I groaned. “Why do I feel as if I know where this is going?”
Marla put her hand on her chest. “You haven’t heard it all. Courtney was designing a big new house for the two of them in Flicker Ridge. She even promised to get new boobs for him.”
“Marla, don’t.”
Marla sipped her drink and rattled the ice cubes. “This is to let you know her motivation. She was so in love with him, not only was she ready to have surgery, but as we know, she also loaned him that hundred thousand bucks after they hooked up. She also rented him the Tudor house, ostensibly so that you wouldn’t scream about him living with another woman when Arch came to visit. Really, of course…”
I said, “Yes, yes, she was naive.”
“Courtney had given him a lot of money, which probably meant he saw her as getting controlling.” Marla paused and raised her eyebrows. “And by the way, the Jerk said, he couldn’t actually marry her anytime soon. Are we not surprised at this, either?”
“He wanted his freedom. He wanted to examine his options,” I said dully. “See if he could trade up, so to speak.”
“So to speak. Depends on how you look at a stripper who’s ten years younger than Courtney.” She did a little dance around the kitchen. “Okay. Remember the Mountain Journal of…of…Friday, the sixth of May?”
I slid in a dirty dish and paused. “Was that the one with the picture of John Richard sponsoring the golf tournament? Twenty-five thou to charity and you’re suddenly back in the bosom of society?”
“Oh, darling, don’t talk about the bosom of society, talk about Courtney and her upcoming boobs and her money, and Cecelia’s column from that same issue, which precipitated the breakup. Do you not remember it? What local tennis-playing merry widow is living with an ex-con? Could that be where the ex-con, an infamous local doctor, is getting the wherewithal to squeeze back into everyone’s good graces and have them forget about the past? Are we as willing to forgive and forget a crime against a woman? Courtney drenched herself in champagne cocktails and sobbed to me all about this at the club last night. She blames you and Cecelia for what happened to them. Although she ought to blame the Jerk, as usual,” she muttered.
“I saw the column,” I admitted. “I take it the Jerk objected to being gossiped about?”
“Courtney had been staying at the Tudor house, and only left when you brought Arch over. But the Jerk kicked her out the morning after the column was published,” Marla said. “He said between dealing with you and the Arch-visitation issue, and facing negative publicity, they were through.”
“Whoops.” I wanted to feel sorry for Courtney, but couldn’t. She had certainly proved to me that she was a bitch.
“Okay.” Marla put down her iced tea and poured herself a cup of coffee from our drip machine on the counter. “What the Jerk said to Courtney was that they were officially broken up. Over. Kaput.” Marla gestured with the coffee and slopped half of it onto the counter. “After the breakup, Courtney sobbed how over John Richard had said it should be. She should not call. Not write. No e-mail! And Courtney cried, oh, God, she cried.” Marla blinked and drank a bit more coffee. “She demanded her hundred K back, but not that day. And guess what happened when Courtney went to her lawyer to get her money back?”
I said, “I can’t imagine.”
“The Jerk told his lawyer Courtney’s cash wasn’t a loan, it was a gift.”
“Pretty big gift.”
Marla smirked. “No kidding.” My friend’s tone turned serious. “Goldy, do you think Courtney could have shot him?”
I stopped loading the dishwasher and shook my head. “I don’t know. When she came in here, she was furious. You have to suspect anyone with a temper like that.” I remembered one of the places John Richard had been shot: the genitals. “I know Courtney’s alibi is about as solid as carbon dioxide. In and out of a crowded bake sale five minutes away? But if she were ever caught, the negative publicity from Cecelia Brisbane would be nothing compared to being convicted of homicide.”
“Let me ask you this, then.” Marla picked up her purse. “Do you think Courtney would hire someone to kill the Jerk?”
“She’s got the money, certainly.”
“Yeah. And the motive.”
Something in Marla’s tone made my skin turn to gooseflesh. “Why? Do you know something? What have you heard?”
Marla chewed the inside of her cheek. “I haven’t heard a word. But I did see something unusual when I arrived this morning. I walked around to the club service entrance, because I thought we could visit before the breakfast. You weren’t there, but guess who was? That food inspector you hate so much—”
“Roger Mannis?” I interrupted, stunned. “A guy who looks like a weasel with an ax for a chin?”
“The same. And sitting in the passenger seat of the van, handing him an envelope, was Courtney MacEwan.”
Marla said she hadn’t seen anything else. She hugged me and took off, while I fought the knot in my stomach.
After checking that the committee meeting was finally on track, I asked Boyd back into the kitchen. I shared what I’d heard from Marla, and my questions. How much had Courtney resented me for supposedly breaking up her affair with John Richard? Could Mannis have been the one who’d attacked me outside the Roundhouse? He would certainly know about sabotage, or he could have tutored Courtney in what to do. And then perhaps Roger, or Courtney, had driven over to John Richard’s house and shot him.
“Could be,” Boyd mused. “You always have to be open to theories.”
“Do you think I should say anything to Reilly and Blackridge? They’ve been really hostile to me.”
“Let me do it.” Boyd nodded decisively. “They know I’m here guarding you, and I can say one of the women saw Ms. MacEwan give Mannis an envelope. Then it’ll be up to them. You probably don’t want them knowing you’ve got this information, anyway.”
Plus, I thought, I sure didn’t want Courtney MacEwan to know I had even more reason to suspect her. That woman was dangerous.
An hour later, the committeewomen began to wrap up their meeting. Boyd and I were in the last stages of cleaning up from the breakfast. Priscilla Throckbottom did not give me an extra gratuity for Boyd, despite his hard work. I would do it myself, I resolved, when he departed from the Roundhouse this afternoon. And he was going to be there, he’d insisted. He’d informed me he was sticking with me until Julian and Liz arrived to help with the picnic. Ordinarily I would have bristled at being chaperoned, but I really did not want to go back into the Roundhouse alone, thank you very much.
At the end of the meeting, two things surprised me. First of all, the women actually did agree to do something. Lot purchases of trees were to be had at half price at Aspen Meadow Nursery, this week only. With their many donations and the success of the bake sale, PosteriTREE was buying sixteen dozen blue spruce, twenty dozen aspen trees, and fifty dozen lodgepole pines. They were going to organize volunteers to plant them in the burned areas of the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. Since the canyon fire had just jumped over to the preserve, the women thought a replanting scheme would be a worthy goal. I didn’t know what volunteers would be willing to work for these women, but no one was asking me.
Tipping the emotional scales over to misery was the second surprise: the sight of Ginger Vikarios sobbing in her battered Taurus. The meeting had not yet ended when I’d finished cleaning and slipped out the service entrance with the trash. The food inspector’s van was gone, of course, but I did spot a desolate Ginger when I rounded the corner to the club’s Dumpster. Her flyaway orange hair was bent over the steering wheel; her body heaved with sobs. I tossed the trash into the Dumpster and headed in her direction to see what was wrong, to comfort her, something. But she heard my footsteps on the gravel and glanced up. Startled and gasping, she turned the key, pushed the old car into gear, and took off.
When Boyd and I finally finished, we were dismayed to see that two Cadillacs had been carelessly parked in such a way
as to block the service lot exit. Cursing under my breath, I climbed into my van and revved the engine. With Boyd guiding me, I did a sixteen-point turn to get around the Caddies. Chuckling, Boyd hoisted himself into the passenger seat and we took off. As we drove up toward the tennis courts, we both saw Courtney MacEwan racing toward us. Oh, hell, I thought. Not again.
Courtney was wearing a skimpy white tennis dress that showed off her muscled arms and long legs. But she also had those strong arms raised, and each of her hands clutched her signature pink tennis balls. She did not look happy.
“You bitch!” she screamed at me. “You wrecked my life!” Before she could go on, she caught a glimpse of Boyd and clamped her mouth shut.
I gunned the engine to get up onto the club’s main road. As we whizzed past Courtney, she gave me a hostile stare. I pressed the accelerator to go even faster. “That woman is a piece of work,” Boyd commented, his voice amused.
Boyd reminded me not to speed, so I carefully slowed the van to make the turnoff to the lake. I needed to check on the tent setup, use my new keys to get through the Roundhouse’s reinforced kitchen door, and generally make sure that everything was proceeding well for the next event. I certainly hoped Courtney MacEwan had not been invited to Nan Watkins’s picnic.
After the mess at the club, the Roundhouse was a positively serene spot. The tent was up. Boyd gently took my new keys, opened the Roundhouse, and thoroughly checked the premises. He declared them clear.
We had just begun to haul out the boxes for the picnic event when my eyes caught on a sheriff’s-department tow truck on the far side of the lake. It was the exact spot where I’d seen Trudy’s son, Eddie, fishing with his pals earlier in the day. My heart turned over.
I remembered when Arch was nine and had come to the lake to fish by himself, because John Richard would never take him. I hadn’t found him for hours and was sure he had drowned. I shook my head and walked even faster up the path to the kitchen door.
“Mr…. Sergeant…” I couldn’t get the words out.
“What is it, Goldy?” Boyd asked calmly. He stopped unloading his box and came over to me. “Talk slowly.” He nodded encouragingly. “Tell me.”
“Lake,” I said. “Here. Come!”
He accompanied me outside, and I pointed to the truck, which was now flashing its lights and backing up to the bank. With the truck reversing, I could now see two sheriff’s-department vehicles and a state trooper’s gray sedan near it.
“Oh, God!” I wailed.
“Goldy,” Boyd said calmly. “Tell me what you think it is.”
“Eddie!” I gasped. “Eddie from next door. Please. Call and find out.”
Boyd told me to stay where I was, then unhooked his radio and walked ten paces away from me. His radio crackled as he talked into it.
I thought I was going to be ill. I was suddenly excruciatingly worried about Arch. About Eddie. About everything. I told Boyd I was going over to where the sheriff’s-department cars were parked and see if Eddie was okay. Boyd relocked the Roundhouse and hustled along behind me. I pressed the buttons for Tom’s cell phone and resumed trotting toward the far side of the lake.
Tom, happy to hear from me, said Arch had had one shaky period on the way to the giant pool. Tom had taken an exit off the interstate and found a church where he knew the pastor. The pastor had listened to and comforted Arch while Todd and Julian had waited patiently. The three boys had spent the morning riding man-made tsunamis in the wave pool. After that, they’d had banana splits, and then it had begun to rain, hard. Denver’s weather could be entirely different from ours, no question. Anyway, Arch and Todd had decided to go back to the Druckmans’, and Julian was on his way to the Roundhouse. I asked Tom if Arch had mentioned the non-golf lessons with John Richard.
“That’s a negative, Miss G. My guess is that his guilt will catch up with him, and he’ll offer the info to you. He…had a bit of a paranoia attack, too. He thought we were being followed. He said he thought somebody had followed him to the rink in Lakewood on Tuesday, too.”
“Who could have been following him?” I glanced back at Boyd, who was talking into his radio.
“I don’t know, but I made damn sure I watched for somebody once we got back on the interstate. There wasn’t anyone.”
“Tom, have you heard about a drowning at Aspen Meadow Lake?” I blurted out.
“No, I haven’t. You want me to call in and find out? Is that where you are?”
“Yeah. Boyd’s on the radio. I’m walking toward the recovery operation. Eddie from next door was going fishing today, and I’m so scared I’m sick.”
“I understand. Boyd still checking?” Tom asked.
I glanced back and said he was. Talking, talking, talking. What was going on?
Tom said, “Tell me about your breakfast.” I told him that Courtney MacEwan might be up to something with Roger Mannis. Tom chuckled. “Girls will be girls.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Boyd clicked off his radio and called for me to slow down. Meanwhile, two cops were lowering the truck’s winch into the lake.
“I’ll call you back, Tom.”
“I’m on my way over there right now.”
“Thanks.”
“Eddie’s okay,” Boyd reassured me. “So are his friends.” Relief washed over me. “They did find something over there, though.”
The winch beeped and cranked. It was hauling a heavy load out of the water.
“It’s a woman,” Boyd told me grimly.
We were less than twenty yards from the sheriff’s-department cars. A state patrolman signaled us to stay put. Meanwhile, the tow-truck engine growled as its tires bit into the dirt.
At the end of the winch, a car’s grill glittered in the sunlight. I blinked in surprise. I knew that old station wagon. Water gushed out of the sides as more of it surfaced.
And then I saw her, her face pressed to the window. Even in death, I knew those thick glasses, that shovel-shaped face.
It was Cecelia Brisbane.
16
Sirens wailed in the distance. On the far side of the tow truck, a small crowd had gathered behind orange cones I’d missed seeing before. The cops needed more cars, of course. The town gossip columnist would generate more gossip in death than she had in life.
Not long after more sheriff’s-department cars had pulled alongside the tow truck, Tom’s sedan swung onto the lakeside road. A more welcome sight, I could not imagine. I had checked that the tables were being set up inside the tent. But someone still needed to pick up the pork chops from our house. No matter what, I really, really wanted to see Tom.
As Boyd and I walked back to the Roundhouse, he asked me if I wanted him to stick around.
“Tom will want to guard you,” Boyd said with a grin. “You don’t need two cops to do that. Well, maybe you do.”
“You’ve been great. Please let me pay you for this morning’s work.”
“Forget it. That was pure entertainment.” He promised he’d wait for Julian and give him the keys to the Roundhouse. Tom saluted Boyd, who only smiled.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” I asked Tom once he was sitting beside me in my van. “Did anyone know Cecelia was missing? How did she end up inside her car at the bottom of the lake?”
“Take it easy, Goldy. I only know what I’ve heard since I talked to you.”
As he recited the facts, a sense of unreality crept over me. I had just seen Cecelia at the bake sale. Then I’d received a piece of mail from her. And now she was dead. I found this literally and figuratively hard to swallow.
About all law enforcement knew, Tom told me, was that Cecelia had been reported missing by her neighbor yesterday. Since Walter had committed suicide, this neighbor had vowed to check on Cecelia every single day, so she’d been sure, she told the sheriff’s department, that something was wrong.
What did I know about Cecelia’s history? Tom asked. Not much, I conceded, except that eve
ryone in town feared being skewered in one of her columns. Of course, she’d hired me to do those posthumous birthday parties every year. And she seemed to pine for her daughter to come home, although she never said anything concrete to me.
Cecelia’s neighbor, Tom said, was an elderly woman named Sherry Boone. Cecelia always told Sherry when she was going somewhere, as Sherry fed Cecelia’s guinea pigs in her absence. When Cecelia hadn’t answered her phone, Sherry had called the Mountain Journal, frantic. Not only was Cecelia not there, she hadn’t phoned the paper that morning, as she usually did, to tell them when she’d be bringing in this week’s column. Sherry Boone had finally convinced the sheriff’s department to send a patrol car out to the Brisbanes’ creek-side residence.
Nobody had been home. Cecelia’s car was gone. In front of the deputies, Sherry retrieved Cecelia’s spare key and went into the house. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no note—only three hungry guinea pigs, which Sherry Boone immediately took into custody.
“Didn’t anyone think Cecelia might have been so depressed she’d commit suicide?” I wondered aloud.
“Nobody knew her better than her own neighbor. And Mrs. Boone insisted Cecelia had been in a good mood on Tuesday afternoon.” Tom’s face was grim as he opened the passenger door to my van. “And then our guys got this call from Aspen Meadow Lake…” He got out of the van. “Anyway, they’ll know more when they hear from the M.E.”
I followed Tom’s sedan home. When he saw I was shivering, he insisted I have a hot shower. He announced that he was going to do the final prep for Nan Watkins’s picnic. When I protested, he reminded me that I always seemed to want to do an investigator’s job, so wasn’t it hypocritical to stop an investigator from doing my job? I smiled. Was he getting his old sense of humor back? Was the depression over that lost case finally lifting?
Double Shot Page 21
