Granny Bares It All

by Harper Lin

  A man stepped forward without asking and gave his own testimony about Clarissa, which amounted to little more than platitudes about how nice she was and how much of an asset she had been to the community. That seemed to break the ice, and everyone remembered they were at a memorial service. A couple more people stepped forward after him and also gave anecdotes about Clarissa.

  None of those amounted to much. I got the impression that most people liked Clarissa, that she truly was a popular figure, although just beneath the surface, there was some sort of bubbling tension involving her. People knew that there was trouble in Eden, although most people did not know the full, naked truth.

  At last, a strapping young man brought forth a lit torch and set the pyre ablaze. The wood had been doused with lighter fluid, and the flames shot up. Within seconds, the pyre was steadily burning, the wood crackling and sending sparks high up into the night sky to mingle with the stars.

  Someone announced that the buffet was open, and everyone lined up to get some food.

  In front of me stood two middle-aged women with a small boy holding on to one of their hands.

  “I can’t believe he had the gall to name her as volunteer coordinator,” she whispered.

  “And she accepted!” the other replied.

  “What’s going on?” the boy asked.

  “Nothing,” his mother said. “Let’s get some pie.”

  The two women gave each other a significant look. Sadly, the child’s question had cut their conversation short.

  Lining up for food gave me a chance to study the photos. Clarissa really had done everything around Sunnydale. There were photos of her teaching a crafts class for children, one of her cleaning the pool with an expression of mock horror, an eye-popping one of her leading a yoga class, and several of her simply hanging out in various spots around the resort with other nudists.

  Those were significant. It was remarkable how many of those shots included Adrian. Virtually none of them included Zoe. The most telling shot was a row of sunbathers with their feet dipped in the lake. Adrian had his arm around Clarissa, who smiled awkwardly at the camera, while Zoe sat on the other side of Adrian, actually leaning slightly away from her husband.

  Well, well, well. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  I glanced at Zoe, who had regained her demeanor and was chatting amiably with a small circle of men and women. Could this happy-go-lucky woman really run someone down with a car? And if Adrian was the philandering type, why not run him down?

  I gathered my food and kept my eyes open and ears perked.

  The buffet was lovely. Nudists turned out to be great cooks. With my lack of culinary ability, I hoped I wouldn’t be invited to a potluck. I’m always the awkward one bringing a bag of chips or some supermarket muffins.

  I mingled with the crowd, hoping to hear some more juicy gossip, but I had run out of luck. Everyone was either saying kind nothings about the recently deceased or not speaking at all. In fact, quite a few people were silent.

  Once again, I was struck by how unusually normal all these people were. I’d been to more than my fair share of wakes and memorial services, both for people who had died in combat and for those who had died of old age. They were all more or less like this. The majority had only good things to say about the deceased, but always some of the tensions the person had created in life came to the surface once they had passed.

  I remembered one memorial service for a Marine killed in Iraq that ended up in a brawl. Apparently the Marine’s brother had been sleeping with another Marine’s wife. The deceased had had nothing to do with it and probably didn’t even know, but his dying had led to the fight because it brought the two other men into the same room. The stress of a combat loss had broken what reserve they had mustered, and soon they were in a no-holds-barred fistfight. Most unseemly. They both got demoted.

  I circulated for some more time but found out nothing more. I did notice that Angie had left early.

  I eventually left as well, coming away with more questions than answers.

  Unfortunately, that meant that I’d have to come back to this crazy place the next day.

  Ten

  When I got home, I found no sign of another attempted break-in, but shortly after I returned, there was a knock on the door.

  Gripping my 9mm automatic, I went to the door and looked through the peephole.

  A peephole has saved my life more times than I can count. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t have a peephole in their front door.

  This time, however, I didn’t see a potential intruder, only one of Cheerville’s finest. I opened the door a crack, keeping my gun out of sight. No point getting him jumpy.

  “Did Grimal order you to keep checking on my house?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, touching his hat like he was in a Western movie. “Until this whole thing is cleared up. That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. Just an hour ago, I noticed a pedestrian wearing a hooded sweatshirt, sweatpants, and running shoes jog by your house. I noted that he or she was unusually warmly dressed for such a warm evening and suspected they might be trying to hide their features. I circled around and spotted the jogger passing by your house again. I turned on my lights, and the suspect bolted.”

  “And got away.”

  The cop looked embarrassed, as well he should.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I rolled my eyes like I was my thirteen-year-old grandson.

  “We’ll keep a sharp lookout for them,” the police officer promised. “You’ll be protected.”

  I rolled my eyes again to express my feelings about the value of his “protection.”

  “Can you at least give me a description?”

  “Yellow sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, blue sneakers. No visible logos or writing. About five-eight or five-ten, medium build.”

  There was a pause.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I gave him the kind of stare I used to give raw recruits when they thought they knew more than I did.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to call Grimal and tell him that I don’t want police protection.”

  “But—”

  I raised a hand. The guy actually flinched.

  “You’re going to go off and do whatever it is you do in this town. Go save a cat from a tree. Go give someone a parking ticket. Go home. Whatever. But you and your colleagues are not going to patrol around my house.”

  “But—”

  “Call Grimal and tell him I said so.”

  I slammed the door in his face.

  It took him five minutes to leave, but leave he did.

  In the meantime, I checked all the windows and the back door and made sure my security was working all right. While I wanted my hooded friend to come back, I wanted to be prepared.

  So whoever it was had come an hour ago. I did the math. After I left Sunnydale, I had stopped in to see Pearl to ask if she needed anything. She kept me for about an hour and a half, complaining about her nurse, who was in the same room, and nattering on about the state of the world in general. It turned out that she didn’t need anything. I made a mental note to check with a call instead of a visit in the future. She had made me miss the murderer, or at least a prime suspect.

  I smiled, thinking I was still young at heart. The old me (meaning the young me) had always felt cheated when she missed some of the action. That hadn’t changed.

  So who could this be? The officer said the person was five-eight to five-ten with a medium build. That could be a lot of people. It ruled out Zoe, but it could be Adrian or Naomi or any one of a dozen people I’d met. It could be none of them. It would take a lot of chutzpah to show up at the memorial service of someone you had just killed, although the killer was cold-blooded enough to consider it just to allay suspicion. I was almost as stuck as I had been before. Too many suspects, not enough information.

  Which was why I’d told the cop
s to beat it.

  I wanted to face the killer myself. The police would only get in the way.

  After feeding Dandelion and making a pot of coffee, I turned off all the lights, opened the curtains facing the street half an inch, and settled down in a chair just behind them, expecting a long wait.

  It turned out I only needed to wait two hours.

  The street was silent when the hooded figure came. My neighborhood was a sleepy one, and few people walked around after dark, so the hooded jogger with the slow but steady pace going along the opposite side of the street stood out plain as day.

  The figure passed by my house, disappeared from view, and doubled back a minute later.

  I thought my mysterious visitor would come up to the front or back door and try to break in again, but instead, he or she hurried across the street and disappeared into the shade of a maple tree close to the house. No lights were on in the house, and the light from the nearest streetlamp left the space under the tree in deep shadow.

  The figure did not reappear. There was nowhere for them to go. Behind that shadowed area was only the house and a stretch of garden blocked off by a trellis. So they were still in there, hunched down in the shadow, waiting.

  So I waited too, somewhat confused. Was my visitor watching the house? Why? My lights were off, and no one else was on the street. Now was the perfect time to try to break in.

  Whoever it was didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Minutes stretched on. I sat perfectly still, my gun in one hand and my pepper spray in the other, sitting in my chair, staring at that blob of shadow on the opposite side of the street. After about twenty minutes of this, a car drove by, its headlights partially illuminating the area under the tree. In the couple of seconds of light, I could not make out my visitor. He or she could have been any one of a number of shadows and vague shapes.

  He or she? Yes, I had a vague hunch that it might be a woman. Women’s and men’s hips are made differently, and when women run, their feet tend to splay out more. It had been difficult to see when the person had been running in the half darkness, but I had gotten the impression that I was dealing with a woman.

  Another car passed, but still I could not spot the person watching the house. Had they slipped away somehow? I didn’t think so.

  Patience. If working in war zones teaches you anything, it’s patience. Sometimes you just have to hunker down and wait. Getting nervous or antsy and making a move before the time is right can get your head blown off.

  So I kept waiting.

  Minutes turned into half an hour, then an hour.

  Our mutual wait was approaching two hours when something unexpected happened.

  A second jogger came down the street. Like the first, this jogger wore a hooded sweatshirt, but the newcomer looked somewhat taller than the first. This second jogger came directly for my house.

  What was this, a murderer’s convention? I flicked the safety off my gun.

  The figure that had been hiding under the tree appeared again, moving quickly and silently at the newcomer, who didn’t notice.

  A loud beep sounded from down the street, and suddenly everything was illuminated by spinning red and blue lights.

  Both figures spun, saw the approaching police car, and bolted down the street.

  “Darn it!”

  I ran for the door. Well, “run” is a generous term, but I made for the door as quickly as I could. I could have killed Grimal. Just as things were getting interesting, he had to send one of his squad cars to mess everything up!

  By the time I flung open my front door, the whole scene had changed. My two visitors had bolted in opposite directions, both opting to cut between the houses to get to adjoining streets. The squad car had roared off around the corner to try to cut one of them off. I went after the other one, the taller, first visitor, who I could just now see diving into the shadows between the houses of two of my neighbors.

  This person was far quicker than me, so running them down was not an option. Instead I made an educated guess about which way they would go and tried to get in front of them.

  Assuming my visitor had scouted out my neighborhood, they’d know that beyond those two houses lay another residential street. Taking a right on that street would get them to a larger, busier street, the one from which the police car had come. Going left would bring them to a dead end and a small park—an open stretch of grass with a few young trees mostly used by dog walkers and joggers. Not much cover there, but the police would have to pursue on foot.

  That would be the smarter way to go. Of course, my visitor could always continue to the next street over but would be faced with the same choice. Continuing through the houses to the street after that would get them to a busy area with some shops and a lot more lights. Not a good choice.

  So I angled to the left, cutting between some houses farther down the street and closer to the little park. I figured my target would be moving slowly for a time, hiding in the shadows and checking every direction for signs of pursuit. With some luck, I’d be able to get ahead of them.

  My luck held, barely. I huffed down a dark space between two of my neighbors’ houses, nearly killing myself on a tricycle little Billy Dawson had left out in the yard, and came within sight of the next street. Soft footsteps close to my right told me where my target was.

  I crouched as much as my knees would allow and swung around the corner, leading with my gun.

  “Freeze!” I shouted.

  Eleven

  The next instant, I nearly fired. The hooded figure snaked a compact .38 automatic out of the pocket of their sweatshirt and nearly got it level before seeing my gun and stopping.

  Wow. Nearly beat me to the draw even though I got the drop on them. Whoever this was, they were good.

  “Drop the gun,” I ordered. “You won’t get yours up in time, and besides, mine’s bigger.”

  The figure’s head moved, and the streetlight illuminated the face.

  Liz. The Gulf War veteran from Sunnydale Nature Resort.

  She grinned. “Mine’s bigger than yours? You’re talking like a guy.”

  “No I’m not, because I’m actually talking about my gun.”

  Liz chuckled and dropped her gun on the grass. “I’m not the one you’re looking for.”

  I cocked my head. “No. No, you’re not.”

  She was too good. She would have thought of a better plan to kill Clarissa Monell than running her over in the middle of town, and she would have maneuvered the car better in the chase. And she certainly wouldn’t have made the rookie move of trying to break into my house with a paperclip.

  I motioned with my gun for her to back up and grabbed her piece from where it lay on the grass. The safety was on. Every soldier keeps their gun at the ready if they think they’re going to get into a combat situation. Liz obviously felt that threatening with the gun would be sufficient.

  “So what are you doing here?” I asked.

  The house we stood by was suddenly silhouetted by flashing red and blue lights. The patrol car moved slowly down my street. Cheerville’s brave public servants had let yet another suspect get away.

  A light came on upstairs.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered. I put a gun in either pocket.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “To explain to the Keystone Cops that they aren’t needed. They’re going to wake up the whole neighborhood at this rate, and I don’t like to be conspicuous. You walk ahead.”

  That last instruction was because I still didn’t fully trust her. I wasn’t sure what was going on. My gut told me she didn’t pose a danger, but that didn’t mean I had to run any unnecessary risks.

  I flagged down the squad car. It was the same officer I’d dismissed before. I explained that Liz was my friend and had been watching my house for me, that the real culprit had run off, and that he’d better run off himself and try to find them.

  As the squad car did a one-eighty, tires screeching, sirens wailing, thereby warning the murderer to h
ide, I made a call to Grimal. I’m happy to say I woke him up. Yes, I had his home number. The CIA is a handy ally when it comes to finding out that sort of thing. I told him what had happened. He sounded grumpy. Whether grumpy about being woken up or about the incompetence of his officer I couldn’t say.

  But I could guess.

  Once the police were out of our hair, we got down to business.

  I brought Liz home. Dandelion took one look at Liz and started clawing her leg.

  “She likes you. Usually she hides under the couch when strangers appear. Sit down and let’s talk.”

  She detached herself from my kitten and took a seat on my sofa. I sat on the opposite side of the room and covered her with my gun. While she was younger and healthier, there was no way she could make it across the room and disarm me before I plugged her.

  Somehow I didn’t think that would be necessary. Liz wasn’t a threat. Just what she was, I wasn’t sure.

  “All right,” I said. “Get talking.”

  “I went to the dentist the other day, and he was talking all about the hit and run. He was there, and he told me things that didn’t appear in the papers. From what the eyewitnesses told him, the car shot out of a parking space and deliberately hit her. He didn’t see it himself, but that’s what everyone was shouting about when he got to the scene. It was murder, not a hit and run.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked.

  “Because when that prettied-up version of events hit the papers, I knew the cops thought it was murder too and were investigating.”

  “If you can call it that,” I grumbled. “Go on.”

  “There’s been some tension at Sunnydale, and I wondered if someone there might have done it. Then you showed up. Someone with old bullet wounds joining the camp just after Clarissa got murdered? That couldn’t be a coincidence. What are you, ex-SWAT or something?”

  “Never mind me,” I said, dismissing the question with a gesture of my gun. “Tell me more about the tensions at Sunnydale.”