Venus in Blue Jeans

by Meg Benjamin

  “Shut up,” she hissed.

  Something glittered in the grass. Margaret reached down. A shard of plastic from a broken glass.

  She picked it up and rammed the sharp end into the fattest of the trash sacks. The point slid through with a satisfying pop. Margaret pulled down, and the plastic ripped open. Trash spilled out onto the ground.

  Without pausing to think, she grasped the top of the sack and dragged it across the yard, leaving a trail of paper napkins and plates, bits of cheese, bread crumbs and plastic utensils. A long diagonal path of garbage.

  With each bit of refuse that dropped to the lawn, the tightness in her throat eased.

  Margaret ran back to the second bag and tore it open, dragging it in another diagonal line across the first. X marks the spot. She had to control the urge to giggle.

  With the third bag, she made a rough circle around the first two. The fourth one she used to draw a horizontal line underneath. Jolts of adrenaline poured through her veins. She’d never been so excited by anything in her life.

  She didn’t bother with artistry with the last bags, simply swinging them back and forth to strew garbage across the grass. Bits of paper floated in the air, a few catching in the lower branches of the live oaks.

  Margaret stood at the edge of the yard, admiring her handiwork. Her heartbeat was slowly returning to normal, and she took deep breaths to calm herself.

  She supposed she should feel ashamed. She didn’t. Docia Kent had finally gotten something she deserved.

  Señor Pepe had crawled under one of the chairs when she’d grabbed the second bag. Now he sat staring at her.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Mommy’s all done now, Precious. We can go home.”

  Behind her, she heard the shop door click open.

  Margaret’s heart started hammering again. Her hands balled into fists. Someone would see her! Someone would know what she’d done!

  As the door opened wider, she backed slowly toward the gate.

  A person stepped through the door. A man. Not Cal Toleffson, though.

  Margaret stopped, curiosity warring with caution. Another lover sneaking out before Toleffson caught him? Who else was Docia Kent sleeping with?

  The man stepped further into the yard, and his face was caught in the moonlight. Margaret’s heart froze. Oh, this was much worse than she’d thought. She took another step back and her foot skidded on the gravel.

  The man turned at the sound, staring in her direction.

  “Good evening,” Margaret stammered, stepping back again. “I heard some noises in here. Teenagers. Teenagers must have vandalized the yard.”

  Her palms were sweating. She swallowed. Surely he’d believe her. No one would think someone with her standing in Konigsburg would stoop to doing something like this.

  The man stepped in front of her now, looking down.

  Margaret raised her chin, resolutely. “Isn’t it awful?” she croaked.

  The blow was so quick she never saw it coming. As the world went dark, she had just enough time to wonder if her explanation had really been that bad.

  —

  Cal cooked Docia eggs the next morning. They turned out better than he’d expected, given that he usually wasn’t much of an egg man. Plus Docia was dressed in one of his T-shirts which only reached to her upper thighs, so there’d been some significant distractions.

  “We need to go back.” Docia stretched beside him. “The shop opens at noon on Sundays, and I’ve got to clean up the last of the trash before we do.”

  “It’s ten,” Cal reasoned. “We don’t need to leave until ten thirty or so.”

  “Calvin, we need to leave now.” Docia grinned at him. “We must be strong.”

  Cal gathered the dishes together and started for the sink. “Calthorpe,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Calthorpe. Not Calvin. It’s my mother’s maiden name. And if you tell anyone, I’ll swear it’s a spiteful rumor.” He rinsed the dishes underneath the faucet.

  “Calthorpe.” Docia shook her head. “How could she saddle an innocent baby with that?”

  “I was her fourth innocent baby, and her fourth son. I’ve always considered it revenge on her part.” Not, of course, that Mom would have thought of it that way.

  “You have three brothers?” Docia was fastening her bra underneath the T-shirt. “Are they all your size?”

  Cal kept his gaze on the dishes in the sink. He had a feeling jumping her right now would not be appreciated. “One is. Peter’s a little smaller. Erik’s slightly bigger.”

  “Are they all still in Iowa?”

  He nodded. “My dad’s a biology teacher at Lander High. My mom’s chief occupation is driving me nuts.”

  Docia stopped in the midst of pulling on her shorts. “What?”

  Not a good time to go into the many intricacies of Toleffson family dynamics. “Another time. You want to walk or drive?”

  Docia sighed. “I’d like to walk, but we’d better drive. I want to get everything picked up before we open.”

  “Right.” Cal grabbed his truck keys. “Let’s go get started on the fun part of the day.”

  Main was already full of tourists, although most of the stores didn’t open until noon on Sundays. Cal grabbed the box of trash bags they’d picked up at the supermarket and followed Docia out the back door of the shop.

  She walked into the yard and froze, staring. “Sweet Jesus. What the hell happened here?”

  Cal looked over her shoulder. Trash was strewn everywhere around the yard, far worse than it had been after the party. Bits of paper clung to the leaves of the live oaks. One shredded black plastic trash bag hung from a lower branch.

  “Holy shit.” He stepped around Docia and stared at the remains of the party. It looked like the results of a particularly goony frat prank. Someone had used trash to create an X-shape and a circle in the middle of the garbage heap.

  Another black plastic bag lay in the midst of the refuse. Cal started toward it, then paused.

  One bare foot extended behind the bag. Cal’s stomach clenched.

  He got to the body a moment before Docia did. Blond hair was tangled in a mass of discarded paper napkins. Some of the napkins were dark red.

  He knelt and touched the woman’s throat, pushing aside the plastic bag that had drifted across her face so he could look at her.

  His stomach clenched again when he recognized the face. Damn it to hell! A flutter of pulse tickled his fingertips.

  “Call 911.” Cal’s voice automatically shifted into emergency management mode. “It’s Margaret Hastings and she’s still alive. But not by much.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chaos. Docia’s quiet backyard had erupted in chaos. An ambulance with flashing red lights. Both the town’s police cruisers. Medics who muttered consultations until they’d lifted Margaret Hastings onto a gurney and wheeled her away. Her long blonde hair almost trailed on the ground as they did. Docia thought Margaret probably wouldn’t have liked that if she’d been in any condition to notice.

  Ham Linklatter, pale-faced, roped off her backyard with yellow crime scene tape. People clustered in the alley, gawking over her back fence.

  Janie, well-nigh vibrating with tension, stood with her hand on Docia’s shoulder. “Should I open up the shop?” she asked.

  Docia shook her head. She figured opening your shop when someone had almost been killed in your backyard—your mysteriously trash-filled backyard—would not be well regarded by the other members of the Konigsburg Merchants Association. Plus she didn’t think she could bear to stand behind the counter and peddle books herself, particularly when everybody in town would probably come in to peep at her.

  Chief Brody had arrived within minutes of her 911 call. After Margaret had been taken away, he took a seat beside Docia on a folding chair left over from the party.

  Cal looked up from a low-voiced discussion with the paramedic. After a moment, he ambled toward them.


  “How are you doing, Ms. Kent?” Brody’s voice sounded blessedly calm, almost normal.

  Docia glanced up at him, taking a deep breath. “You mean aside from the fact someone trashed my backyard and then tried to kill Margaret Hastings here? Aside from that, I suppose I’m okay.”

  Brody nodded absently, pulling out his notebook. “I assume the yard wasn’t like this when you went to bed last night.”

  “No.” Docia shook her head emphatically. “We’d cleaned up a lot of the trash already. I had some bags ready for garbage pickup on Monday.”

  “So all of this—” Brody gestured across the lawn, “—happened after you went inside?”

  “Yes. I guess so. A lot of it, anyway.” A dull ache crept up the back of Docia’s neck.

  Brody wrote a quick note. “Did you hear anything last night?”

  Docia shrugged. “I wasn’t here. We left after we’d cleaned up some of the trash.”

  “We?” Brody looked up from his notebook.

  “Cal and I. Dr. Toleffson. I was at his place.” Docia found herself blushing. Well, crap. Great time to get embarrassed about her sex life.

  Brody raised an eyebrow, then looked back down at his notes again. “When did you leave?”

  “Around ten, I think.”

  “And you got back when?” Brody wasn’t looking at her, but his voice sounded faintly stiff.

  Docia bit her lip, fighting the blush. Was he being critical because she was sleeping with Cal? She was over thirty, for Christ’s sake!

  “Around ten this morning.” Cal’s voice came from beside her.

  Brody glanced at him. “Did you see anyone when you drove up?”

  Docia looked back down at the ground between her feet, trying to picture the street as they’d arrived that morning. “Some kids were playing in Carol Brosius’s backyard. Tourists were all over the place. And Harry Morgenstern was power walking over on Spicewood. Nobody unusual.”

  Brody nodded, writing quickly in his notebook. Then he looked up again. “Any idea why Margaret Hastings would be in your backyard?”

  Docia grimaced and shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t have a clue. Margaret Hastings has never visited my backyard in all the time I’ve lived here. I didn’t realize she even knew I had one.”

  “Was the gate locked when you left last night?”

  Docia glanced at the back fence—the lock hung open at the side of the gate. She stared down at her feet again, trying to picture it last night, then shook her head. “I thought so. I mean, I only unlock it when I take the trash out.”

  Brody glanced at the back wall. “It’s open now. But you didn’t leave it like that?”

  “Oh, shit!” Cal muttered. He turned his head to look at Brody. “I unlocked it so I could take the trash bags out, then I didn’t get around to doing it before we left. I don’t think I locked it again after that.” He turned back to Docia, his mouth a thin line. “My fault. I’m sorry, babe.”

  Docia slid her hand in his, squeezing his fingers. “It’s okay. Just…bad luck.” Mainly for Margaret.

  Brody tucked his notebook back in his jacket pocket and stood. “Well, at least we know how Ms. Hastings could have gotten in, although we may not know why. Thanks, Ms. Kent. If you think of anything else about last night, you get in touch with us, okay?”

  “Sure.” Docia chewed her lip for a moment and then asked the question gnawing at her. “Is Margaret going to be all right?”

  Brody’s face became suddenly expressionless. “We don’t know yet, Ms. Kent. I hope so. But it looks serious.”

  Docia blew out a breath. “Oh, Lord,” she murmured. “Yes, I hope so too.”

  She thought about getting up to see Brody out, but in the end she didn’t have the energy. As Brody paused to say something to Ham, she turned toward Cal, shaking her head. “I still don’t understand what she was doing here. Why would she be walking over on this side of Main? She lives in the other direction.”

  Cal sat beside her, his brow furrowed, glancing around the trash-filled yard. Then, abruptly, he stood, shoulders stiff.

  Docia stared up at him. “What?”

  “I think I know what Margaret was doing,” he murmured.

  “Doing?” Docia tried to focus. “When?”

  “When she came here.” He turned to look at her, eyes dark. “She was walking her dog.”

  The dog wasn’t in the backyard. That was easy to establish, although Ham wasn’t much help. He assumed they were digging through the trash to destroy valuable evidence. Docia decided he watched too much CSI.

  “We need to find the dog, Ham,” Cal explained, patiently. “Margaret’s dog. She must have been taking him for a walk when she was attacked.”

  Ham flinched, his face grim. “I’ll kill the bastard who did this to her.”

  Cal’s mouth flattened in exasperation. “Okay by me, but for now let’s just find the dog.”

  “Could he have fit through the opening here at the bottom?” Docia knelt down, peering through the gap in the half-open gate.

  Cal joined her, measuring the gap with his hands. “Oh, yeah, easy. He’s just a little guy.”

  He opened the gate all the way and stepped into the alley that ran between her backyard and her neighbors’. Some of the yards had fences, but most didn’t.

  “He could have run off down the street,” Docia mused. “Or cut through one of the yards. Maybe he headed back home.”

  “Maybe.” Cal walked slowly down the alley, his gaze darting from side to side, checking the garbage cans and cartons stacked behind the stores facing Main.

  Halfway down the alley, he stopped, then knelt across from the candle store’s backdoor, resting his hands on his knees. “Hey, buddy,” he murmured.

  Docia stood back where she could watch without getting in the way. A small, fawn-colored snout protruded from behind a cardboard carton.

  “Remember me?” Cal’s voice was soft, almost crooning. “You like my feet, remember? You can come out now.” He extended his hand, carefully.

  The snout was replaced by a small head with bulbous forehead and large, terrified brown eyes. The little dog trembled.

  “You cold, buddy? You hungry?” Cal leaned forward slightly. “I can help. Come on out now. It’s okay. We’ll take care of everything.”

  Tentatively, the dog stepped forward, head down, tail tucked between its legs. A leash dangled from its collar, the end buried beneath a pile of trash. It watched Cal with wary eyes.

  “That’s it,” he crooned. “Come on over here now.”

  Docia kept waiting for Cal to scoop the dog up in his extended hand. But he remained still, his hand out.

  The dog tripped toward him, slowly, shoulders tensed as if it were ready to run, the leash dragging on the ground behind it.

  Cal stayed still. “Come on, buddy,” he said softly, “come here.”

  Carefully, the dog sniffed at his outstretched fingers. Cal dropped his hand slightly so it could sniff his palm. Then he moved, with infinite care, to rub behind its ears.

  The dog stood stiffly for a moment, and then it seemed to make a decision. It scuttled toward him, its tiny paws scuffling in the gravel. Cal reached down gently, wrapping a large hand around its pint-sized, shivering body while he unfastened the leash from its collar, dropping it on the ground.

  “That’s it. Here we go.” He lifted the animal, placing it securely in the crook of his arm while he scratched the back of its head. “You’re good. Nothing else is going to happen.” He walked back up the alley toward Docia.

  She frowned, watching the small, trembling body. “What are you going to do with him?”

  The little dog regarded her distrustfully over Cal’s arm. Maybe he lumped all women into the same general suspect category, not that she’d blame him, given his owner.

  Cal stopped, frowning. “Do with him?”

  “Well, Margaret can’t take care of him right now.” She could swear the Chihuahua gave her the evil eye.

  “Pound in
Kerrville would take him.” Ham had followed them up the alley. His mouth twisted with scorn as he regarded Señor Pepe.

  The dog yipped. Cal looked as if he’d like to.

  “Maybe one of Margaret’s friends could take care of him for her until she gets back on her feet.” Assuming Margaret is someday able to take care of him again herself. Docia shivered.

  “Never heard of anybody who wanted that rat.” Ham shook his head. “Send him to the pound.”

  Cal reached down to rub the dog’s head again. “He’s coming home with me. Aren’t you, Pep?”

  Ham grimaced. “Suit yourself. I got to go down and see if Brody wants anything else.” He rounded the corner and started for his car.

  “Pep?” Docia raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “There is no way on God’s green earth I’m referring to him as Señor Pepe.” Cal shuddered.

  The little dog looked up at him with blatant adoration.

  “You better let me drive you home.” Docia narrowed her eyes at the dog. “No telling how he’ll behave in your truck.”

  “He’d be a champ, right, Pep?” Cal smiled at her. “Besides, I thought we could go to Brenner’s for dinner. Lee and Ken will want a report.”

  Docia shook her head. “They’re closed on Sundays. Ingstrom serves chili, but I don’t suppose you’d like it much.”

  Cal grimaced. “Nope. How about Sweet Thing?”

  “Not open for dinner. Come on, Doc.” Docia started toward her back door. “I’ll make you a cheese sandwich.”

  “And the dog?”

  “Oh, hell yes, Toto too.” Docia blew the hair off her forehead and dug in her pocket for her key.

  —

  Nico, lounging in the late afternoon sunshine from Docia’s front window, came to spitting attention as soon as they entered the room.

  Pep trembled and yipped, simultaneously terrified and on the hunt. “Knock it off, both of you,” Cal snapped. He considered trying to fit Pep into the pocket of his jeans. Probably best not to try it.

  Nico retired to the top of the bookcase, hissing at Pep.

  Cal shook his head. “You’re twice as big as he is. Hell, you could eat him for dinner, although I’m fairly sure you’d regret doing it.”