One Last Look

by Linda Lael Miller

  “There wasn’t a scratch on that car when Loretta loaned it to me,” I lamented. “Do you think it will be safe in that neighborhood? Until a towing company can pick it up and get it to a shop, I mean?”

  “I don’t give a damn about the freaking Lexus,” Sonterra said. “You could have been killed!”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” I said reasonably.

  Sonterra swore.

  “I’m hungry,” I announced.

  “You just had a Blizzard,” Sonterra pointed out.

  “Melted,” I told him.

  We stopped at a chain restaurant for fish tacos and pancakes with extra syrup, both of which were mine. Sonterra didn’t have an appetite, and he kept glowering at my food and shaking his head.

  “I think I have morning sickness,” he said, as we left.

  “It’s afternoon,” I reminded him.

  He checked his watch. “Holy crap,” he muttered. “We’re supposed to be in Father Morales’s rectory in twenty-five minutes.”

  “We could reschedule,” I suggested lightly.

  Sonterra gave me a scorching glance. “As if,” he said.

  We pulled up in front of St. Swithin’s Catholic Church half an hour later.

  By that time, the Blizzard, fish tacos, and pancakes were at war in my stomach. My knees were still wobbly, I had a headache, and I kept reliving the moment when the Lexus came to a shuddering stop in the middle of a busy intersection. All in all, I did not feel much bridal anticipation.

  “I’m going to puke,” I told Sonterra.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “There’s the gutter.”

  What a romantic.

  A tiny priest came out of St. Swithin’s, smiling. I recognized him as Father Morales and guessed we’d been absolved of the sin of unpunctuality.

  Sonterra helped me out of the car and hustled me across the church’s rock lawn. A few sprouts of dog-christened grass poked up here and there, bravely trying to look green.

  “My fiancée,” Sonterra explained, virtually holding me upright, “has had a hard morning.”

  Father Morales looked sympathetic. About time somebody was. “Come inside,” he said, in a thick Spanish accent. “Sit down.”

  I made it as far as the back pew.

  The priest studied me, then glanced questioningly at Sonterra. “Perhaps we should do this another time?”

  Sonterra hipped me aside and sat down. Put a proprietary arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Tell the man we want to get married, Clare,” he said.

  “We want to get married,” I parroted.

  Father Morales frowned. “Usually there is more—enthusiasm?”

  I smiled blandly. If Sonterra wanted Stepford, he’d get Stepford. “We want to get married,” I repeated.

  Sonterra elbowed me. “Cut it out,” he said.

  “I’m under stress,” I whispered back.

  “Did you say you are under duress?” Father Morales asked.

  I had to go home with Sonterra, so I decided enough was enough. “No,” I said. “I’m here of my own free will.” A bit of a stretch, but it was time to throw SuperCop a bone.

  “You have a marriage license?” the priest inquired.

  Sonterra whipped out a copy. Sure enough, he’d done all the legwork. Nothing lacking but my signature.

  “I usually like to do premarital counseling,” Father Morales imparted, after scanning the paperwork. He cleared his throat diplomatically. “But since Chief Sonterra says you are in a delicate condition—”

  This time, I was the one doing the elbowing. I gave Sonterra a good jab. “Yes,” I said. “I’m—pregnant.” I’d wanted to say knocked up, bun-in-the—

  oven, or something even cruder, just to spite Sonterra, but, like I said, I had to go home with the man.

  “You are Catholic?” Father Morales wanted to know. Seemed like a reasonable question to me.

  “Yes,” Sonterra said.

  “No,” I replied.

  Father Morales crossed himself.

  Sonterra tossed a statement into the ensuing silence. “Your secretary said the church is free Saturday afternoon.”

  “Yes,” Father Morales said. “There will be guests, flowers, decorations?”

  “Yes,” Sonterra said.

  “No,” I answered.

  Father Morales crossed himself again. Sighed. “Very well,” he said. “Two o’clock, Saturday afternoon.”

  “What if Loretta can’t get here by then?” I demanded of Sonterra, a few minutes later, as we left the church.

  “She’ll get here,” Sonterra said, opening the SUV door and practically shoving me inside.

  “What makes you so sure?” I asked suspiciously, when he got in and turned the key.

  “I called her. She’s flying in as soon as she can get away.”

  “I don’t even have a dress.”

  “Good thing,” Sonterra said. “The way you’re eating, you wouldn’t fit into anything bought more than a week ago.”

  “That was uncalled for.”

  Sonterra didn’t answer. The back tires grabbed a little as we lurched away from the curb.

  Maybe it was the pressure. Maybe it was feeling as though I was being railroaded into getting married. “Are you saying I’m fat?”

  He muttered something in Spanish. English was not Sonterra’s second language.

  “I didn’t catch that,” I pressed.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. He didn’t say what, but I could guess.

  “You think I’m fat,” I accused, folding my arms.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Sonterra prayed. At least, it had better have been a prayer.

  Not another word passed between us until we got home. He left me in Esperanza’s flustered, fluttery care and went back to work. I hated that he got to be the one to make a grand exit. I was the woman. I was the one who had survived an attack on my life, and I was the one quivering with prenatal hormones run amok. The way I saw it, it was my prerogative to stomp off.

  Trouble was, I had nowhere to go and no way to get there.

  “I make tea,” Esperanza said somewhat desperately.

  I stretched out on the sofa. “Is there any ice cream left?” I asked.

  At six o’clock that night, I was ringing Danielle Bickerhelm’s doorbell. I didn’t have the latest Oprah pick. What I did have was an attitude, and my niece hovering at my elbow. Evidently, she and Sonterra had some kind of keep-an-eye-on-Clare pact going.

  Danielle admitted us, coolly elegant in what looked like a pair of Chinese pajamas. I introduced Emma. Danielle dismissed her after a once-over and “Glad to meet you, Emily.”

  “There are folding chairs in the dining room,” our hostess called chattily, over one shoulder, long-legging it for what I presumed to be the kitchen. I was having trouble squaring this Danielle with the very bad girl boinking the mystery boyfriend in Micki’s trailer.

  The living room was small, and every chair was full. Chattering women everywhere, and the topic of conversation was Judy Holliday’s grisly death. I gathered that there would be no funeral, just a memorial service in the high school gym on Friday night. A basketball game had been preempted for the occasion.

  “We could leave now,” Emma whispered. “Make a run for it.”

  “You’re welcome to hit the road if you want to,” I replied sotto voce. “I’m staying.”

  Emma sighed and turned toward the dining room, ostensibly to fetch a couple of folding chairs. Somehow, over all that womanly hubbub, I heard her gasp.

  “Check this out,” she said under her breath.

  I followed her gaze and on the first pass, my brain didn’t register what I was seeing. I did a double take. Sure enough, two skeletons sat at the antique table, one wearing a picture hat and pearls, the other, a bowler and an ascot. A china tea set sat between them, translucent in the lamplight. The pair was life-sized and brown with age.

  “Probably plastic,” I murmured.

  “Weird,” Emma said. “It’s not ev
en Halloween.”

  No disputing either assessment. I took a step toward the tea drinkers. Stopped. Something about those two raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “I wouldn’t touch them if I were you,” interjected a third voice, and I started. Turned to see a middle-aged woman in a green double-knit pantsuit. Madge Rathburn, the deputy’s wife. I’d met her very briefly at the picnic after Sonterra’s swearing-in.

  Madge smiled warmly. “Danielle calls them Uncle Fred and Aunt Doris,” she imparted, as Emma made a belated show of claiming two folding chairs from the stack next to the china cabinet. “That’s a small town for you. Full of eccentrics.”

  I dug up a smile, but it didn’t feel stable enough to hold. The more I learned about Danielle Bickerhelm, the less I understood her. Which only made me more determined to find out what made her tick.

  Madge nodded. She seemed friendly, but she was watchful, too. I figured she was as curious about me as I was about Danielle, and I also wondered if she’d expected her husband to be promoted to chief, instead of Sonterra, an outsider from the big city. “I see you didn’t bring a book,” she said.

  It took me a moment to catch up. “A book?”

  Madge smiled again. More gums than teeth, and they were that strange, purplish color. The gums, I mean. “This is a reading group,” she said pleasantly, and held up an oversized paperback. “I wouldn’t blame you if you opted for the Cliff Notes on this one. It’s pretty dismal.”

  I nodded, and as Emma carried the two still-folded chairs past Madge, I followed. Not without a look back at those skeletons, though. Uncle Fred and Aunt Doris. I stifled a case of heebie-jeebies.

  Emma found space in the living room and set up the chairs. Backs to the wall, clear view of the door. Was she afraid somebody would try to sneak up on us?

  “The Hollidays were devastated, of course,” a woman in a homemade dress was saying to the general assembly, as we sat down. “As soon as the coroner releases the body, they’re having it flown back home for a proper Christian burial.” The speaker had long, mousy brown hair, no makeup, and no jewelry, except for a plain gold wedding band sinking into the appropriate finger. I tried to place her, from the swearing-in or the picnic afterward, and couldn’t. She might have been there, but she was the sort who fades into the landscape. Odds on, she belonged to one of those repressive churches and had an IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE EMPTY sticker somewhere on her car, the assumption being that I, along with the rest of the unrighteous hordes, would still be around to get the message.

  Danielle swirled in from the kitchen, by way of the dining room, carrying a big platter of cookies in both hands. “Has everyone met Clare and her niece, Emily?” she chimed. I recalled her strange fascination with the painting at her shop, and tried to square it with the skeletons in the dining room, not to mention the trailer-park rendezvous.

  There is no figuring some people out. Not without a lot of snooping and a few trick questions, that is.

  “Emma,” my niece said.

  My interest had snagged on the cookies. I scored a macaroon when Danielle set the platter on the coffee table. Good thing I was quick. The whole group dived, like sharks in frenzy, for the refreshments.

  “Hello, Clare,” everyone sang out at once, some with their mouths full. It sounded like the opening of an AA meeting. “Hi, Emily!”

  “Emma,” said Emily. “My name is Emma.”

  Things went steadily downhill from there.

  “Of course it is, Emily,” Danielle said, taking the seat of honor with a flourish.

  “Go,” I told Emma, out of the corner of my mouth. “I know you and Sonterra synchronized your watches, but I’ll be perfectly safe here.”

  She leaned in my direction. “Yes,” she muttered back, “but will the macaroons?”

  “I resent that remark,” I said, helping myself to another cookie. If Emma was going to join Sonterra in the Fat Clare chorus, there would be trouble in paradise.

  Emma favored me with an evil grin. “Well, I do have homework,” she said.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” I replied sweetly, as Danielle clapped her hands to call the book club meeting to order.

  Emma got up, made her excuses, and hit the door.

  “Good night, Emily!” I called after her.

  Danielle leveled a look in my direction. She regretted inviting me, I could see that. I consoled myself with another macaroon.

  “About Threshings,” she said pointedly, still glaring at me even as she picked up her own copy of the book from the end table beside her chair and waggled it for all to see. There were dozens of those little colored tabs attached to the pages, and lots of passages were probably highlighted, too. Maybe there were even little anal notes scrawled in the margins. “Who’s read it?”

  “I thought it was a load,” Ms. Proper Christian Burial confided to those of us near enough to hear. Mentally, I ripped the rapture sticker off the back of her car.

  As soon as Danielle’s attention shifted, I scanned the room, looking for pictures of Bobby Ray Lombard in the flower of youth. Or even of a younger Danielle—I might be able to place her from a candid shot. I put checking the bookshelves and the china cabinet on my mental to-do list, along with getting married, avoiding a fiery vehicular demise, and searching the cemetery for the names “Fred” and “Doris.” I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were a couple of bodies missing. Not that I’d know, without digging up the graves.

  Danielle’s voice intruded on my dark ruminations. “What did you think, Clare?” she trilled. There’s a reason that word rhymes with “drilled.”

  I blinked and reentered my body with a bone-jarring slam. “About what?”

  “Threshings, of course.” Her smile was thin, her gray eyes flat as dusty mirrors.

  “Didn’t read it,” I confessed. I don’t know what possessed me to say what I said next—it just popped right out of my mouth. “I’ve been a very bad girl.”

  Danielle’s slate eyes flickered, and her cheeks seemed to recede a fraction of an inch behind a dusting of expensive blush. Clearly, the reference carried her back to last night’s assignation in the bedroom of Micki’s trailer. Then she must have decided there was no way I could know about her sexual adventures—God knows, ignorance would have been bliss in this case—because her makeup and her face reconnected. “Well, you are a new member, of course,” she said generously. “You didn’t really have time to give Threshings the attention it deserves. It’s a literary masterpiece, you know.”

  She seemed to be implying that I moved my lips when I read, but that might have been my imagination, so I let it pass.

  “Can we read a romance novel next time?” someone asked hopefully.

  Danielle looked as though she’d like to leap to her feet, catch the offender by her hair, and fling her down the front steps.

  Murmurs of agreement from the gathering only made matters worse, at least from Danielle’s viewpoint. Her blush stood on its own again, and her mouth tightened.

  “That would be fun,” I said moderately, when some of the chatter died down. “We could meet at my house.”

  If the prospect of a juicy love story hadn’t swayed everyone, the opportunity to poke a nose into our medicine cabinet and size up our furniture seemed to. A date was quickly set and a title agreed upon.

  I smiled to myself as I took my DayTimer out of my bag and recorded the pertinent details. I could feel Danielle’s annoyance from across the room, and, all right, I enjoyed it.

  The evening dragged on, the macaroons were wiped out, and I was the last to leave. I made several snoop-forays during the party, on the pretext of using the bathroom, and came up with next to nothing. There were no family pictures on the walls or any of the many surfaces, all of which were antique, but I did notice that the bookshelves were jammed with volumes on reincarnation, true crime, and a smattering of what appeared to be lesbian poetry.

  Eclectic tastes, I thought. You can tell a lot about the inner work
ings of a person’s psyche by what he or she reads. It’s a virtual map of the unconscious, but decoding it can be a real bitch.

  By the time I made the last run, the other guests were gone, and Danielle was waiting for me in the dining room, arms folded, skeletons partying ludicrously in the background. I’d never seen anyone seethe and smile at the same time, but Danielle managed it.

  I thought she was onto me, so I was relieved when she didn’t confront me right off. I’ve got no problems with confrontation, believe me, but it was too soon. I still had a lot of mental sorting and sifting to do before I got down to cases.

  “I honestly can’t imagine what you were thinking of, encouraging the group to spend a whole month of reading time on one of those silly little books,” she said. “I’m disappointed in you, Clare. You’re an educated woman, and I didn’t expect this.”

  I smiled warmly, tarrying near the front door. My gaze went straight to the skeletons, and I had the fanciful thought that I might end up as the third member of the tea party if I didn’t watch out.

  I decided it wouldn’t hurt to stir the waters a little and see what came up out of the silt.

  “Have you heard from your brother lately?” I asked. Restraint is not one of my dominant qualities.

  Danielle stiffened, watched me narrowly. “Bobby Ray had nothing to do with Dr. Holliday’s tragic death, if that’s what you’re hinting at,” she said.

  “I’m not hinting at anything,” I replied. It took more than an anorexic, skeleton-collecting book snob to scare me. Which did lend a certain credence to the idea that I might be a slow reader. “I joined the Pima County Prosecutor’s Office today. The forensics reports on the crime scene ought to be in tomorrow, and if Bobby Ray left so much as a skin cell in Judy Holliday’s house, I’ll have him. You can bet your Victorian cradle on that.”

  For a moment, I thought she was going to lunge for my throat. Or throw her well-thumbed copy of Threshings at my head. “Micki’s behind all of this,” she said bitterly. “It’s some elaborate, codependent scheme! I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d killed Dr. Holliday herself, then gone underground, just so Bobby Ray would be blamed. She’s that vindictive, the little slut!”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes, but barely. “That’s quite a stretch, Danielle,” I replied. “No doubt Micki cleverly orchestrated her own battering, too. Goaded poor Bobby Ray into using his fists on her, so everybody would think he was a thug.”