Murder Crops Up

by Lora Roberts

  I saw her out the door, and Amy joined me to watch her stride away. “I bet she’s good at it,” Amy whispered. “She could make me do just about anything.”

  “It’s a useful personality trait,” I agreed. “And she doesn’t really intimidate her friends. Often.”

  “Right.” Amy turned back to examine the refrigerator. “So there’s going to be a surprise party, huh? Did you realize, Aunt Liz, that we haven’t had lunch yet?”

  “I’m hungry.” And I was. It seemed like a long time since breakfast. “Shall I cook these veggies now or save them for dinner?”

  “Dinner.” Amy didn’t even glance at the baby beets, glistening like rubies and topazes. I put them in the crisper. “Peanut butter is fine for lunch.”

  She made a huge peanut butter and jam sandwich on the homemade bread I’d baked the previous morning. I made a slightly less epic version and put come carrots and celery in a dish on the table.

  “Say, I saw a bicycle in the garage, Aunt Liz. Does it work?”

  I swallowed peanut butter, not without effort. “Yes, I got it at a garage sale and Drake fixed it up. It’s not fancy, but it goes.”

  “I could ride that to Claudia’s,” Amy said around her own mouthful. “And maybe leave early and stop on the way to check in at the office.” This referred to the stockbrokerage where she’d had a summer job on her previous visit. “I want to hear what the guys there think about the current market. Wanna make sure my college money gets the max.”

  Hearing Amy talk about college interviews and savings made it pretty clear what course she’d chosen. I didn’t ask anything, however. I thought she’d tell me about it when she wanted. And I didn’t want to be backed into giving advice. I was still unsure how I felt about it all.

  Amy spiffed up a little to visit her buddies at the brokerage house—she changed the ragged flannel shirt she wore over her baggy linen jumper for a ragged black sweatshirt, took the helmet I insisted she wear, and pedaled off down the drive. I settled down at my desk, Barker at my feet, and tried to prune my notes on an article about bitter greens for Organic Gardening into some semblance of coherent thought. This process wasn’t helped by not having an assignment—I’d queried a couple of weeks ago and not heard back yet, so I didn’t even know if they’d buy the article. I wondered if the editor had tried to call me at Drake’s and failed somehow to leave a message. I wondered if it was time to bow to consensus and get my own phone, even a fax machine. Even an on-line connection for my ancient computer, which probably couldn’t begin to handle it.

  The speeding bullet of technology is making a Luddite of me. Why should it matter to everyone that they had to leave messages and write letters to contact me? Why did everything have to be done instantaneously? I looked at Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley on my bookshelf and knew that no one would have the effrontery to write such a book in this day and age. Readers lacked the attention span for Victorian masterpieces; the high moral tone Brontë espoused and her characters’ hidden reserves of passion would lack accessibility in the modern age. And the mind-boggling thing is that Brontë wrote it all on tiny scraps of paper while sitting near the fire in the evenings, the only time she had free for authorship. It seemed churlish to complain about lack of telephone and fax machine in the face of that triumph of determination.

  All that the cogitation about office equipment accomplished was to keep me from getting very far with my bitter greens article. I had amassed a fair amount of information on the medicinal properties of mustard and corn mâche, of radicchio and arugula, and had to weave that material into the article without boring my reader to death. I didn’t much relish the task, but it was more appealing than the alternative, which was to go out and find a regular job, working amid all the complicated machines that populate the modern office.

  Too scary. I looked at my elderly computer, so old that its sheer bulk occupied major space. In such an unintimidating environment, I should be able to compose a positive epic about bitter greens.

  Chapter 21

  The knock on my door came before I’d managed to put myself totally to sleep droning on about phytochemicals.

  I looked through the window and saw Tamiko standing on the front porch. Huddled into a thick zippered sweater and a skirt, without garden gloves, she looked different.

  I opened the door for her. “Hi, Tamiko.” She came in hesitantly.

  “You must wonder why I’m here.” She glanced around, taking in my house. I wished that Amy had thought to pick up the clothes she’d pawed through to find her jacket.

  “Not at all,” I lied politely. “I almost didn’t recognize you without some dirt under your fingernails.”

  She smiled, but sobered immediately. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

  “Sure.” I gestured her into the kitchen, away from the hurricane of Amy’s personal possessions that cluttered the living room. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes, thank you.” She watched while I put the kettle on and warmed a pot. I spooned in some of my favorite blend of lemon balm, peppermint, and pineapple sage.

  When I set the teapot, cups, and honey on the table, she spoke. “You probably know this is about Lois’s death. And Rita’s, of course.”

  “I wondered.” I gave the tea a stir and tucked a cozy around it.

  “You have the ear of the man who’s investigating. Detective Morales.”

  “Yes, to some extent. So do you, Tamiko. If you have something you want him to know, call and talk to him or leave a message. He wants to hear anything you have to tell.”

  “This is not something I know.” Tamiko leaned forward. “It is only something I wonder about. Have you noticed the stranger, Liz?”

  I was pouring the tea, and her words took me by surprise. Some of the fragrant blend splashed on the table-top. “I’ll get it,” I said, grabbing a tea towel. “What stranger do you mean?”

  “The man who walks around the garden. About noon, a couple of times a week. He wears an overcoat and a hat, and regular shoes—not tennis shoes.” Tamiko stuck out one sneaker-clad foot. “I have seen him a couple of times a week for the past month or so. Suddenly today I wondered if he had something to do with their deaths. Rita and Lois.”

  I remembered the man strolling at the garden while Amy and I worked. “I’ve seen that guy—he was there today. Maybe he’s just some businessman who likes to walk around the garden after lunch.”

  “He lingers,” Tamiko insisted, accepting the cup I put in front of her. I added honey to mine; honey brings out the sweetness of the herbs, and blends their flavors together. “Especially around the gate near our plots, I’ve noticed. And around the wood chips. Maybe he plans to pull women over behind the wood chips where Lois was found and—”

  We stared at each other. “Lois wasn’t raped,” I said. “And neither was Rita.”

  “Do you think Detective Morales would be interested in this?” Tamiko took a sip of tea and hastily put the cup down.

  “I’ll mention it, and I’ll tell him you’ve seen the man a couple of times a week. But I don’t think it means anything, Tamiko. There are lots of people walking around there all the time. The woman with the golden retrievers, the man with the big shepherd—”

  “And the woman in the blue jogging suit who runs very slowly and listens to headphones.” Tamiko nodded. “But they are doing something. This man is doing nothing. Why is he there?”

  “Bruno will check it out. He’s looking for any information he can find.” I hesitated, wondering how to bring up the quarrel Bridget had overheard between her and Rita. And then wondering why I thought it was my business to ask.

  Tamiko mentioned it herself. “Mr. Morales has already spoken with me. He heard that I quarreled with Rita.” She shot me a glance. “You had heard this, too?”

  “Not from Bruno.” It made me uneasy to receive her confidence, given that I had no official standing in the investigation. And despite what Drake believed, I had no desire to get involved. I could have been
happy if Tamiko had never dropped in, but had gone straight to Bruno with her concerns.

  “We quarreled because she wished to blackmail me.” Tamiko’s voice was expressionless. “I wonder now if she dealt with others through blackmail.”

  “How could she blackmail you?” I blurted the question out, and then hastened to add, “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  Tamiko went on talking in her deliberate way. “It was very simple. She noticed the address on the check I used to pay my garden rent. It is the same as that of one of her friends from high school. She knows—knew—the friend’s mother is a lesbian.” She glanced at me and then back down at her hands. “Rita said she would tell everyone of my—preferences—if I made any more trouble over the raspberries or the Roundup incident.”

  “So Rita tried to force you to go along with what she wanted?”

  “Yes.” Tamiko did not look up. “I am a teacher. And—I am not yet ready to have my private life revealed to the world.” She smiled a little. “Not that the world would pay much attention. But Rita’s way of doing such a thing would be ugly. It might have made a difference among my coworkers. I do not wish to go through that.”

  “And you told her—”

  “I told her that the job of garden coordinator didn’t give her the right to blackmail the gardeners. That made her angry, and then I got angry, too.” Tamiko looked up from her hands. “I don’t remember exactly what I said. But it was something bad, I know—along the lines of, ‘You will get yours.’ Ten minutes later she was dead.”

  We were silent for a moment. I knew that Tamiko, who treated each seedling with the utmost care, was not the kind of woman to take a life. But anyone can be enraged, goaded, until they lash out and push, not meaning to kill, just giving way to their anger and fear.

  I just couldn’t believe that it had happened that way—not with Tamiko. “So you think she might have been using those tactics on others besides you?”

  Tamiko shrugged. “She and Lois were definitely engaged in a power struggle. Lois threatened to make a big issue out of Rita’s conflict of interest—her relationship with the contractor who wanted to build on the site. And Rita was threatening Lois with some statute about unlawful burial.”

  It was like lifting the lid of the cookie jar and finding baby alligators. “I never knew this stuff was happening. It can’t be the same garden I’ve worked in for three years.”

  “It is. The garden changes, just like everything else. It will change again now that Rita is gone.” Tamiko patted my arm. “You are an idealist, Liz. You do not see the struggle between the earthworm and the nematode. But it is there. Rita was not suitable as a leader for the garden. She could make nothing grow.”

  “She had a stifling kind of a way with her, that’s for sure.” I felt dazed. “So you could be right. She could have been using the blackmail approach on other people.”

  “Those in her personal life, too.”

  “I hadn’t even thought of that. And you say you told all this to Bruno?”

  “I told him what passed between Rita and me. But I have only just now begun to wonder about who else she might have tried to blackmail. If you think Detective Morales is interested in my unformed thoughts, I will let him know.” Tamiko got up. “Oh, by the way.”

  “Yes?”

  She fidgeted nervously with the zipper tab on her sweater, pulling it up and then back down. “I have been asked to be the new volunteer coordinator,” she said, glancing at me and then away. Her olive skin was warmed to dark rose by an embarrassed blush.

  “That’s great. You’ll do a wonderful job.”

  “Thank you, Liz.” She smiled suddenly, the mischief making her look years younger. “I will notice now when you don’t share in the work days. So see that you do.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I showed her out and went back to my bitter greens, but they failed to occupy me. Instead I went over what Tamiko had said, and it finally occurred to me to wonder just why she’d come by to say it. Her questions about the noonday businessman stroller had simply been a pretext for bending my ear about Rita’s blackmailing propensities.

  Why me? That’s what I couldn’t figure out. What did Tamiko have to gain by telling me all of that? I could understand her feeling of being under suspicion, her need to justify herself.

  I couldn’t help but wonder, though, why she chose me as her confidant. She could have gone to Bruno without my advice. In fact, I would have expected her to.

  Now she was volunteer coordinator. Maybe she’d wanted the post all along.

  I didn’t like these thoughts. I refused to let them link up in my head any longer. But I couldn’t altogether chase them away.

  Chapter 22

  I gave up working and stared out the window at the pink glow of sunset. Tamiko had given me too much food for thought; I was choking on the fiber. The possibility that Rita and Lois died natural deaths was growing more and more remote. I could more easily understand violence stalking a woman like Rita. But Lois, with her shrine and her ashes, seemed a totally unlikely victim. Unless someone had wanted something she had. Like the volunteer coordinator position.

  The dusk had faded into full darkness when I roused from my thoughts enough to pay attention to Barker’s increasingly insistent nose nudges. I gave him food and water, and wondered where Amy was. It was nearly six. I didn’t like to think of her biking in the dark with only my bicycle’s feeble headlight.

  I went to Drake’s to call Claudia. Every time I stuck my key in his door, a wave of missing him washed over me. I wanted to find him in his kitchen, the light glinting off his granny glasses, his hair wild with some enthusiasm or other. Instead his house was dark and empty. The air was chilly and felt damp. I turned up the heat to dry things out, and because the chill was too disturbing.

  Claudia’s voice was absentminded when she answered.

  “Hi, it’s me, Liz. Is Amy still there?”

  “Oh, Liz. No, she’s not. She left an hour or more ago. I gave her some materials and made a couple of phone calls, and she’s going to do the rest.” Her voice sharpened. “She isn’t home yet?”

  “No. But she probably just stopped downtown. She has some friends around here—maybe she met someone.”

  “You must be using Drake’s phone. Too bad you don’t have your own, and Amy could let you know.”

  “Well, call me an anachronism, but the world got along fine without telephones for billions and billions of years.”

  In the face of my impatience, Claudia was silent for a moment. She finally spoke with uncharacteristic meekness. “Should I drive around and look for her?”

  I was touched. “No, no. She’ll be back pretty soon. If anyone drives anywhere, it should be me.”

  I felt apprehensive all the same. Surely Amy wouldn’t go anywhere near the garden alone, and in the dark. She was simply hanging around one of the coffee places downtown with some of her friends from summer.

  I told Claudia I would keep her posted and hung up. Then I noticed the message light glinting on the answering machine.

  The message was from Drake. “Liz, sorry I won’t be able to call tonight. Something’s come up. I’ll leave another message or call when I can.” Then came a quick jumble of words I couldn’t quite make out—he sounded weary in the extreme. But I thought he was saying, “I love you.”

  His father, I guessed, wasn’t doing well.

  I glared at the telephone. It was a loathsome monster, bringer of hideous news and dreadful uncertainty.

  I wanted to sit next to it until it rang again and I heard Drake’s voice.

  Instead, I locked the door with careful precision and started toward my house, wondering if I should get into Babe and cruise the cafés. I felt the weight of my inexperience as an in-lieu parent. Amy was old enough and smart enough to take care of herself in a benign place like Palo Alto. A place, I reminded myself, where two women had recently died in suspicious circumstances.

  Gravel rattled in the driveway. Amy
wheeled the bike past Drake’s house, trudging beside it, her head down. She didn’t see me till I spoke.

  “Amy, are you all right? Did you fall?”

  “Huh?” She lifted her head and stared at me. In the light from the kitchen window, I could see the stunned bewilderment on her face.

  “What’s happened?” I ran down the steps and took the bike, propping it against the garage door. When I put my arm around her, she broke into sobs.

  I hugged her, though I had to stand on tiptoe to do it— she tops me by a good four inches. “What is it? What happened? Are you hurt?”

  Gulping, she shook her head. I guided her toward the house. For once I was without a handkerchief or bandanna in my pocket. But I had a drawer full of them inside.

  Amy sat at the kitchen table. Her hands and cheeks were cold, so I put the kettle on and found her a hankie. She was trying to stop crying, but sobs kept bursting out in the most heartrending way.

  I got out the chamomile tea and made a pot. We could both use some calming down.

  The aroma of the tea steadied Amy. She cradled her cup and stared into it as she spoke.

  “I was just biking home after going to Mrs. Kaplan’s house.” Amy gulped back a sob. “She—was very nice and got me stuff about college. Anyway, I was going down University Avenue so I could see if I knew anybody. And while I was at a stoplight that man came by.”

  “What man? Tom Dancey?”

  Amy nodded. “He didn’t seem mad at all—thanked me for letting the police know, said he felt better after talking to Mr. Morales. Then he apologized for this morning. He—he seemed very down, and when the light turned green he walked across with me. And he—he started talking about how I must know I couldn’t kill anything, how bad it would be to kill my”—she glanced at her stomach with fearful fascination—“my baby. How it deserved to live just like I did. I—I wanted to get away, but he was very quiet and reasonable and I just couldn’t ride away. See, that stepsister or whatever she was had an abortion, and he’s really torn up about it, and he has this mission now to save babies.” She looked at me, her eyes welling with tears. “And it’s no good, Aunt Liz. I don’t want this baby, but I can’t get rid of it, like—like a weed or something.”