by Harper Lin
Taking a furtive look around, I opened the bin, pulled out the garbage bag, and opened it.
Chapter 6
An hour later, I dropped Pearl off with her nurse, who greeted me with her usual patient smile. I’m afraid I didn’t smile back. I felt thoroughly confused.
The garbage bag had contained some burnt toast and a broken, uncooked egg. Gretchen, in her grief, had obviously made a mess of her breakfast. That explained why she had taken out a half-filled garbage bag. No one wants an egg rotting in their kitchen trash can.
The remainder of the trash included some junk mail, some paper towels that had been used to clean up the egg, and the remnants of our snack from the previous day’s meeting. There was a heap of squeezed lemon halves, used paper napkins, and some excess batter, and frosting.
In other words, nothing that pointed a finger at Gretchen or anyone else.
And yet, something niggled at the back of my mind, something that told me that garbage bag and its contents weren’t quite right. I couldn’t put my finger on it. The shock of the previous day’s events and the emotions brought up by my associating Lucien’s death with James’s kept me from thinking straight.
So I did what I always did to clear my head—I went to the firing range.
Yes, at seventy I was still going to the firing range. Nothing gets that old blood pumping better than squeezing off a few rounds. Of course, Cheerville didn’t have a firing range, but there was one off the highway a few miles outside of town, tucked behind a gun shop.
The gun shop’s giant billboard advertised “Guns, Guns & More Guns (and ammo too!)” beneath a huge .357 Magnum that poked out of the billboard to threaten the commuters. The billboard was a local landmark, and it had taken me a few months of going there before I discovered that “Guns, Guns & More Guns (and ammo too!)” was actually the shop’s name.
It certainly delivered. It had one of the most impressive stocks of firearms I’d seen outside of Pakistan. Everything legal could be purchased there, from the latest AR-15s to fine reproduction flintlock muskets. They had all the accessories, too, from camouflage outfits to telescopic sights. A big American flag hung over the door right beside a Colonial “Don’t Tread on Me” flag with an angry serpent warning anyone against taking the customers’ liberty.
I strolled in, carrying my 9mm automatic pistol in a locked carrying case as required by state law. I always followed the law unless I thought I or someone else was in danger, at which point the law became irrelevant and I did what needed to be done, like not telling the cops that Lucien had been murdered. While it might seem hypocritical to flout the law that I had sworn to uphold and protect, I was a former CIA operative, not a former Girl Scout leader. I didn’t live in the same world as most people.
That became blatantly obvious every time I walked through the door of Guns, Guns & More Guns (and ammo too!). The store was one big room the size of a supermarket, with racks of guns and aisles of other equipment. The shelving was all fairly low, and anyone coming through the door was in full view of the other customers.
All those customers immediately turned and stared at the gray-haired grandmother toting a gun case.
All of them were men, every single one of them.
I gave them my sweetest grandma smile and strolled over to the front counter, feeling their eyes on me. It happened every time I came here, and I had to admit I enjoyed it. It was the most male attention I ever got these days.
Karl Nordenson, the owner, smiled at me from behind the counter.
“Hey, Mrs. Gold! Here for some shooting?”
Karl had long since gotten used to me. His customers had not.
“Yes, please. And a fifty-round box of 9mm.”
“Coming right up.”
A few minutes later, I stood in the firing bay of Guns, Guns & More Guns (and ammo too!)’s outdoor firing range. There was another firing range in the basement, but the weather was so nice today that I wanted to be outside. The sun was shining, the birds were singing from the tops of the nearby trees, and it was a perfect day to put some holes in some targets.
I put on my ear protection (my hearing is one of the few senses I still have at a hundred percent), set my pistol on the shelf in front of the firing bay, and studied the man-sized target set at fifty meters. Heads poked out of nearby fire bays, looking at me with curious stares or ill-concealed smirks. Those smirks got wider when I put on my reading glasses.
In one of the inevitable thefts of old age, I had become a bit far-sighted in recent years, and now I couldn’t clearly see the sights on my pistol even when I held it at arm’s length. I thought I heard a snicker from one of the guys. Actually, it couldn’t have been a snicker if I heard it through the ear protection. It must have been a full-bellied guffaw.
I focused. Time to get rid of those smirks and make the guffawer guffaw from the other side of his guffaw hole.
In rapid succession, I placed all eight rounds in a tight cluster in the target’s chest.
Your average Sunday shooter would have trouble putting four out of eight rounds anywhere on the target at that range, let alone in the kill zone of the central chest. A trained soldier would be expected to make six out of eight rounds on the target, with at least one or two in the central chest.
I’d put all of them there.
Soon I had a whole crowd around me, all asking the same question: “How did you do that?”
“Ex-army,” I replied with a smug smile. That was close enough to the truth that it didn’t feel like a lie.
Surreptitiously, I rubbed my wrists. The recoil on even a light pistol like this one had begun to hurt in recent years. I wouldn’t even try to fire an M16 these days.
Ah, my dear departed husband just loved to see me toting one of those!
“There’s something about women with automatic weapons,” James always used to say with a sigh.
There was something else he always said too: “You’re still going to be kicking butt when you’re a grandmother.”
I intended to.
I was going to solve this murder and make his angel give me a thumbs-up.
And then it struck me. I knew what had been missing from the garbage bag.
The eighth piece of lemon cake.
No one ever ate the eighth piece. There were seven of us in the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society. Gretchen always sliced the cake into eight pieces. Helpful as usual, Lucien always cleared up the cups and plates. But it turned out the Good Samaritan had had another motive: clearing up the coffee table got him alone in the kitchen, where he could scarf the last piece of cake.
Did Gretchen know of this secret habit? Had she deliberately poisoned the spare piece, knowing that Lucien would eat it? She had cut the cake, and she’d doled out the pieces. With the cake conveniently written on, it would be easy enough to add the poison to a particular letter on the icing and leave that part as the leftover piece. It would sit there throughout the entire meeting like a time bomb, only to be set off when Lucien took it into the kitchen and ate it out of sight of the others.
It was perfect—she murdered him when she decorated the cake, but he only died when he was out of sight and she was still sitting in the living room acting all innocent.
I smiled to myself as I checked that my gun was out of bullets, put the safety back on, and placed it in its lockbox.
Okay, I had taken care of the who, so that left me with only two questions—how and why.
Wait, no, I still had the “who” question.
Because I had no proof that Gretchen was the one who had poisoned the icing, assuming it really was the icing that was poisoned. Someone else could have known of Lucien’s secret cake fetish, and someone else could have planned the murder. It was entirely possible that the poison had been placed on the spare piece after the other seven pieces had been handed out. The spare piece sat on the coffee table amid all of us—that was what had always annoyed me about it—and people reached across it to pass each other books or to get more
lemonade or another paper napkin.
It wouldn’t take much sleight of hand to place a few drops of poison on it. All of us wore reading glasses, even Lucien. At many points in the meeting, all of us would be looking at the book of the month. All those tired eyes took a moment to look up and focus on the distance. Even if one of us noticed a fellow reading group member reach across the table and looked up to see what he or she was doing, by the time our eyes focused, the poison could have been dropped on the cake, the container for the poison palmed or tucked into a sleeve, and the murderer could have continued reaching across for a napkin or more lemonade.
I thought back to the meeting. Had I seen anyone reach across the table after the cake had been served? I couldn’t recall, since my mind hadn’t known that would be a significant detail. Even if I could remember with crystal-clear accuracy, I was willing to bet that I would have seen all of the reading group reach across the table at one point or another. Nervous little Evon, for example, always fluttered about, helping people with their books. Pauline tended to overuse the napkins and reached for extras throughout the meeting. Pearl made grand gestures as she shouted her opinions. Charles often helped get things from the table for Pearl.
So I hadn’t proven anything. But I did know one thing I needed to do, and that was to get that garbage bag. If the poison was really in the icing and not dropped on afterward, that would be some pretty damning evidence against Gretchen. I had to get that garbage bag after it was placed on the curb in the evening and before the trash collectors picked it up in the wee hours of the morning. That should be easy enough for someone who had infiltrated Soviet military bases.
Of course, I had been half my present age and had had a well-trained team at my side, but grabbing somebody’s garbage was pretty simple stuff.
What was more difficult was to determine if it had been poisoned or not. I didn’t have the expertise to analyze the icing myself, and I couldn’t very well ask a chemical lab to do it for me. It was important, though, to secure the evidence before it disappeared into a landfill.
“Secure the evidence” instead of “take her garbage”? Oh dear, I really was getting back into the lifestyle, wasn’t I?
And I have to admit, it made me feel younger than I had in years.
But I couldn’t go on that little mission until well after dark. I didn’t know when Gretchen went to bed or if she would even be able to sleep that night, but I decided that if I went past around midnight, she certainly wouldn’t be up and about, and neither would anybody else. The streets of Cheerville got quiet pretty early.
It was only a little past noon, so I had plenty of time to do some more sleuthing. Returning home to stow my pistol and rest my aching wrists, I gave Charles a call.
“How are you doing?” I asked after he picked up.
“Oh, not so good, I’m afraid. Yesterday left me exhausted. There were all the forms to fill out and officials to talk to, and I stayed up late with Gretchen last night. It was a most trying day. In fact, I’m at home. Oscar is taking care of things at the funeral parlor.”
Oscar was his son, a quiet man whom I didn’t know well. He was set to inherit the family business, or at least what was left of it.
I found it interesting that Charles had stayed with Gretchen after the officials had all left. Until late into the night, no less. I remembered that reassuring hand stroking her back.
“So what did the county coroner say? Was it a heart attack like we suspected?” I asked.
“Oh, he hasn’t had time to see Lucien yet. He doesn’t work on Sundays, and Mondays are always busy for him. Plus, there was a traffic fatality on the highway late Saturday night, and he has to take blood samples to check if the man had been drinking. The fellow swerved into another vehicle and injured the occupants, and the insurance company wants to know if he had been drinking.”
“Oh. So when will he get to Lucien?”
There was a pause.
“I don’t know. Is there some sort of rush?”
I bit my lip. I’d pushed him too hard.
“No,” I said with a sigh. “I guess I just wanted some closure. It’s hard when it’s someone you know.”
Charles’s next words came out sympathetic. “Yes, yes it is, Barbara. It’s got me thinking about my poor Laura. Everybody thinks morticians get used to this sort of thing, but we don’t. Every customer who comes through my door tugs at my heart a little. Especially the young ones like that fellow who died on the highway. His family wants an open-casket funeral. The coroner let me take a look at him, and it’s going to be a heck of a job to make him presentable.”
“I see.”
“But to answer your question, I suppose the coroner will get to Lucien this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”
I made some quick calculations. The coroner would almost certainly notice the symptoms of poisoning. As far as I knew, those didn’t disappear when rigor mortis set in. He’d take a blood test, send it off to the lab, and probably tell the police before the results came in. That meant the police would start sniffing around tonight at the very earliest, or more likely, tomorrow or even the next day.
It was impossible to tell for certain. All I knew was that I had to get that evidence before it disappeared. If the police came and asked Gretchen some initial questions, she’d get scared and get rid of the garbage. Which meant I had to snatch it before they arrived.
Which meant I had to go in broad daylight when there were people out and about in the neighborhood.
I felt a little tingle of adrenaline at the thought that I’d have to take a risk. My my, I really was enjoying this a little too much, wasn’t I?
Better now than later. If I had to do it in the daytime, it should be before people got off work and school. I only had to hope that Gretchen still had her garage door open and her blinds down.
She did. I made a slow pass by her house and saw no sign of her. Her car was still in the garage, so unfortunately, that meant she was home. Luckily, the garage door remained open. It was that kind of neighborhood. Nobody expected a burglary, let alone a murder.
I parked my car a bit down the street and out of sight of the house and then strolled in plain view along the sidewalk, keeping an eye on Gretchen’s windows. If she looked out, I could simply walk up to her front door and ring the bell, saying I wanted to check in on her again. That looked suspicious but not damning.
I kept my eyes focused on those windows as I approached. None of the curtains twitched. Taking a deep breath, I casually walked into the garage, cutting across the neighbor’s lawn so my shoes didn’t crunch on the gravel driveway.
Now came the tricky part. I tiptoed to the door to the laundry room and pressed my ear against it. I couldn’t hear a thing. Gretchen was either sitting alone mourning her loss or checking on plane tickets. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t being noisy about it.
As quietly as I could, I opened the bin and pulled out the garbage bag. I had to bank on the chance that she wouldn’t open the bin again before she took it to the curb. The bag being so light compared to the bin, I doubted she would notice it had been removed as long as she didn’t look inside.
If she did notice the bag had been removed, she’d be alerted to the fact that someone was onto her, assuming she was the murderer. If she wasn’t the murderer, she’d only be thoroughly confused.
I peeked out the garage door. The blinds remained down, and no one was in sight on the sidewalk.
With as relaxed an air as I could muster, I cut across the neighbor’s lawn again and headed for the sidewalk, angling away from Gretchen’s house.
Just then, her neighbor opened his front door.
He was a younger man, in his early thirties, wearing a business suit and a preoccupied look. He made a beeline for the Lexus parked on the curb. He looked like a businessman who had come home to have lunch with his wife and now needed to hurry back to work.
He barely glanced at me even though I was on his lawn carrying a garbage bag.
&nb
sp; “Good day. Lovely weather we’re having!” I said in a chirpy voice.
“Hm,” he nodded, checking his watch. Was this what Martin would grow up to be?
He didn’t give me a second look as I got on the sidewalk and passed him. Nobody notices old people. I had always hated that. Now I saw that I had its advantages.
My hands shook with the best adrenaline rush I’d felt in years, and I nearly fumbled my keys as I got into the car.
I took a deep breath.
“Mission accomplished,” I reassured myself.
Just as I pulled away, I saw Gretchen’s curtain pull back and her face appear at the window.
She looked right at me.
Chapter 7
Frederick hurried out of the house as soon as I arrived, with that eager look that showed he had a prize client. After a quick thank-you, he was gone. He didn’t even notice the tension that must have been clearly visible on my face. Gretchen had seen me on her street. She knew that I had shown up but didn’t knock on her door. Should I call her and make some sort of excuse, like I had wanted to visit and decided not to at the last minute for fear that she was sleeping? That didn’t ring true, because if that were the case, why would I call at all?
No, I’d been caught good and proper. If she was the murderer, the first thing she’d do was to check that bin. She’d be coming for me.
I had to avoid her now and hope she wasn’t the murderer after all.
Shaking my head at my own ill fortune, I entered my son’s home. At least Gretchen didn’t know where Frederick and his family lived.
Martin was playing Call of Duty on the Xbox as usual, his feet, encased in dirty socks, propped up on the coffee table.
“Hi, Martin!” I said, sitting down beside him.
I got a grunt in return, almost drowned out by the sound of a bunker exploding. Just a big boom, and that’s it. No falling concrete or secondary explosions from the enemy’s ammunition or anything. They really needed to work on their sound effects.
