Tea-Totally Dead

by Girdner, Jaqueline

  “Listen, sweetie,” I said instead. “Clara thinks Harmony might need hospitalization. What do you think?”

  Wayne’s frown went deeper, pulling his brows down over his eyes. He didn’t answer me. Damn. I’d obviously hit a mine field. Wayne felt responsible for Vesta’s long sojourn in the mental hospital. And now he was probably worried about being responsible for Harmony’s.

  I was still trying to think of a way to rephrase my question when we pulled up to the curb in front of La Risa Green. We walked up the too familiar path to the front door in renewed silence.

  I rang the bell. Then we waited. And waited. I rang the bell again, and we waited some more.

  “Maybe she’s gone out,” I said hopefully. Or maybe, I thought, she’s refusing to answer because we might be from a UFO. Or maybe she’s committed suicide. Or maybe—

  “I’ve got my key,” Wayne said before I could think up any other theories.

  He bent over and unlocked the door. Always the gentleman, he motioned me in first.

  I stepped through the doorway. The crystal-and-cross-drawings were still taped to the living room wall. But now there was rust-red paint splashed on the carpet, even sprayed in arcs across its beige surface and onto the furniture. Harmony lay in a heap in the center of the paint. I took a step toward her. That was when I realized that the splashes of color weren’t paint after all.

  - Fifteen -

  The rust-red splashes on the beige carpet were blood, Harmony’s blood.

  My mouth went dry. My mind kept saying No, over and over again. I wanted Harmony to stand up and say it was all a joke. But it wasn’t. My head buzzed with adrenaline. And I couldn’t seem to think clearly. Had she really killed herself? Was that what I was seeing?

  Harmony lay crumpled on her side, still wearing her favorite crystal-and-cross-studded jacket over Vesta’s black dress. Her head and neck were twisted so that her pale eyes peered up through a crust of dried blood to the ceiling above. I could hardly make out the rest of her face. There was just too much blood. And the features were all wrong. I caught a glimpse of something sticking through the flesh of her cheek. I realized it was bone, and shivered, wondering why the room had suddenly gone so cold. Then I noticed the broken teeth that had spilled from her open mouth. And the room began to shimmer.

  No, not suicide. Murder. Or maybe I’m just dreaming, I thought as my legs went weak beneath me. I closed my eyes. Maybe it would all go away.

  Someone moaned from behind me. I opened my eyes and turned. Wayne. I had forgotten Wayne.

  He stood with one big hand covering his face.

  “How could this happen?” he whispered, as if to himself, then repeated it again more loudly. “How could this happen?”

  “Someone killed her.” I answered him literally, too stunned to deal with the existential aspect of his question. I was surprised I could speak at all. I rubbed my cold hands together and tried to think.

  Murder, not suicide. Both Harmony and Vesta. There was no possibility remaining in my mind that Vesta had swallowed poison voluntarily. Because Harmony—

  I shuddered violently and tried not to think of her crumpled body behind me. A surge of bile burned my throat.

  “I’m so sorry,” Wayne said in a whisper. “I should have kept this from happening.” He had taken his hand from his face and was now staring out over my head.

  “Stop that!” I snapped. “Just stop that! How the hell do you think you could have stopped this? Precognition and an army? Because, without them, there’s not a damn thing you could have done.”

  Wayne looked down at me, surprise evident in the upward curves of his brows. At least he’d heard me. Maybe my outburst had done us both some good. My head was beginning to clear now. And I could feel a few, faint prickles of warmth in my cold hands.

  “Sorry,” whispered Wayne. He looked down at his feet.

  I heard a snort of laughter and then realized that it was my own. I couldn’t believe I had laughed. But it just seemed so terribly funny that Wayne had apologized for apologizing.

  “Oh, sweetie,” I said and reached for him.

  He put his arms around me and held on tight. I could feel the trembling in his body as well as my own as we embraced each other for several minutes. Finally, I broke away.

  “We have to call the police,” I said softly.

  “I know,” he replied.

  We went together to the phone in the kitchen.

  Someone at the La Risa Police Department told us to stay put and not touch anything until they got there. So we did, sitting on kitchen chairs next to each other, holding hands.

  “Something’s missing,” Wayne muttered after a few minutes of silence.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Something’s missing in the living room,” he replied, and sighed. “Can’t remember what, but something.” He shook his head as if to clear it.

  I got up and walked to the kitchen doorway to peek into the living room. It looked about the same to me as the last time we had visited. Except for Harmony’s body of course. I kept my eyes away from her as I scanned the scene. The black leather furniture looked the same. The crystal-and-cross-drawings were in place. There was still food on the coffee table, apparently the same food that had been there the morning before. And Vesta’s water gun was on the floor near the door.

  “What’s missing?” asked Wayne from behind me.

  “I don’t know,” I answered slowly. Was there something missing?

  Then we heard the sirens.

  We hurried back to our chairs and were sitting quietly when we heard the police officers tromping through the still open front doorway. Neither Wayne nor I had ever thought to close the door.

  “Police!” someone shouted.

  “We’re in here!” I shouted back.

  The officer who came through the kitchen door was one we’d met earlier. A well-muscled man with a well-trimmed mustache and buzz-cut hair. I couldn’t remember his name.

  He stared at us coolly for a moment, resting his hand on his gun butt. Did he think we were going to make a break for it after calling them in the first place? I felt Wayne stiffen at my side. A quick glance told me that his face had gone expressionless again.

  “Hey,” I said defensively. “We called you to report the body.” I regretted my tone instantly. But oddly enough, it seemed to work.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” the officer said with a little jerk of a bow. The only thing he didn’t do was click his heels together. Yoder, I remembered—his name was Yoder. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait here until Detectives Upton and Amador arrive,” he told us.

  “Hey, Stan,” came a voice from the other room.

  Yoder did his little bow again, then left the kitchen.

  We could hear bits and pieces of the conversation from the next room. “No weapon,” was one of the more interesting bits. Was that what Wayne had thought was missing? “Those two in there,” was a more disconcerting bit, especially because I couldn’t hear the end of the sentence.

  I kept listening, though, because every time I stopped I thought of Harmony. Poor crazy Harmony. My eyes teared up. I didn’t know why, but I felt as though it had been a child who had died, not a middle-aged woman. Maybe that was because Harmony had never grown up. At least not properly. I took a deep breath, trying to dispel the sadness.

  Then I heard the rumble of new voices. “Ask them where Jasper and Caruso are,” someone said.

  Damn. Was that Detective Sergeant Upton talking to Detective Amador?

  A tall, cadaverously thin man and an equally tall black woman with a round, freckled face walked in. That was them all right.

  “Hello, sir. Ma’am,” I said as politely as possible. My mother had always told me “courtesy counts.” It was worth a shot.

  Detective Amador smiled and returned my greeting. Upton, on the other hand, directed a fierce glare somewhere over my right shoulder, popped a few of his knuckles and brusquely told Amador to get some chairs.
In a few moments, they were both sitting across from Wayne and me.

  “Amador, tell them they’re going to have to answer a lot of questions,” Upton said angrily.

  Uh-oh. The man wasn’t in a good mood today. I told myself to calm down and pretended to listen to Detective Amador’s good-natured relay of Upton’s instructions. I wasn’t about to answer the man directly. Nor was Wayne. We had both learned our lesson the first time around.

  “Ask them why the hell they came here in the first place,” Upton ordered, tapping his foot impatiently.

  “Why did you come here today?” Amador asked.

  “Needed to check on Harmony,” Wayne growled, sounding none too friendly himself.

  “Huh!” barked Upton.

  I waited to see if Amador would attempt a translation. When she didn’t, I tried to explain.

  “Harmony had been acting pretty strange lately,” I said. “Clara Kushiyama told us she might need hospitalization. And since Harmony had been living with Wayne’s mother, we felt some responsibility, so we—”

  “I thought the Kushiyama woman was Mrs. Caruso’s nurse,” Upton interrupted. He rotated his head slowly. I could hear the tight tendons in his neck crackle with the movement. “Ask them why she was so interested in Harmony Fitch.”

  I waited impatiently for the relay. “We asked Mrs. Kushiyama to help with Harmony,” I clarified, once it came. “Harmony was in bad shape and we didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t just kick her out of the condo—”

  “Ask her why not,” Upton ordered.

  It went on like that for a while. And then some.

  By the time Upton let us go, Wayne and I had shared every morsel of information we had ever gleaned about Harmony, a half-hour description of her party the morning before, an even longer description of our own movements after that party, and more. Much more. I began to suspect that Upton’s method of interrogation was indeed a very effective method, and not madness at all, about the time he told Amador to tell us that they were going to seal the condo.

  “And tell them not to leave town,” were Upton’s final words. Or Amador’s maybe. I wasn’t sure whose words were whose by that time. I had passed from the state of shock I had been in after finding Harmony’s body to a state of extreme mental and physical fatigue. I was almost grateful. It kept me from thinking too much.

  “Well, at least the police will investigate now,” I told Wayne as we got into the Jaguar.

  “So will I,” he promised, his voice a rough whisper. “So will I.”

  Apparently, he wasn’t as tired as I was.

  I never did escort Wayne to the funeral home to select a casket. Once he had parked out front, he insisted on going in by himself. And when I began to argue, he turned and silenced me with a glare.

  “Know you’re trying to help, Kate,” he said. “But this is between me and Mom.”

  “Oh,” I answered, feeling my cheeks flush with embarrassment. Embarrassment and a hint of resentment, actually. “I guess I’ll go pick up a picnic.”

  He nodded, got out of the car and strode off to the funeral home. I sighed and shuffled across the street to the health food store. The image of Harmony’s body flashed into my mind as I came to the automatic doors. I swallowed hard and hurried inside, glad I had a task to do. Someone had to pick up food for the picnic that Wayne insisted we were going to have with the Skeritts, even though he hadn’t bothered to tell them about it yet.

  The deli section had Thai rice, Greek dolmas, Japanese noodle salad, Lebanese tabouli, Russian cabbage rolls, Guatemalan black bean enchiladas and a variety of breads. All vegetarian. That added to the bag of apples I had at home ought to be enough for eleven, I decided. I wasn’t going to get anything with mystery meat in it, not this close to the funeral home. And it was certainly enough for the two of us who were probably going to be faced with eating the whole international feast when Wayne couldn’t convince the Skeritts to come.

  But Wayne did convince them. He called Ace’s room at the Redwood Grove Inn when we got home. The Skeritts arrived within a half hour. Every last one of them.

  “Wow,” breathed Eric as he came through the door. “This is totally, totally cool. Can I play a pinball machine?”

  I nodded and flipped the switch on Hayburners. He hit the reset button and the machine came to life, clunking, humming and flashing lights.

  Mandy lowered herself gracefully into one of the swinging chairs and pronounced it “simply splendid.”

  Her grandparents just stared, letting their eyes travel from the swinging chairs to the overflowing bookshelves, the pinball machines and the framed pinball backglasses on the wall, and back again. But Dru was equal to the occasion.

  “Oh my,” she trilled. “This is such a fun house. Don’t you think so, Bill?”

  Bill’s face twitched in a hint of a nod that didn’t disturb his usual vague smile.

  “Oh, this room is so healing, Kate,” Lori chimed in. She was wearing a plum-colored batik blouse over jeans and a hot-pink turtleneck today. And plenty of thin metal bracelets that jingled as her arms opened wide as if to embrace the entire living room. “The plants are really happy, I can tell. And the people too. Oh, it’s just wonderful.” She threw her arms around me and hugged.

  I returned her hug. If nothing else, Lori seemed sincere. I wasn’t so sure about Dru. “Fun” sounded like a euphemism to me. Whether it was a euphemism for messy or badly decorated or something else altogether, I wasn’t sure.

  “So, kid,” Ace said, putting a meaty hand on Wayne’s shoulder. “Where’re we going for this here picnic?”

  “Around the corner,” Wayne answered briefly, not mentioning that the “corner” was almost a mile long. Maybe he wanted to wear them all out so they’d be more likely to confess. Actually, he probably hadn’t even noticed how long the walk was. He was a strong walker.

  So were all the Skeritts as it turned out. Maybe it was because they all had such long legs, but no one complained as we marched along, each of us carrying a blanket or a piece of the picnic lunch. Dru exclaimed over some of the more picturesque houses and better-tended gardens that we passed. Eric tried to engage Mandy in a discussion about martial arts, but she just giggled. True love at last? And Lori sang the theme from Oklahoma for some undisclosed reason. But mostly we just walked. It felt good. There weren’t many cars on the street on a weekday, and the October air smelled crisp and clean.

  The park we came to was really a mini-park, a sloping section of lawn about half the size of a baseball field, complete with a couple of big oak trees and a pocket-sized playground in one corner. We were the only ones there. Wayne and Ace laid out the blankets on the grass and we arranged ourselves in a rough circle, Dru giggling about her “old bones” as she lowered herself carefully. The thin blankets didn’t do much to disguise the fact that the ground was hard, cold and lumpy. Still, nobody complained. The Skeritt clan was a hardy lot.

  Once we were all settled in, I passed out paper plates and wondered if anyone here had heard about Harmony’s death yet. No one had mentioned it. And no one’s appetite seemed impaired, I noted a few moments later as everyone scooped, prodded and speared food from the passing deli containers. Everyone but Wayne. And myself. I took a little Thai rice so I wouldn’t look out of place. And then I wondered if someone else here was only pretending to have an appetite. Because one of these people had probably killed Harmony, had probably beaten her to death. I felt a sudden sting of angry tears.

  “Allergies,” I murmured hastily, wiping my eyes.

  “You know what, Aunt Kate?” Eric said through a mouthful of food.

  I shook my head, trying to smile.

  “There’s medicine you can take for allergies.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said, my tears subsiding. Eric was such an earnest know-it-all, he made me smile for real.

  “Uh-huh,” he told me, then took another bite of something that might have been a cabbage roll or a dolma.

  “Wayne and I have been worr
ied about Harmony,” I said, with no attempt at a more graceful segue. “Anyone have any ideas?”

  “Ideas about what exactly?” Trent asked. At first I thought he was teasing me, but his eyes were serious. And intent.

  “Oh, what to do with her now that Vesta’s gone,” I answered casually.

  “I shouldn’t think that would be your problem,” he advised me.

  I opened my mouth to argue with him, then remembered why I was asking these questions.

  “I think Harmony must be here as an irritant,” Lori offered.

  “What do you mean, ‘an irritant’?” I asked, turning to her.

  “Well, we’re all here for a purpose,” she began. She tilted her head at me as if inviting confirmation of this basic proposition.

  I nodded. I wasn’t about to air my own spiritual ambivalence.

  “But some of our purposes aren’t so obvious, or so pleasant,” she continued, shaking her plastic fork for emphasis. “For instance, there are people who are here in this lifetime to understand what it means to oppress others. Like Saddam Hussein. Or those guys in the CIA.”

  “Oh, dear,” Ingrid interjected. “I don’t really think Hussein could be here for that purpose. I think he must be rebelling against God’s purpose, if anything.” I wondered briefly what she thought of the CIA.

  “But see, Mom,” Lori said excitedly, her plastic fork really wiggling now. “That’s the point. Everyone thinks that they know what a good or a bad purpose is. But it’s not that simple. It someone is reincarnated for the purpose of suffering oppression, someone has to oppress them, right?”

  “Well,” Ingrid whispered, shaking her head, “I don’t know about that—”

  “So some people come into this life to experience being the oppressor,” Lori finished triumphantly.

  “Are you saying Harmony was supposed to be an oppressor?” I asked, completely confused now.

  “No, that was just an example,” Lori answered, shaking her head. Her earrings jingled merrily. “Harmony’s an irritant. She’s in this life to annoy other people. To shake up their thinking. It’s a very important purpose.”