Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Matt glanced again at the photo, then shook his head. "If I had, I'd remember," he said. "But I didn't start full-time at the hotel until after Rachel got sick. That gun's been in that very same case for forty years or better, except when the cops had it for a while. It's possible that your man worked there some while back and knew about it." He turned to me. "You bring that photo up and show it around, Miz Bayles. Somebody might could recognize it."

  I nodded. "But Jeffs the big question now," I reminded McQuaid. "If you're so sure he didn't do it, you owe it to him to help him clear his name. I can handle Brian." I looked at him squarely. "You can trust me."

  McQuaid rubbed his nose. "If there's a problem at night, you could call Blackie. But what about during the day, while you're at the shop? Brian can't stay here by himself."

  "He can come to the shop with me," I said, and then wanted to bite back the words. What was I letting myself in for?

  Matt pushed back his cup and stood. "Then you'll do

  it?" He was excited, twitchy. "You'll go after him? You'll bring him back?"

  McQuaid stood up, too, glancing first at me, then away. "I'm not wild about it," he said slowly, "but I'll do it. For Jeff, you understand. There's got to be an explanation"

  "Sure there is," Matt said. "I can't figure him for a killer, either. But from the way Harris was acting, he's under suspicion. He needs to get back here and get himself a good lawyer." His eyes swiveled to me. "Say, you're a lawyer, aren't you? And didn't I hear you used to do criminal law?"

  "Used to," I said. "Past tense. I'm in a different business now.

  "If you're going to pick up the tab for the search," McQuaid said, "we'll need to write up a letter of agreement."

  "Sure thing. Why don't you write something up and bring it by the office. You'll need an advance, too, I reckon. Just name the amount." Matt thrust out his hand and McQuaid, reluctant, shook it. It was a done deal.

  Chapter Seven

  Pennie Royall boiled in wine and drunken, provoketh the monthly termes, bringeth forth the fecondine, the dead childe and unnaturall birth.

  John Gerard

  John Gerard's Herbal, 1633

  Monday is my day to do errands, have lunch with a friend, and treat myself to a haircut or a new book. But at eleven A.M. on this Monday, I was bent over the air conditioner, listening with half of my mind to a detailed explanation about relays and condensors while the other half wondered just how much this initiation into the esoteric mysteries of refrigeration was going to cost. At length, Harold hitched up his gray work pants, turned the bill of his red gimme cap to the front again, and announced that he'd be back that afternoon to start work, as soon as he finished repairing the walk-in freezer up at the Springs.

  "Oh, yes," I said, "I'd forgotten about that. It went out on Friday evening, didn't it? It seemed like a big emergency. Lily had to send somebody to Austin for dry ice on Saturday morning."

  "Yep," Harold said blithely, "failed big time. Weren't the first failure, neither. Went out here a coupla months back." He leaned forward, confiding. "Problem was, they din't call me. They called Tiny an' Tim's Plumbin', Heatin' an' Coolin'." He leaned back again, his snaggletoothed grin cheerful. "That was their mistake, y'see. Call Harold the first time, won't be no second. That's my motto." He said it again, with obvious relish. "Call Harold the first time, won't be no second."

  "Mm-m-m," I said without conviction, studying the innards of my air conditioner and wishing I could be sure that Harold was the expert he claimed to be.

  Harold scratched a scab off his sunburned nose. "Yep, that Mr. Mon-roe, he purt'near had a heart 'tack when that freezer went out. Phoned me up when I was sittin' down to supper, orderin' me to git my tail up there lickery-split, like I was one of his maint'nance men, 'stead of a independent per-fessional." He chuckled. "Looked to me like he had sumpthin' in there he din't want thawed out."

  "Chickens, probably," I said. "They got in a load of Cornish game hens for the banquet."

  "Wasn't no game hens," Harold said, scribbling something on a piece of paper. "Side of beef, mebbe." He handed me the paper. "Here's what I figger this thing'll cost," he added sunnily, "plus or minus ten percent. How does that there number look to you, Miz Bayles?"

  It looked awful. It looked like I could send Brian to college on what it was going to cost to repair the air conditioner, plus or minus ten percent. "Do I have any choice?" I asked bleakly.

  "Well, sure," Harold said. "You kin call Tiny an' Tim fer a second opinion." He paused and screwed up his face. "Course, Tiny's in the hospital havin' his hernia sewed up, and Tim's took off fer a while, nobody knows where. Sad to say, but them boys're none too reli'ble. Might be a while before they git over here. Even then, chances are they'd come up with the same figger. Higher, probly." He patted my air conditioner consolingly. "Ain't no two ways to deal with this here problem."

  "Forget the second opinion," I said, resigned. Getting something fixed in a small town can be a big problem. "Let's just get it repaired. Today."

  "Sure thing," Harold agreed happily, thrusting his screwdriver into his jangling belt of tools. "Right after I git that freezer runnin' up at The Springs. Like I say, call Harold the first time, won't be no second."

  Harold left, whistling. I cut an armful of thyme sprigs and took them into what used to be my old kitchen, where I swished them in cool water, blotted the moisture with towels, and put them in the dehydrator, where they would dry until tomorrow morning. Then I poured myself a glass of red zinger tea out of the pitcher in the refrigerator, added some ice cubes, and surveyed the large, bright room, with its stone walls, original pine woodwork and ceiling, and red clay tile floor. I still hadn't decided how to use it. Certainly, it was great space for my occasioned classes in wreath-making, herb-crafting, aromatherapy, and traditional folk remedies. But with almost no remodeling, the guest house at the back of the lot (once an old stone stable) was suitable for classes, and the kitchen could become a tearoom. It would mean more work, of course, and I'd have to hire extra help. But it had good income potential and wouldn't necessarily require a heavy cash investment. Maybe I should check with the health department and see what kinds of requirements I'd have to meet.

  I dreamed for a few minutes. The space is an ideal setting for Victorian, which appeals to my softer side. Wicker chairs, even a wicker sofa with chintz-covered cushions over there under the window. Lace tablecloths and lace swags at the tall windows. Delicate glass pitchers filled with fresh hydrangea and cosmos and cabbage

  roses, with silvery lamb's ears and dark green leaves of tansy. Crystal and silver espaliers brimming with lavender potpourri. With a fairly small investment, I could turn my old kitchen into a lovely place for an herbal high tea on Sunday afternoon, a place where friends could linger together over cups of hot mint tea and cheesy twists in the morning and iced glasses of rosemary lemonade and plates of puff pastry in the afternoon. I could make an arrangement with Maggie's Magnolia Kitchen to handle the cooking.

  I sat quietly, sipping tea and letting the images come into my mind, enticing, entrancing images. But what kept coming with them, like unbidden shadows, was a barrage of questions. Where was Jeff Clark, and why had he run away? Had Rosemary been murdered in my place by a revenge-crazy ex-convict? Or had she been killed by an angry ex-husband? After a while, I acknowledged that the questions were too intrusive to allow me to think about Victorian delights, and with no air-conditioning, the temperature was creeping upward. I took one last sniff of the sweet fragrance of drying thyme, locked up, and went home to see if McQuaid needed anything for his trip to South Padre.

  I found him in the bedroom, stuffing socks and jockey shorts into a duffel bag. Men don't pack underwear the way women do. I count the days I'll be gone and take that many pairs of panties. McQuaid had dumped in everything he owned.

  "How long do you think you'11 be gone?" I asked, looking at the shorts.

  He peeled off his shirt. "Your guess is as good as mine." He took an underarm hol
ster off the bed.

  "You're carrying?" I asked.

  Dumb question. The evidence was right there in front of my eyes. But I'd never seen McQuaid wearing a gun. Cleaning and repairing guns, yes, in his workshop. Shooting them, yes, on the practice range behind the house. Driving around with them, yes, in the window rack of The Beast. McQuaid is a gun person. But I had not seen him wear one, with the obvious intention of using it as a weapon. I was taken aback by the difference it made in him, and by my response.

  His "You bet I'm carrying" was clipped and terse. He slipped into the holster, snugged it with a practiced motion, and took a plaid cotton shirt out of the closet.

  I sat down on the bed. He hadn't wanted to go in the first place, but the excitement of getting ready was charging him up. The adrenaline of the chase was turning him into somebody I didn't know very well, into the hard, macho cop he used to be. A man riding into the wilderness to do a man's job while his woman stayed behind with his child. Some part of me was excited by this arming of the hero, by McQuaid buckling on his gun belt and sallying forth. This man in my bedroom was a stranger, and the fact aroused me, made me want him. My hand reached up and touched his arm.

  But something about this scene and my response to it reminded the liberated woman in me of a worn-out myth. Sorta like Penelope watching Ulysses strap on his sword and head out for Troy, huh? (Sardonic laugh.) Have you forgotten what happened after he left? There she was with that stupid loom all day, nothing to do hut weave. So what do you think you'll be doing when your hero's on his way to the border and you're left to babysit?

  I dropped my hand. "What are you going to do when you get to South Padre?"

  "Check the docks, the parking lots, the hotels. Talk to the local cops." He picked up a small snub-nosed re-

  volver, swung out the cylinder to check the rounds, snapped it shut. His mouth was a firm, hard line. "Bubba's put out an APB for the Fiat." He looked at me. "The prints on the gun belonged to Jeff."

  "Oh, no," I said—sympathetically, because Jeff was McQuaid's friend.

  "Oh, yes." McQuaid was grim. He went to the closet for his new boots.

  I picked at a tuft of thread on the green and white Irish Chain bedspread McQuaid's mother had quilted for our bed, bless her heart. She's an old-fashioned ranch wife who's lived with the same man on the same two thousand acres of Texas prairie for the last forty-five years, and she has deep moral qualms about our living together without benefit of clergy. But that doesn't keep her from wishing us happiness and making a quilt to cover us while we make love.

  "Everybody knows Jeff can be hot-headed," I said quietly. "Maybe Rosemary told him she wouldn't marry him, and he got angry. Maybe he found out the baby wasn't his. Maybe — "

  McQuaid came around the end of the bed and sat down beside me.

  "Maybe he did kill her. Or maybe he didn't. Either way is beside the point, far as I'm concerned. I want to change boots. Give me a hand, will you?"

  The liberated woman in me put up a squawk, but I knelt at his knee and eased the boot over his instep while he tugged. His voice was muffled, gruff.

  "Whether he killed her or whether he didn't, it's none of my business. I don't want to know what he's done. I'm going down there to bring him back, that's all. It's not my job to make judgments."

  Both boots on, I sat down beside him again. I don't want to know. I recognized McQuaid's logic, for I'd used it often enough to shout down my own doubts. If you're worried about guilt, you shouldn't be in the business; if you demand that your client tell you the truth, you're only reducing your options. Innocent or guilty, it's beside the point.

  "Did you let Bubba know you're going?" I asked.

  "Bubba an? Blackie." He picked up a dirty sock and began to buff the toes of his already-gleaming boots. "Bubba can't spare any warm bodies for a search, so he's glad enough to let Matt pay me to look. Blackie says to tell you he's adding a night patrol route past this house. A deputy will be driving that county road out there every few hours. Any noise, anything out of the ordinary, all you have to do is pick up the phone." He stood up and began to push his hand-tooled Western belt through the loops of his jeans. "I don't want you to take any chances, China. You hear? You get on the horn to Blackie at the slightest hint of trouble."

  "I hear," I said. This was starting to sound like a lecture. "You don't have to worry."

  He laughed, a brusque male laugh that showed just how far away from me he had already gone. "I'll worry anyway." He fastened his belt and sat down beside me again, pulling open the nightstand drawer. "I know all about you and guns, but I want you to forget that and pay attention."

  "Yessir," I said with exaggerated deference, but he didn't notice. He had a gun in his hand.

  "This .38 is loaded, and it's right here where you can get at it during the night." He put it back and closed the drawer. "There's also a pump shotgun behind the raincoats, in the closet by the front door. It's loaded with double-ought buckshot. All you have to do is pump once, point it, and pull the trigger. Don't bother to aim; the choke is set to cylinder for max spread. Your automatic is at the shop?"

  There was a quick retort on my tongue, but I only nodded. 1 couldn't imagine using the .38, or the shotgun, or the Beretta. But McQuaid didn't want to hear that now. The hero was off to war, and he wanted to lead his woman armed and prepared to kill in defense of his child.

  "There are other weapons out in my workshop," he added, "but they're locked up. Oh, and leave Howard out at night. He's not much of a watchdog, but he'll bark if he sees anybody moving around out there."

  I sorted through two or three responses, and settled for one that seemed appropriately neutral. "The place is an arsenal."

  "If you need to protect yourself, I want you to be able to do it. And Brian knows to leave the guns alone. That's one thing I've never had to worry about." He stood up, threw the dirty sock into his duffle, and zipped it.

  I forebore to ask him why he was taking one dirty sock. Instead, I asked, "What about Sally? Are you going to let her know you're out of town?"

  "Not on your life," he said firmly. "If she knows I'm gone, she might put pressure on you to let her take Brian. She's done a few things lately that make me think she's not very stable — quitting her job, for instance."

  "If that's instability," I said wryly, "then Brian's in bad trouble. I quit my job. You did, too."

  "That's different," McQuaid said. "Anyway, you should have heard her on the phone last night. Totally unreasonable. I don't trust her to keep Brian safe." He sat back down on the bed again and put his arm around me. His voice became tender. "You'll miss me?"

  "Of course I'll miss you," I said. The other China whispered, Will you?

  He nuzzled my cheek. "You and the boy are more important to me than anything else, China. I'd go crazy if anything happened to either one of you."

  The other China whispered that we were talking in soap-opera cliches. I shushed her and kissed him, murmuring reassuringly, "Nothing's going to happen. We'll be fine." As my arms went around him, I felt the bulge of the holstered gun under his armpit and the wanting came up again in a hot, rushing wave that pulled me under. This time the other China didn't say a word. She just stood by and watched, shaking her head.

  Sometime later, Brian and I stood on the porch, waving goodbye as McQuaid drove away in his rental car.

  "Dad's going after a bad guy?" Brian asked, squinting up at me. "Just like in the movies?"

  "You might say that."

  Brian looked after the car. "Awesome," he said.

  I spent the hour after lunch doing necessary domestic things like laundry and the vacuuming. Then I went outside to work on what will be a wonderful herb garden — this time next year.

  A couple of weeks ago, in the center of the sunny backyard, I had staked out a large area. Now I hosed down the grass thoroughly, then spread black plastic over the ground. It would serve as a solar kiln to bake the grass roots and residual weed seeds. By the middle of August, everyth
ing under the plastic would be cooked to a crisp, the plastic could come up, and I'd start putting in paths and borders and shaping the beds. In September I'd turn the soil, then cover it again to catch any late sprouters, and in the middle of October, before the onset of fall rains, I'd transplant the basic biennials and perennials: rosemary, sage, thyme, catnip, parsley, lavender, arte-misia, chives, yarrow, santolina, fennel. These I would compost and cover lightly with grass and leave until early spring, when it's time to sow the annuals: basil, borage, coriander, dill, nigella, sweet Annie.

  Working in the backyard was hotter than making whoopee in woolens. Having spread the plastic, I went back indoors, washed off the sweat, and settled down at McQuaid's computer to work on the newsletter. You can write about herb gardens as well as dig in them. Writing doesn't tear up your hands.

  Arnold came over early in the afternoon with the latest copy of Card Collector magazine, and he and Brian retired to Brian's bedroom to drool over pictures of the collector cards they coveted and play with a computer game Sally had given Brian last month. A couple of hours later they migrated downstairs and settled in front of the television for a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A little later, they came into the office and stood behind my chair, one on each side. Brian was wearing Einstein on one shoulder. Arnold was wearing a remarkable ridged plastic forehead, a la Lieutenant Worf, a vest that looked like it came out of the costume shop for Die Nibelungenlied, and a Klingon sash peppered with various fan pins, security badges, and the Karizan Stella. I didn't even do a double take. I've gotten used to seeing Brian and his friends in Trekkie regalia.

  Brian came straight to the point. "Arnold wants to know can I go with him to the Trekker Con on Saturday. It's in Austin."

  I stopped typing and turned around. Before he drove off, McQuaid had laid down the law to Brian. He was to go to the shop with me. He wasn't to go anywhere else.