Murder Bone by Bone

by Lora Roberts

  “You must have seen some changes.”

  “My, yes.” She sighed. “It was so rural at first, you know. There were cows pastured on the other side of Middlefield instead of all those houses. Even where the Eichlers were, we were surrounded by fields for years. The children ran wild.”

  “Your kids—did they go to Stanford, too? Were they part of that whole hippie scene?”

  Emily tilted her head. “Are you collecting information for an article, Liz?”

  “I’m doing a little preliminary research.”

  “I liked the one you did for Smithsonian on Mayfield. Are you doing Palo Alto through the ages?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “The sixties and seventies are of interest to everyone now, aren’t they? Really, although there seemed to be a lot of turmoil at the time, it was pretty benign down here. The real revolutionary action was in Berkeley.” She started walking toward the gate, and I kept pace with her. “Of course, that’s where my son wanted to go, just to mingle with the other radicals. But he transferred to Stanford his junior year. Not that he said so, but I think some of that rhetoric kind of scared him.”

  “Did he live with you?”

  “Heavens, no.” She laughed. “He wouldn’t have been caught dead living with us. He had a room in a group house over on Palo Alto Avenue. If you want the truth, I think his girlfriend shared the room with him. But we adopted a ‘don’t ask’ policy long before the military did. They showed up at our house for dinner on Sundays, and we made the washing machine available if they should want it. Despite the way they looked, they were pretty clean.”

  “You have a daughter, too, right?” We stopped beside Babe.

  “Oh, yes. My daughter actually went to Vassar. She was much more conservative—then.” Emily laughed. “Now she’s the environmental activist, and my son has turned into a very button-down insurance broker. You never can tell.”

  “Would he be willing to tell me any stories about his college days? Or has he put that behind him?”

  She looked thoughtful. “I’ll give him a call when I get home. Let you know this afternoon.”

  I pushed Barker’s head back through the open passenger window. “You want a ride home?”

  Emily shook her head. “No, the walk is part of my workout.” She strode off down the sidewalk, plump and gray-haired, but in good shape for a seventy-year-old woman.

  I didn’t know if Drake would think I was meddling or not. But Emily had given me an idea. If I found Palo Alto in the seventies interesting, others might too. Maybe I would do an article on that time, using the bones as a framework.

  Then I remembered Richard Grolen. I kept forgetting that he was hovering between life and death over those very same bones. My writer’s instinct told me that just made the story more dramatic. But the rest of me found that stance a bit repellent.

  I explained it all to Barker on the way home. But he couldn’t help me with my moral dilemma.

  Chapter 17

  I pulled Babe into my driveway, and immediately felt uneasy. Something was wrong. Everything looked just as usual: The door to the house was closed, the yard empty. I looked at Barker. He didn’t have his fur up.

  Then I noticed that the garage door was no longer locked.

  My garage is old, with two heavy doors that swing out if you exert enough force. I padlock it, of course, but the screws holding the hasp onto the wood had simply been unscrewed, leaving the expensive padlock dangling. The doors had been pushed back together, but they are warped and don’t stay shut unless they’re locked. Though the gap between them was only six inches of darkness, it raised the hair on the back of my neck.

  I sat there for a minute, wondering what to do. Nothing happened, except that Barker grew restive. Finally I opened the door and climbed down from Babe. Drake would have said I should go straight to Bridget’s and call from there. But I couldn’t leave my territory undefended like that. And if nobody opened fire on me while I sat in my car, I figured whoever had broken in was long gone.

  Barker brushed past me. I called him back, but he was busy at the garage door, sniffing with deep interest. His fur stood up a little, but he didn’t growl. Another sign that the intruder was gone.

  I got the flashlight out of the glove compartment and found the key to the side door of the garage on my key ring. With Barker at my heels, I approached the door cautiously. It looked untouched. Perhaps its deadbolt had discouraged the intruder.

  I put the key in the lock, then turned it quickly and flung the door open. The flashlight switch was stiff: I should have turned it on first. I thumbed it madly and finally it threw a beam of light into the gloomy interior of the garage.

  Something unfamiliar, big and bulky, dark and glittering at the same time, confronted me. My heart leaped into my throat. Growling, Barker moved past me, his hackles at their full extent.

  The light switch on the wall eluded my groping fingers for a long moment. When I finally switched it on, the dangling bulb in the center of the garage didn’t do much to penetrate the gloom. But it did show me the object that had frightened me in greater detail.

  Old Mackie’s shopping cart.

  I recognized it from the neatly folded coats in the front and the big plastic bags crammed with cans and bottles. Barker circled it warily, then came trotting back to me.

  I shoved the big doors open, flooding the inside of the garage with light. There was my workbench, with the tools I use to maintain my bus hanging on the Peg-Board behind, and the floor beneath it crowded with paint cans. There were my garden tools, acquired from garage sales and reconditioned with a file, and a bucket of sand mixed with used motor oil, neatly ranged along the wall. Nothing had disturbed the bags of vermiculite and rock dust and chicken manure. The stacks of plastic and terra-cotta flowerpots were still upright.

  Best of all, no body. The vision of Old Mackie crumpled into a corner dissipated.

  Like Barker, I walked around the shopping cart, careful to touch nothing. Old Mackie’s things looked intact. His pillow was in its usual spot, its flowered case grimy.

  It took me awhile to realize what was missing. There was no bottle right in front, wrapped in a paper bag, ready to be uncapped for a swig.

  Barker and I checked behind the garage, then around the house. The locks were undisturbed on the front door and on the side door leading to the porch that houses the washer and water heater. Nothing in the yard was out of place, nothing different from the morning. All the little seedlings were still reaching for the sky. Feeling just a tad ridiculous, I stirred the compost piles with the pitchfork. Nothing.

  With Barker at my side, and a distinct feeling of anticlimax, I entered the house. Everything was just as I’d left it that morning, down to the half-open drawer in the bedroom that I hadn’t closed after yanking out my swimsuit. No bodies in the bathtub. Nothing under the bed but a few escapees from the dust mop. Nothing in the washer, and precious little in the fridge. My computer and all the piles of manuscript, the most important things in the house, were intact.

  I got the key to Drake’s place from the hook beside the door and went to use his phone. I don’t have a phone, partly for reasons of economy, and partly for the same reason I don’t have a TV. Reading has always been adventure enough for me.

  Drake wasn’t in when I called him, of course. I left a message on his voice mail and then tried Bruno’s number.

  “Morales.” He sounded unusually preoccupied.

  “Bruno, this is Liz. I’m trying to find Drake.”

  “He’s out interviewing.” Bruno sounded guarded. “Is this about the Grolen case?”

  “I don’t know.” I sat down in one of Drake’s kitchen chairs, after moving a stack of books, papers, and magazines. Most of Drake’s house consists of overflowing piles of stuff—predominantly clothes and books in the bedroom, videotapes and books in the living room, newspapers and books in the dining nook of the kitchen. But the cooking half of the kitchen is a scene of rigid order. Not a tool out of place, not a di
sh left in the sink. His stove-top was spotless. Even the front of the refrigerator gleamed under the rotating gallery of cartoons he’d clipped from various sources.

  “Has something happened?” Bruno’s voice sharpened. “The children?”

  “As far as I know, the children are fine.” I glanced at Drake’s clock. Already ten-thirty. My precious day was evaporating. “Did he tell you about Old Mackie’s visit yesterday?”

  “The vagrant. Yes, he told me last night. We have been looking for your friend to verify his statement, but so far we haven’t found him.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Well, his shopping cart has turned up in my garage.

  Bruno didn’t speak for a minute. “Are you in Paolo’s house?” He didn’t wait for my mumbled yes. “Lock the doors. I’ll be right there.”

  He hung up, and so did I. There went the rest of my morning.

  “What did you touch?” Bruno stood beside me, watching the evidence team go over my garage.

  “I unlocked the side door and pushed it open. I pushed the big doors open from the inside. That’s all.”

  Bruno nodded. The outside of the double doors had already been dusted, or smoked, or whatever it was they did.

  “Where’s Drake, anyway?”

  “He was looking for your friend.” Bruno nodded at the shopping cart. Spotlights illuminated it, as if it were some kind of funky stage decor. The evidence guys hovered over it, delicately testing this and that. I felt guilty when they heaved the bags of bottles out of the cart and began going through them. Old Mackie wouldn’t thank me for drawing so much attention to his livelihood. If he were in any condition to complain.

  “Why do you think the cart is here?’ Bruno propped his laptop open on the trash can at the side of the garage. The evidence team had already checked that it was empty; I hadn’t thrown anything away since the previous day, when PASCO had been around to collect the garbage.

  “I don’t know. But Old Mackie might have parked it here if he was going to drop out of sight for a while.”

  “Why would he feel he needed to drop out of sight?” Bruno clacked busily at his keyboard, taking down everything I said.

  “Probably because he knew I’d tell Drake what he saw, and Drake would buzz around stirring people up, and he didn’t want to be at risk.” I shivered, though the sun was warm. “I can’t imagine him without his shopping cart. Leaving his pillow behind—”

  “And his spare coats.” Bruno frowned. “What does that suggest?”

  “That he won’t need them where he’s going.” The words sounded grim, and I added quickly. “He did take his bottle. Or else he emptied it before he left.”

  “If he’s the one who left the cart here.” Bruno studied the driveway. “No way to get any tracks from this dry gravel,” he muttered.

  One of the evidence guys came up, peeling off latex gloves. “We didn’t find anything in the cart but old bottles and cans and some clothes. Nothing in the pockets but a very used handkerchief. Prints on the cart’s handle match those we could get from the bottles and stuff. No blood, nothing particularly sinister.”

  Bruno entered this information into his laptop. “Thanks, Dwayne. Guess you guys can go now.”

  Dwayne nodded and went back to his partner. They started packing up all their equipment—more bulk than Old Mackie’s cart contained. I noticed that Dwayne put all the bottles back in their ratty plastic bag. They left the cart looking much the same.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.” Bruno shut his laptop and turned to me. “There’s no evidence a crime was committed, and nothing that points to the shopping cart as significant if there had been a crime. More than likely, your explanation is correct—your friend is staying at the Carver Arms or some similar place, waiting for this to blow over.”

  “Will you keep looking for him?” I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling chilled, though the sun was hot. “What if that puts him in danger?”

  “We will be low-key.” Bruno patted my shoulder. “You understand that we cannot ignore this occurrence. It fits somewhere into the continuum of these incidents.”

  “Do you include the first skeleton in your list of incidents, or just Richard’s bashed head?”

  “We are investigating many things,” he said primly. “I am not at liberty to fill you in on them all. But, Liz—” He looked at me, a worried frown creasing his smooth forehead. “You take care, and take care of those children. These activities seem targeted toward the area around Bridget’s house. Will Paolo be staying there again tonight?”

  “That’s up to him.” My turn to be prim. “I feel we are perfectly safe with Barker, but we can come over here if it would be better.”

  “It would not necessarily be better now,” Bruno said patiently. “You see, if your friend didn’t put his cart in your garage, someone else did. Someone who knows you are involved, and where you live.”

  This was not a comforting statement. I chewed on it while Bruno put the computer back in its case. “I will advise Paolo to stay with you nights until we clear this up,” he said finally, and grinned at me. “It will not be a hardship for him, I think. And you must take care.” He held up a hand. “I know you are used to looking after yourself. In this instance, be even more careful.” He bent to rumple Barker’s ears. “Keep this dog with you.”

  “Okay, I get the picture.” I watched him drive away and felt a bit forlorn, going about locking things up. I screwed the hasp back into the garage door and imprisoned old Mackie’s cart, now put back together as it had been left. Too bad if he wanted it and couldn’t get at it. I locked the house, too, after rinsing my swim stuff and hanging it in the side porch to dry. Barker and I piled into the bus. I felt safer there than walking. I headed to Bridget’s for a quick bite before my class, since my cupboard was bare.

  Turning the corner onto her street, I realized I wasn’t going to get anything to eat at Bridget’s. The fluttering yellow caution tape that festooned the chain-link fence around the scene of the latest bashing was nearly obscured by a crowd of people. Many of them carried big press cameras. Bulky vans with satellite dishes on the roof were parked up and down the street. The media was in hot pursuit of the gruesome news. Drake was there, too, his hair wild, hanging behind the uniforms that strove to create order. Every so often one of the press pack would break free and run up to him, pelting him with questions that he answered with one or two words at the most. He caught my eye as I cruised by slowly, and the tiny motion of his head indicated, “Out of here!” I was only too glad to comply.

  I still had to inch past the Public Works guys, though. Stewart was obviously very interested in what was going on in front of Bridget’s, but he still waved the backhoes and crane operators into line, between peeks over his shoulder at the media circus.

  Doug, however, stood at the edge of the construction, staring at the milling crowd around the crime scene. His face was unguarded, and his expression caught my attention. His mouth was open, his forehead furrowed. The look in his eyes was a compound of anguish and uncertainty.

  That look stayed with me all the way down the street. I found a parking place out of the two-hour limit, since I still had to conduct my writing workshop at the Senior Center. I ate a package of peanut-butter crackers from Babe’s emergency kit.

  It was the last package. Time to restock the kit with the perishable items such as chocolate bars and crackers, perishable because I raid them shamelessly.

  And I tried to dismiss that image of the big, shambling man, his distress written all over the face he couldn’t mask as normal people do. Certainly he wouldn’t lack the strength to heave up that chunk of concrete and bash in Richard Grolen’s head.

  I just couldn’t figure out any reason for him to do it.

  Chapter 18

  “And that was when,” Carlotta Houseman read in a voice quavering with emotion, “I realized that my beloved home would henceforth be occupied by strangers. That I would go to my grave withou
t ever again tending the beloved camellias planted so many years ago by my dear, departed husband.”

  She sniffed and laid down the pages of her manuscript. Around the table, we waited a moment, giving her time to dab at her watery eyes and, at least on my part, making sure she was done.

  “Well,” Janet Aronson trumpeted before anyone else could speak. “I don’t think much of your choice of subject matter, Carlotta.”

  I frowned at Janet. This is not the kind of critique we usually indulge in during the writing seminar I conduct for seniors at the Palo Alto Senior Center two days a week. We are supportive of each others’ writing, especially when, as in Carlotta’s case, it was autobiographical, with no commercial application in mind.

  But several other members of the class were nodding their heads in agreement. “It was tacky, to say the least,” Helen Petrie said, sitting back in her chair once she’d delivered that uncharacteristically strong statement. “And didn’t you tell us before that you couldn’t wait to cash in your house and move to the Forum? I’m sure you did.”

  “What’s the point in bringing all that up again?” Emily Pierce glared at Carlotta. “We’re not interested in your fake emotions. Dragging in poor Vivien’s death, and Eunice’s, too, and implicating Liz—”

  Freda Vaughn, another veteran of the class, was filling in a couple of the new members in a penetrating whisper. “Shocking murder … poor Vivien … Liz inherited …”

  “Ladies. Let’s not get personal.” I tried to take control of the situation. “Carlotta is at liberty to choose her subject matter, as you all are. Let’s try responding to the merits of the piece. Pretend it’s fiction for a minute.”

  “It might as well be, with so little relationship to the truth.” Janet was not to be quenched. She turned to Carlotta, who sat, plump and defensive, at the end of the long conference table opposite me. We were a larger group this fall, which had made me happy. I am paid a small but welcome sum to run the class, and the fewer members there are, the more I worry that it will be canceled. Along with the five returnees—perhaps Carlotta would call them survivors—I had five new members, and had been feeling pretty good about the class for the first few sessions.