Half a Mind (The Kate Teague Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Like, you’re going to work, you leave the house every day at two-thirty,” Eddie went on. “You warm up, run the four miles to Ollie’s on the Beach for a beer and a bullshit session, then you run home, usually passing the spot in question between four and four-fifteen.”

  “You have me followed?”

  “Didn’t have to. Everyone on the beach knows your schedule,” Eddie said. “But yesterday you were late, and at four-ten someone else found the head. In a gift box.”

  “Came in on the tide.”

  Eddie finished his beer, put the bottle on the table, then stood up. “Head was there before the tide.”

  Tejeda looked away, refusing to be sucked in.

  “Silver still say he’s innocent?” Eddie asked.

  “If you ask them, there aren’t many guilty men in county jail.”

  “Arty Silver’s still one of the nicest guys I ever met.”

  “Tell it to the Marines.”

  Eddie pushed in his chair. “Wouldn’t hurt if you gave Arty a call, found out who his friends are these days.”

  Eddie balanced the cap on his empty beer bottle, giving Tejeda time to respond. When nothing happened, he reached into his pocket, slid out a long folded paper, sharpened its creases, looked at it, then put it away again. “Wouldn’t hurt to see what Arty has to say.”

  “So call him,” Tejeda said with exasperation. “Spud, I don’t want any part of this.”

  “Sorry.” Eddie Green reached a hand back into his pocket, pulled out the folded paper again, and extended it toward Tejeda. “But you’re in. I’ll pick you up around eight-thirty, quarter to.”

  Tejeda looked at the document but didn’t reach for it. “What is it, Spud?”

  “Subpoena,” Eddie said, dropping the document beside the mustard. “Coroner’s preliminary inquest. Tomorrow morning at nine.”

  5

  “What’s this?” Kate asked, accepting the small white bag from Lydia Callahan, her office mate. “Women’s volleyball team having a bake sale?”

  “Hell, no. When I heard you were ditching the curriculum meeting to take the kid driving, I had these specially made for you.” Lydia straightened the front of her linen blazer and looked around to see if anyone in the campus quad was within earshot. “Valium brownies.”

  “Sure.” Kate looked into the bag. “Look like standard-issue cafeteria brownies to me.”

  “Trust me.” Lydia grinned. “Soon as Theresa turns the key in the ignition, start eating. Halfway through, you won’t care whether you survive or not.”

  “Very funny,” Kate said, watching Lydia. “But not like you. What’s up?”

  “What do you mean, I’m not funny?”

  “You’re one of the funniest people I know,” Kate said. “But spur-of-the-moment funny, not organized buy-a-brownie funny. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Lydia protested, but she shifted her briefcase from one hand to the other, then back again. “Okay, look, it’s really nothing. I saw the late edition of the local paper at lunchtime and I thought you might need a yuck.”

  Kate paused. “Something about me?”

  “It was about the …” Lydia drew one long finger across her throat.

  “The head? Don’t worry about it. Roger promised me, it’s not our head.”

  “Roger?” Lydia repeated. “You say ‘Roger’ funny.”

  “Shut up, Lydia,” Kate laughed. She thrust the white bag into Lydia’s hand. “If you’re going to the meeting, you’ll need these more than I do.”

  “Yeah.” Lydia looked suddenly serious. “Do me a favor?”

  “Within reason.”

  “Don’t read the paper today. You know the sort of junk they dredge up. Just go home and spend some time with that gorgeous hunk.” Lydia made a pretense of looking down at her watch, but Kate saw the tears welling in her eyes. “God, I’m really late.”

  Lydia turned down a walkway that angled toward the administration building, her long athletic gait checked by her tailored skirt.

  “Thanksgiving?” Kate called after her.

  “All set.” Lydia turned, taking a few backward steps as she talked. “Three o’clock, bring rolls. Reece need a tie?”

  “No. Be comfortable.”

  “Call you later.” Lydia waved and turned, then disappeared quickly into the shadows of the building’s portico.

  Kate took a deep breath; walking with Lydia was like jogging with anyone else. Lydia did everything on the run, Kate mused, even in the classroom. Her lectures seemed to be breathless dashes across the historical landscape, while Kate preferred to posthole, to dissect key issues before moving on. The amazing thing was how well they worked together, complemented each other. Three mornings a week they taught a huge freshman survey course, sharing the podium on the stage of the Humanities Lecture Hall. Lydia always started. After she had sketched in the skeletal framework of European history, Kate would hang flesh on the bare bones. It was fun. Some colleagues groused that the popular course was too much fun. But Kate rarely bothered to listen; the papers their students produced were well beyond the usual freshman level.

  Kate shifted her briefcase to her other hand and walked on. The campus was quiet. A few sunbathers sprawled on the lawn, taking advantage of the waning heat wave, but this late in the day most students were either in class, or in the library, or at home.

  “Hey, teach.” Brent something-or-other from her ten o’clock class squinted up at her from the grass where he lay with his head cushioned on his backpack. There wasn’t a textbook in sight. “Have a good one,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  She envied his insouciance. Her briefcase was heavy with ungraded midterms she should have finished over the weekend but could never find the time or, she admitted, the sustained interest to read. If she started reading papers immediately after Theresa’s driving lesson, she thought, maybe she could finish before bedtime.

  She checked her watch. She was running late. If no one else stopped her before she got to her car, and if traffic then cooperated, she figured she would just have time to change from her skirt into some shorts before picking up Theresa. She shifted her briefcase again and walked faster.

  What Lydia had said bothered her. Was the local press somehow tying that grisly find on the beach to her or her family? After the press blitz that followed the death of her mother, she would rather avoid public notice, no matter what she had told Carl. She thought she had earned some privacy.

  Do what Lydia said, she told herself, and don’t read the papers.

  The walkway to the faculty parking lot came up on her left. But without even thinking, Kate turned right instead and headed for the newspaper rack in front of the bookstore.

  Theresa was a quick study, Kate found, with good reflexes and more common sense than she had expected. After an hour of jerky stops, jackrabbit starts, and near-panic when it came to lane changes, Theresa was actually driving the car. Kate wasn’t exactly relaxed, but by four-thirty she no longer held the door handle in a death grip or pushed her right foot against the floorboard as if she had a brake pedal.

  After cruising the high school one last time, Theresa essayed them home. “Not a scratch,” Theresa said proudly as she waited for the iron gates across Kate’s drive to open for them.

  “Ready for parallel parking?” Kate asked.

  “That’s like really hard, isn’t it?” Theresa said, drawing to a smooth stop on the turnabout.

  “In this car, yes. We’ll try it later in the Jaguar.”

  As she got out of the car, Kate looked across the courtyard shared by the three houses her grandfather had built. She was dismayed to see that the front of the house closest to her own had the beginning skeleton of a construction scaffold. Carl had warned her that he was ready to start work on the house he had inherited from Uncle Miles, but she hadn’t expected it so soon.

  Theresa caught up to her. “Was I okay?”

  “You were great,” Kate said. “Tomorrow, same time?”
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br />   “Mrs. Teague?”

  Kate spun around, startled by hearing the married name she had dropped. A small muscular man with a full black beard and a regenerated-hippie sort of air loped across the brick courtyard toward them.

  “Mike Rios,” he said, thrusting a hand at her as he came to an abrupt stop in her path. “I’m construction foreman on this project.”

  His hand was dry and callused. “We’ll do our best to stay out of your way,” she said.

  “Yeah. Good.” His every movement was quick, charged with nervous energy and impatience, as if the rest of the world moved too slowly for him. Kate couldn’t decide whether he antagonized her simply because he was working for Carl or because of some annoying quality all his own.

  She side-stepped him. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Rios.”

  “Hang on a sec.” He was in front of her again. “Listen, we ran into some problems in the dining room and we need to take a look at yours. Your husband said it would be okay.”

  “I don’t have a husband.” She quickly took back an idea she had almost persuaded herself was true: she and Tejeda hadn’t found peace, only a few moments of relative quiet now and then. If Theresa hadn’t been standing there, she would have told Mike Rios to tell his boss to go fuck himself. Instead, she took Theresa by the arm and walked away.

  “Look, Mrs….” Rios trotted up behind them. “I just need some idea what the original looked like. The old guy who had Mr. Teague’s house before him didn’t take very good care of the place. We want to do this project right. It’ll only need a minute or two.”

  Kate sighed. Sometimes giving in was so much easier than continuing the struggle. “I get home from school at noon tomorrow. Come then.”

  “Now would be okay.”

  “Noon tomorrow,” she said firmly. He acceded, but he let her know by his sarcastic bow that he didn’t gracefully tolerate inconvenience.

  Theresa had walked on ahead, and now she stood on the front steps, spotlighted by a long slash of sun streaming between two cypress trees. She was watching something so intensely that she didn’t seem to hear Kate come up beside her.

  “What do you see?” Kate expected to find workmen swinging from the scaffold or pelicans nesting on the chimney pots. Instead, there was Carl.

  “Jesus,” Kate groaned. She understood the effect Carl was having on Theresa; the same thing happened to nearly every woman who saw him. Including herself.

  Carl’s beige linen slacks were perfectly tailored to show off his rock-hard ass without seeming to intend to do so. Even his pose seemed artless as he came from the side of his house, spread a roll of blueprints across the hood of his shiny new Maserati, and leaned over them with one casually shod foot propped against the front bumper. He was too GQ to be real.

  Kate recognized the man with him, Harry Jon Miller, an architect with a good, if only local, reputation. He was nice-enough-looking by himself. But next to Carl he might as well have been invisible.

  “Who is he?” Theresa asked with unsettling urgency.

  “That’s Carl.”

  “That’s Carl?” Theresa gave Kate a glance full of disbelief. “You divorced him?”

  “Yes.”

  Theresa’s eyes widened as Carl straightened up. It wouldn’t help Theresa any, Kate thought, when she learned that Carl also had brains and money. Sometimes when she saw him like this, Kate had to remind herself what a world-class shit Carl could be.

  From the way he now flexed his shoulder, Kate knew that he was aware that he was being watched.

  “He isn’t gay, is he?” Theresa asked.

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Long enough,” Kate said. The best way to defuse Theresa’s curiosity, she decided, would be to introduce her to Carl, knowing he would be haughty and aloof with her, as he was with anyone who had neither power nor connections. “Carl is restoring the house next door, so he’ll be around for a while. Want to meet him?”

  “That’s okay,” Theresa demurred. She looked at Kate. “I thought that you owned all the houses in the compound.”

  “Just two of them.”

  “But this is your family’s estate, not his.”

  “It’s complicated.” Kate opened the front door. “The whole sordid story would make an R-rated movie, seventeen and under admitted with parent only.”

  “You mean, ask my dad.”

  “Right.”

  “Or my grandmother,” Theresa said. “I talked to Grandma this morning. She’s bringing some kind of cranberry salad and pies on Thursday. Aunt Teri is bringing hot vegetables.”

  “I didn’t realize Thanksgiving could be so easy. With everyone bringing food, all we have to prepare is the turkey.”

  “Nana, my great-grandmother, won’t bring anything. She doesn’t have a kitchen in her apartment at the retirement home.” Something uncomfortable seemed to occur to Theresa and she turned away.

  “Is something wrong with Nana?”

  Theresa shook her head. “You didn’t invite Carl, did you?”

  “I didn’t want World War III.”

  “Or my mom?”

  “She’s in New Mexico,” Kate said, wishing that were answer enough. Theresa hadn’t seen her mother for over a year, and as Kate understood the situation, wasn’t likely to see her for another. Kate hurt for her. There were times now when she missed her own mother. Even though Mother had been a difficult personality, sometimes when she needed someone to talk to, only her mother would do.

  “If Mom was here,” Theresa said, “could she come for Thanksgiving?”

  “Of course,” Kate said, tightening her fists inside her shorts pockets. “We’d make her bring the rolls or something.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Theresa went off toward the Chinese vase in the foyer. “She won’t come.”

  “Maybe next year.” She hoped Theresa couldn’t see through her; she had never been a very good liar. But there were some truths that didn’t bear addressing.

  Kate picked up the briefcase she had dumped on the table after school and carried it upstairs.

  In her room, Kate opened her briefcase and spilled its contents onto the bed. The late edition of the local paper ended up on top. She tossed it aside, let out a long breath, then began sorting the exam blue books into piles: easy-to-read handwriting in one stack, illegible scrawls in another. It was a beginning, she thought, but the reading was tedious.

  She had been so distractible all fall that she could hardly sit down long enough to read through two papers at a time. Always, it seemed, swirling around in the background like a high-powered buzz saw was a sense of impending horror. Of one thing she was sure: the core of her fear was not, as Tejeda’s was, a recurring memory of what had happened to them. It was instead the realization of how much worse it all nearly was.

  She looked down at the exams and tried to estimate how long this chore would take. Then she killed a few minutes searching for the best red pen. And when she ran out of delays, she stripped off her clothes and ran a hot shower.

  Two hours later, when Tejeda came upstairs looking for her, she had managed to grade only a depressingly small number of blue books.

  “Dinner in half an hour,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  As far as he could tell, Kate wore nothing except bikini underpants, his marathon T-shirt, and her reading glasses. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed, a charming island in a sea of midterm blue books. She marked an exam and tossed it against the ancient carved-oak headboard that depicted either the Battle of Waterloo or the tragic story of Tristan and Isolde—Tejeda couldn’t decide which.

  When she looked up, her wide pale eyes seemed tired. “Eddie Green called.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He’ll call back.”

  “I’m sure.” Tejeda dropped to the bed beside her, crushing a pile of exams.

  “Don’t lie on those,” she said, gently pushing him over. “I have some hope for
those people. You can sit on the other pile.”

  He thought about offering her a match, but managed to make space for himself beside her. He kissed the inside of her exposed thigh and rested his head on the crook of her knee.

  As she read, she scratched between his shoulder blades with the end of her pen. “I think Eddie misses you.”

  “Does he?” Tejeda pulled an exam from under his hip and flipped it open. “‘Andrew Jackson was a very great man,’” he read aloud. “‘He fought a duel for his wife, which was already married to someone else. His boot filled up with blood and he became President.’ Sounds good to me. Why’d you give him an F?”

  “He forgot the part about Jackson’s friends getting drunk and vomiting in the White House during the inauguration party.”

  “Is this what you teach them?”

  “He had special help from the football-team manager.”

  “How can you stand to read this stuff?” He tossed the exam aside and picked up the newspaper lying beside her briefcase. He read the headline to her. “‘DEATH VISITS SANTA ANGELICA BAY.’ Well, hell,” he said, “and Monterey only got the pope.”

  “Lydia thought that article would upset me.” She took the paper and scanned down the paragraphs about the severed head of an unidentified young man and the few details available from the police. Since there wasn’t enough information for a feature story, they padded with a rundown of all the bodies and parts thereof that had floated up in the bay during recorded history. Some of them, Kate was sure, were folklore passed along and embroidered upon in the bar around the corner from the newspaper offices.

  When she found the paragraph she wanted, she pushed her glasses up on her nose and read: “‘Cornell Byrd, playboy son of one of Santa Angelica’s most prominent families, was another victim of the seemingly peaceful waters of our city’s bay. Byrd’s disappearance while sailing his yacht prompts some to wonder whether the mysterious conditions at work in the infamous Bermuda Triangle might also be at work off our own coast.’