds on her deck. Without thinking, I reached into my sweatpants pocket and felt for the keys Jack had insisted I take in the hospital. Luckily, I’d also put the note in there that he had written.
If Jack was directing me to go into that mess he called a residence, or more properly, a residence being renovated, then what did he want me to find?
I suddenly and with unexpected vividness remembered Jack coming into the spa kitchen the previous night. He’d asked if he could talk to Boyd. Jack had wanted to talk to Sergeant Boyd, who worked for the sheriff’s department.
About what?
Well. I looked back at Jack’s house
. There was no doubt that Lucas, whom I perhaps unfairly thought of as a materialist, would eventually have his way with Jack’s house. Lucas was the son, the heir. Marla had heard he needed money. So Lucas would probably get in, finish the renovation as quickly and cheaply as possible, then put the place on the market. This made me extraordinarily sad. I forced my mind to veer away from this line of thinking.
The problem was, I was having trouble breathing. I didn’t want to have anything in my mind. I didn’t want to feel anything.
I pulled out the keys Jack had told me to take, and without thinking about it, jumped out of the van.
Watery sunshine was breaking through the clouds. Finally. It felt as if we’d been underwater for a month. More sadness: now that it was finally nice, Jack wasn’t here to enjoy it. Stop, I ordered myself.
A breeze shuffled through the pines and aspens as I hopped up the steps to Jack’s house, and I wished I’d worn a jacket or a sweater. But if I went back home, my nerve would fail and I would rethink the advisability of going into Jack’s house. I didn’t think it was illegal, but I certainly did not want to consult an attorney on the subject.
The key squeaked as I turned it in the lock, the mechanism itself infected with the humidity that had been our constant summer companion. I tiptoed into the house, and immediately felt as if things had changed. Things had changed? What things?
The interior was as disordered as usual. Jack had apparently left a few windows open, and the fresh scent of recent rain filled the air. Jack’s old sofa was piled with clothes and towels—a dump of clean laundry awaiting folding, probably. The end tables and coffee tables held precariously piled stacks of books and magazines.
I allowed my gaze to travel around the room, thinking the whole time: What’s different? What had Jack wanted me to see in here, if anything? If Jack had been so anxious for me to see something in his living room, then he should have been clearer about it—wait.
Beside the door was a set of golf clubs in a beautiful leather bag. Golf clubs? The clubs and the bag looked brand new. But Jack had bursitis in both of his elbows. It had pained him, and he was always rubbing in this or that new anti-inflammatory cream.
Why new golf clubs? Had Jack bought them as a gift for someone? If so, for whom? Were they for Doc Finn, Lucas, or Craig Miller, as a wedding gift? They hadn’t been here when Tom and I had come over to visit the other night.
Jack could not possibly have thought he would be able to play eighteen holes, or even nine, as his aches would have made the outing disastrous. The bursitis didn’t bother him fishing, he always told me, just doing something strenuous, like … sports. And anyway, with whom would Jack have played golf? He and Doc Finn had engaged in fishing and drinking, not necessarily, as Jack had always said, in that order.
Then I saw something else that had not been there on any of my previous visits. A small gold travel clock was folded into the open position, on a tiny end table right in front of the picture window that gave someone looking out a view of our house. If somebody were sitting on the couch, that person would look right at the clock, and then to our house across the street.
Golf clubs, when he didn’t play golf. A travel clock, when he kept no clock in his house. Hmm.
Okay, I was anxious and grief crazed, and who knew what all. But I couldn’t help seizing on the idea that Jack had left the clubs and the clock here because he wanted me to find them. They were one of his puzzles, left for me.
Without thinking about it, I moved across to the table and picked up the clock. It was not telling the correct time, and when I tried to turn the tiny crank on the side, nothing happened. Without thinking, I folded the clock back into a square, and slipped it into my sweatpants pocket. I walked over to the golf clubs, and ran my hands over the golf bag, which was made of a lovely buttery yellow leather. Maybe it belonged to somebody else? But when I looked closely, I saw a price tag dangling from the bag’s handle.
I simply would not accept what other people might have said, that the clubs and bag and nonworking clock were evidence of mental decline on Jack’s part. I supposed it was possible he had bought the golf accoutrements, then remembered he didn’t actually play golf … and then had wanted to return what he’d bought.
As improbable as it seemed, I found myself returning to the puzzle idea. I began to remove one club after another from the bag. I didn’t know what I was looking for, or even if I would recognize it if I found it.
I had just put a five iron on the floor when I felt a slight movement of air behind me. I started to turn around, but I wasn’t quite fast enough. For all my worry and care about why Jack had given me his keys, I was rewarded with a glancing blow off the side of my skull.
My knees crumpled. My mind’s eye brought up my dear Arch and Tom. But then pain exploded on the side of my head, and I thought, What the hell?
THE FIRST ODDITY facing me as I sputtered, blinked, and coughed uncontrollably was to figure out who was waving spirits of ammonia under my nose. This person had to be stopped. I screamed that I hadn’t blacked out, I was perfectly conscious, thank you very much. The ammonia disappeared.
The second problem had to do with my mother’s pet bird, a canary named George who’d lived in a cage in our New Jersey home while I was growing up. George the canary had not died, as I had been told, but had grown as large as a human and now was fully alive, leaning over me. What kind of badly scented alternative universe had I entered?
Eventually the big canary resolved into the avian facial features and yellow hair of Lucas Carmichael. Next to him were two policemen. I was looking up at them from a prone position on the floor.
“Would you please get my husband? Tom Schulz?” I asked one of the policemen, a fellow with sparse red hair who looked familiar. Then again, I’d just thought the son of my godfather was a canary, so maybe I did not in fact know this guy. Still, in as authoritative a voice as I could muster, I said, “Please call Tom Schulz. Right now. He needs to be here. Please,” I added again.
“Oh, Christ,” said the other policeman, who had dark, slicked-back hair and a youthful face. “Schulz? This is Schulz’s wife?” He looked down at me. “This isn’t Schulz’s house, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” said Lucas Carmichael.
I narrowed my eyes at Lucas. “Please tell me you weren’t the one who hit me on the side of the head.”
“I didn’t know it was you,” he said, his tone humble. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t recognize you from the back.”
While the policeman I had spoken to summoned Tom on the radio, the other one glanced up questioningly at Lucas.
“She did break in,” Lucas protested defensively.
From my ignoble position on the floor, I fastened my gaze on Lucas. “Don’t you watch any TV, Lucas? You’re supposed to say, ‘Freeze, asshole!’”
“I am not an asshole,” Lucas said. “And do you ever think not to break into people’s houses?”
“I wasn’t breaking in, and I wasn’t calling you an asshole. Sorry, Lucas.” Suddenly, I felt consumed with guilt. Lucas appeared bleary-eyed and defeated. He’d just lost his father. “Sorry,” I said again. “I was—”
“Mrs. Schulz?” the sandy-haired policeman interrupted. His name tag said his name was Katz. “Your husband will be here directly. He was in the area and shouldn’t be long.” Officer Katz smiled at me. “So I’m finally getting to meet the infamous Mrs. Schulz.”
“She’s infamous?” Lucas asked.
“Hey, buddy?” Katz said to Lucas. “Don’t talk unless I ask you a question, okay?” To me, he said, “You want to tell me why you’re in this house?”
“Will you help me up first?”
Katz offered me a strong hand, and soon I was sitting on Jack’s couch. The dark-haired policeman, not wanting, I figured, to be bawled out by Tom for being unhelpful to his wife, scrambled to get me a glass of water from the kitchen. I felt dizzy and in pain. On the floor not far from where I’d fallen was a small brass lamp with a br
oken bulb and smashed shade. It was the bulb and shade, I figured, that Lucas had swung at the side of my head, leaving me stunned, confused, and lying on the floor. I wondered if he could be arrested for assault.
“I’ll tell you exactly what I was doing here.” I felt in my sweatpants pocket that held the keys, not the one with the travel clock. Seeing Katz’s immediate look of alarm, I pulled out my hand. “I’m not going for a weapon,” I assured him. “You want to feel in my pocket? I was getting the keys Jack gave me, and the note in his handwriting saying he wanted me to have them.” I gave Lucas another angry look. Lucas shrugged and stared at the ceiling.
“It’s okay,” said Katz, “I trust you. Get out the keys and the note. I’m not going to go feeling around in the pockets of the wife of my superior officer, thanks.”
I withdrew the note and the keys, which Katz studied. If he wanted to make sure the keys worked, then he could go and test them on the door. But I had the feeling he believed me.
The dark-haired policeman came over and handed me the water. His badge indicated his name was Allen. He furrowed his eyebrows at Jack’s handwriting.
I had, of course, left the travel clock securely in the bottom of my other pocket.
“This your father’s writing?” Katz asked Lucas, who stared down at the note. “These his keys?”
“Yes,” said Lucas. “I’m sorry I panicked and hit Goldy—”
“All right, then,” Katz interrupted noncommittally as he handed the keys and the note back to me.
“Don’t give those keys back to her,” pleaded Lucas. “She doesn’t belong here.”
“Could you give it a rest, please, Lucas?” I asked gently. I trained my gaze on Katz. “Let me explain. We live across the street.” My breath hitched, and I fought to maintain calm. “Jack Carmichael was my godfather.” Tears began their unwanted streaming down my face. “He … died last night, in Southwest Hospital,” I managed to say. I cleared my throat and paused to compose myself. As they’re taught to do, the two cops waited patiently. Lucas was shifting his weight from foot to foot. I went on, “Here’s what happened. Last night, Jack Carmichael was attacked at a wedding I was catering out at Gold Gulch Spa. He actually died early this morning. Our priest came to tell me, and I thought, since Jack had insisted in the hospital that I take the keys, maybe he wanted me to … I don’t know, water his plants, feed a pet—”
Fatally Flaky Page 20
