This week had been too much: finding Les, sleeping with him, getting arrested, finding Heather-Anne’s body, Dexter getting arrested, Les showing up again and me going after him like some kind of deranged Fatal Attraction psycho. Too much. I boo-hooed for several minutes before getting up to blow my nose and splash water onto my face. Pulling a box of frozen éclair minis out of the freezer, I sat at the kitchen table and popped one into my mouth. The room reeked of smoke, and the open windows were letting the blizzard and cold blow through, but I ignored the discomforts, propped my chin on my hands, and ate another éclair.
That’s how Les found me. He poked his head cautiously around the basement door and, not seeing anyone—firemen, I guess—he crossed to me and patted my shoulder. I shrugged away from his hand, and he dropped it awkwardly to his side before crossing to the oven and peering inside.
“What a mess.”
“Don’t start.” My voice quavered, so I folded my lips together. I was not going to cry in front of Les.
He held up his hands in a surrender gesture. “Let me clean it up.”
I perked up at that. Les clean? He’d never made such an offer when we were married. Maybe I should have whacked him with a Ping-Pong paddle years ago. I watched morosely as he slid the rack with the carbonized pizza out of the oven and dumped the charred disk into the trash, then dug around under the sink for a Brillo pad and cleanser. “You don’t have to do that,” I heard myself say.
He ignored me. Good. I looked down and realized I’d eaten half the box of éclairs and was feeling a bit sick to my stomach. There wasn’t much an éclair couldn’t fix, but this situation was beyond the power of Bavarian cream and chocolate. I pushed the box away. The movement reawakened the smoke smell, and I sniffed at my robe. Pee-yew! I smelled like my daddy used to smell when he came in from burning yard trash in the fifty-five-gallon drum in the backyard.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I told Les. I didn’t wait for a reply but headed upstairs to my room. I had just closed the door when I realized I’d never checked on Dexter. I dialed his cell phone, and he answered. I sighed a little prayer.
“Yo.”
“Hi, baby. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“James’s. His folks picked us up from school today—they didn’t want him driving in the snow. They invited me to stay.”
The way James drove, they shouldn’t let him near any vehicle more dangerous than a skateboard, rain or shine. “You didn’t think to call?”
“No. Gotta go. It’s my turn.”
The line went dead. Not bothering to wonder what it was his turn at, and relieved that Dexter wasn’t dead, in jail, or coming home tonight, I stuffed my stinky robe in the hamper and stepped into the hot shower.
* * *
Half of me wanted to climb under the duvet with a good Barbara Cartland book, but I knew I needed to have it out with Les. When I went downstairs again, dressed in my mauve velour sweatpants and the Prada sweater with the metallic thread through the lavender yarn—I didn’t want to give Les any ideas by coming downstairs in my jammies, not now that I’d finally given him what for—I found that he had finished with the oven and was watching Fox News with a glass of Scotch at his elbow. Just like when we were married. I marched to the television and turned it off. Take that, Bill O’Reilly.
“Hey, I was watching that.”
“Did you kill Heather-Anne?” I had tried not even to consider the possibility, but now I had to know.
He goggled at me and spilled Scotch on the leather sofa. It would wipe up. His mustache twitched, and he put on a wounded look. “Gigi, I can’t believe you’d even—”
“Did you?”
“No! God, no. I threw up when I heard she was dead.” His face had a greenish tinge at the memory.
“Why did you leave Costa Rica? Was it the newspaper clipping?”
He clanked the rim of the glass against his teeth, and Scotch dribbled down his chin. “Stop doing that. How did you— Oh, you found my folder in the BMW?”
I nodded. “Charlie’s in Wyoming interviewing that family right now. She thinks your Heather-Anne and the wife in that clipping may be the same person.”
He took a long sip of Scotch without spilling any, and I knew he’d had the same thought. “I can’t believe it.”
He didn’t want to believe it.
He gave me his sincere look. “I should never have left you, Gigi. I know that now. I didn’t realize how good I had it living here in Colorado with you, the house, the kids. Yes, even the kids. Costa Rica’s so effing humid you can’t think some days, like your brain’s trapped underwater, and the damn monkeys are everywhere, like big furry cockroaches.”
I tried to keep from laughing, but a little snort came out my nose.
“You can laugh,” he said, gesturing with his glass, “but it’s true. I’d go to sleep at night under layers of mosquito netting and wish for a crisp Colorado day. I guess we don’t always appreciate what we have until we lose it.” His shoulders slumped, but I channeled Albertine and trampled the urge to comfort him.
“Who do you think killed Heather-Anne?” I asked. “And why?”
“It was probably some lunatic, some Ted Bundy–type just passing through.”
That wasn’t even worth responding to. I sat on the sofa across from Les and crossed my arms over my chest. The wind howled outside, and I reminded myself to call Kendall at Angel’s to tell her good night.
“Well, it could have been,” Les said when I didn’t say anything.
“You said someone’s after you … Who?”
“I wish to hell I knew.” He tossed back the rest of the Scotch and rose to get more from the bottle he’d left on the sink.
“You don’t have any idea?” I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him. The éclairs had worn off, and I needed real food. I don’t think as well when I get low-blood-sugary. I followed Les into the kitchen and pulled the makings of Alfredo sauce from the fridge. Even though it felt like midnight, it was only seven o’clock. “How about Patrick Dreiser or one of the other people you robbed?”
“I didn’t rob anybody. I practiced creative accounting. Caveat emptor and all that. I guess it could have been Dreiser—he took my departure badly, sent me threatening notes for months. Do you want me to put the water on?”
I nodded, and he filled a deep pot with water and turned the gas on under it. If he’d been half this helpful when he lived here, I might have missed him more when he left. The thought made me drop the whisk I was using on the cream and butter. I thought I had missed Les, but was that true? What had we talked about the past couple of years? Dexter’s suspensions, my shopping habits, Les’s gripes about some of his business partners. Not much else. Huh. Did I really miss Les? I missed the sex—I was menopausal, not dead—even though there hadn’t been as much of that in the year before he left. I put the idea away to think about later … maybe. What kind of person was I if I didn’t even miss my ex-husband?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked. I shook my head hurriedly, and he held up two boxes of pasta. “Fettucine or linguine?”
31
Charlie froze.
“Ah-hah!” the man said. He was shorter than Charlie and dressed like a cross between an Arctic explorer and an 1850s miner, with a furred hood framing a whiskery face and an unzipped jacket showing a plaid shirt and jeans held up by suspenders. She guessed he must be over seventy. “I knew it when I saw the light! Looters! Hands up!”
Charlie obliged. “I’m not a looter,” she said, carefully not mentioning Dan. She didn’t want to make the enraged store owner any antsier than he was, not with the shotgun leveled at her abdomen. “I got stranded in the storm and had to find shelter.”
“What’s that, then?” The man pointed at the Hostess pie wrapper sticking from her pocket. “Looter!”
“I was hungry. I was going to leave money—”
“Sure you were.” He sniffed and took one hand from the gun to swipe his jacketed
forearm under his nose. “Cold gets me every time. You just stay right where you are, missy, while I call the police.”
“Look, Fred—are you Fred?”
His eyes narrowed to slits. “How’d you know my name?”
“The state patrolman mentioned it when we—I—called to say I was stuck on the highway. He said what a great guy you were.” A lie, but Charlie figured it wouldn’t hurt. “Look, can you put the gun down?” She put some emphasis on the word “gun” in case Dan hadn’t caught on.
“Uh-uh,” Fred said. “You’re a crafty one, you are. You might not be much bigger than a snippet, but you’ve got some wiles. You just march to the aisle by the window and fetch a roll of duct tape so I can make sure you don’t try to pull a fast one while I call the cops. I’ll bet you know right where that tape is, what with looting the place and all.”
Charlie began to walk backward, not wanting to turn her back on the shotgun. “How did you get here?”
“Snowmobile. I live just over the rise”—he jerked his head to the west—“and when I saw the light come on I fired ’er up and headed over here, fixing to catch me a looter. Which I’ve done.”
Suddenly Dan rose up behind Fred—how had he gotten over there? Charlie wondered—and with a series of moves she could barely follow disarmed the man, ejected the gun’s shells, and returned the gun to Fred before he could do more than squawk. “Wha—?”
“I’m Father Dan Allgood.” Dan extended his hand. “I’m sorry I had to rough you up a bit, but shotguns are touchy and I didn’t want that one to go off, especially not with my friend Charlie close enough to absorb a lot of shot.”
Fred gobbled, his face reddening, and looked from Dan to Charlie. Dan’s calm finally seemed to work on the man, and his color subsided. He shook Dan’s still-extended hand reluctantly. “Since when are Catholic priests looters? Not in my day.” He shook his head sadly at the decline of the church’s standards.
“I’m Episcopalian.”
“Oh, well, then.”
Charlie choked on a laugh at Fred’s easy acceptance of an Episcopalian as a criminal. She pulled out her wallet. “Look, here’s two hundred dollars. That should more than cover the food we ate and repairs to the door.”
Fred took the bills and hurried to the front door. “You’re vandals, too?”
“I’m sorry we had to damage the door to get in,” Dan said. “You wouldn’t have wanted us to freeze to death, though.”
Fred didn’t look like he was quite as convinced of that as Dan, but he nodded. “I suppose I can see why you thought it was necessary to vandalize and loot my store, under the circumstances.”
Charlie and Dan listened for a few minutes as Fred told them how he’d come to own the store and how lousy business had been recently. When Fred quit talking to wipe his nose again, Dan said, “Did you say something about a snowmobile?”
“Sure did.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got another one?”
“Sure do. The missus and me like to take ’em up to Winter Park and let ’er rip. There’s a lot of squawking from environmentalists these days about snowmobiles ‘negatively impacting the wildlife’ and what have you, but I say it’s still a free country—barely—and I have a God-given right to ride my snowmobile when and where I please.”
His whiskery jaw jutted out, and he looked as determined as any Minuteman defending the Boston common. Charlie couldn’t remember which article of the Constitution protected the right to ride treaded vehicles, but she didn’t want to put Fred’s back up by mentioning it.
“Any chance you could help us get to a town?” Dan asked. “We’d pay you.”
Fred’s eyes lit up. “Sure can. Long’s you don’t mind riding pillion.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Charlie found herself clutching Dan’s middle, both of them layered in cold weather gear supplied by the now-helpful Fred and his wife, Aileen, rocketing across the snow-covered countryside on what was possibly the loudest form of transportation ever invented. They followed Fred and Aileen; she would ride their snowmobile back. The storm seemed to have moved east, so the wind had diminished, but it was bitterly cold, and Charlie was grateful for the face mask, goggles, hat, and gloves that Aileen had loaned her. The jouncing of the snowmobile jarred every bone and muscle in her body, including her ass, and she was grateful when they reached a smooth stretch of snow she suspected was I-25. Dan pointed to the right, and she made out a snow-covered lump that might have been his truck. Nodding against his back to let him know she’d seen it, she pressed herself more tightly against him and hoped the motel wasn’t too far away and that it would have rooms available. She’d pay half a month’s salary for a hot shower.
Almost on the thought, she spotted lights. They cast a warm yellow glow across the snowy landscape, and she was relieved to find they belonged to a small motel with VACAN Y blinking redly from a sign near the office. After securing the last two rooms, Charlie and Dan thanked the store owner and his wife and shucked off the gear the couple had loaned them, packing it into a garbage bag supplied by the motel clerk for Fred and Aileen to carry back with them. They waved good-bye as the old couple fired up the snowmobiles with big grins on their faces and pointed the machines north.
Feeling utterly exhausted, even though it wasn’t much past seven, Charlie fed quarters into a vending machine to get “dinner” in the form of snack crackers and peanuts and took them to her room after bidding Dan good night. He had enveloped her in a bear hug that did more to warm her than any number of showers or hot cocoas would and told her to sleep tight. The dialogue from a cop show on the next room’s TV seeped through the thin walls, and Charlie wondered how many of the motel’s guests were stranded travelers. Not giving it much thought, she stripped and headed straight for the shower. Fifteen minutes later, the water turned tepid and she stepped out, wishing she had clean clothes to put on.
The roads would be plowed by the morning, she told herself, and they could return to Dan’s truck and finish their journey. Wrapped in a towel, she fished her cell phone out of her purse and called Gigi, wanting to know what her partner had discovered about Wilfred Cheney’s disability and Patrick Dreiser. Just when Charlie was about to hang up, Gigi answered, sounding flustered.
“Charlie! I tried to call you twice. Are you home?”
“Stranded in Mead. The trip was a bust. Neither the sheriff nor the Eustis family could positively ID Heather-Anne as Amanda. What did you learn from Cheney?”
Gigi lowered her voice. “Ot-nay ow-nay. Es-lay ere-hay.”
“No pig Latin, Gigi,” Charlie growled. “We’ve been over this.” Her mind translated. “Wait—did you say Les is there?”
“Es-yay.”
Charlie heard shuffling sounds that seemed to indicate Gigi was moving; then a door closed.
“Okay,” Gigi whispered. “I’m in the bathroom. By myself. I can talk now.”
“What happened? Why is Les there? What does he have to say about Heather-Anne?”
Gigi explained about finding Les in the basement. “I smacked him good with the Ping-Pong paddle,” she said with evident satisfaction.
“Too bad it wasn’t a cast-iron poker.”
“Charlie! Anyway, he said he didn’t kill Heather-Anne—”
“He would say that.”
“—and that someone is after him.”
“Did he say who?”
“He said he doesn’t know, but I think he might be lying.”
Duh. Charlie thought for a moment. “Have you called the cops?”
“Why?”
“The man broke into your house. He’s a wanted criminal!”
“Oh.”
Charlie could almost hear Gigi thinking and knew that turning Les in had never crossed her mind. She let almost a minute pass before saying, “Gigi?”
“I don’t think I can do that, Charlie. Not hand him over to the police. I mean, it was awful of him to run off with Heather-Anne, and of course I understand that t
he embezzling was criminal, but it seems so mean to call the cops on him.”
“You need to be meaner.”
“I know.” Gigi said it sadly, as if meaner were an unobtainable goal.
“Well, if you’re not prepared to hand him over to the police, at least make sure he sticks around long enough so I can talk to him. He’s got to know why Heather-Anne was killed, and maybe who did it.”
“I’ll try. He’s not going anywhere tonight—he’s drunk enough Scotch to put a sow to sleep. When do you think you’ll be back?”
“Noon tomorrow,” Charlie said optimistically. Assuming the plows cleared the highway overnight, they found someone to drive them back to Dan’s truck, they were able to dig it out and get it back on the road, it wasn’t damaged, and no more snow fell. Piece of cake, she thought, hanging up.
32
A snowplow’s growling woke me the next morning. I snuggled my face into my pillow, trying to ignore the sound, but eventually I sat up. Sunlight streamed through the window, and last night’s storm was a thing of the past, except for the foot or so of snow covering the neighbors’ roofs and lawns. The night’s events came back to me, and I remembered Les was in the basement. After he’d stumbled down the stairs, too drunk to make a move on me, I’d locked the door. He could still get out the window, I supposed, if he wanted to leave, but he hadn’t seemed in any shape to go crawling through windows. I wondered vaguely how he’d gotten here.
A faint pounding and Les’s voice calling “Gigi!” got me scrambling out of bed and into my clothes. By the time I’d brushed my teeth and put on just a dab of makeup, it was only fifteen minutes later, but Les acted like I’d left him stranded on a desert island for a week and a half when I unlocked the basement door.
3 Swift Run Page 19
