Her scrubbing fingers stilled as another possibility occurred to her. What if someone else was doing what she thought Evangeline had done? What if someone else killed Evangeline and was distributing clues that would make each of them look guilty? Could Geneva or Dawn or Ellie be that calculating, that diabolical? The Abbotts? It was almost impossible to believe any of them guilty of killing Evangeline in such a way, and harder to suspect them of being evil enough to frame someone else for the murder. Merely considering the possibility felt like a betrayal. But wait … whoever it was might not be trying to convict someone else for the crime, but only looking for a way to establish reasonable doubt if she ever came to trial. That was actually brilliant, Laurel conceded, if true. The conflicting thoughts bashed against each other and brought frustration. Without more evidence—proof—she couldn’t think her way through this puzzle. Ducking her head, she let the water sluice the shampoo from her head. Swirls of soap circled the drain.
She turned off the faucets and wrung her hair between her hands. Pushing aside the shower curtain, she found herself face to face with Dawn.
Twenty-Six
Dawn clutched the paper bag from the housekeeping cart between her hands. Steam from the shower spun her glossy hair into tight curls around her face and her white teeth indented her bottom lip. She looked fierce and determined.
Laurel recoiled, and one foot slipped. She reached out instinctively and grabbed a handful of shower curtain. It slowed her fall, but then the rod gave way and crashed onto her head. She went down in the bottom of the tub in a welter of fabric and metal rod. Her head banged against the tub’s side, and her knee whacked into the faucet. She lay stunned for a moment in a dark cocoon of shower curtain, knee aching viciously, before the fabric covering her head was ripped away.
Dawn stood over her, distress imprinted on her face. “Oh my God. I’m sorry, so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you like that. I wanted— here, let me help you out of there.” She finished scooping the shower curtain out of the tub and bent toward Laurel.
A knock sounded on the door. “You okay in there?” Geneva’s voice called. “I heard a great thump.”
Dawn grabbed Laurel under the armpits and helped her stand. Laurel shrank away from the contact and steadied herself with a hand on the tiled wall. “I fell in the tub,” she called to Geneva. “Come on in.” She didn’t want to acknowledge to herself that she was uncomfortable alone with Dawn, but she was glad to hear Geneva’s voice.
Dawn hurried out to open the door. Laurel carefully stepped out of the tub and wrapped a towel around herself. The rat poison box was half out of the paper bag, soaking up water from the bathmat. She lifted the bag between a thumb and forefinger, even though her precautions were ludicrous now that both she and Dawn had handled the bag and its contents. She placed the packet on the counter. Feeling shaky, she dried herself, wincing as pulled muscles and bruises made themselves felt, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and ponytailed her dripping hair. She returned to the bedroom with the bag to find that Dawn had let Geneva in and was feeding her a story about also having heard Laurel fall.
Laurel summoned a smile. “I’m a klutz,” she said by way of greeting.
Geneva studied her. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll live.” Her knee was already swelling, and her right shoulder and ribs felt bruised.
“Okay, then. I’m on my way down to see if Mr. Abbott can tell me how to go about purchasing the antique cradle that used to be in my room. Geonwoo and I haven’t bought a crib yet, and now I know why. This cradle was meant for Lila Marigold. I’ve always loved it. Hopefully he knows when and where they’re going to auction it. Can you believe I’ve never been to an auction in my life? I’ll ask Mrs. Abbott to bring you some ice. That knee looks nasty.” On that note, she left.
“I didn’t do it,” Dawn said in an impassioned voice, as if Geneva hadn’t interrupted them. Her arms were straight at her sides, fists clenched. “I didn’t. You have to believe me. I didn’t kill Evangeline or Mindy. The way you acted in the hall, I knew something had happened, and I remembered what you said about us not finding the clue that would implicate me yet. You were behaving so oddly, and you practically snatched that bag away from me … I had to know what you’d found. I had to.” She gestured toward the box. “I’ve never seen it before, never. I certainly didn’t buy it. I don’t know how to convince you, but I didn’t do it.” Her eyes were moist with unshed tears, but her voice was strong.
“I’m going to sit,” Laurel said, annoyed by how shaky her voice sounded. The fall had really rattled her. She hobbled to the bed and sat.
“I’m truly sorry,” Dawn said. “I didn’t think. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’ll be stiff tomorrow, I’m sure.” She eyed her friend. After a moment, she lifted the bag, pretty sure that what she needed to say was not going to be well-received. “Look, I have to give this to Sheriff Boone—”
Dawn took a hasty step forward. “You can’t! He’ll think—”
“—and tell him how I found it. It was rolled up in a towel in Mindy’s cart. I have no idea how it got there, if Mindy hid it or someone else, but I need to turn it over to the police.”
“Do you think I killed her? Killed Evangeline?”
It was the first time, as far as Laurel knew, that one of them had asked the question outright. Did she think Dawn had killed Evangeline—had snitched a glass with Geneva’s fingerprints from the dining room, slipped a dose of strychnine into an after-dinner drink, and offered it to Evangeline? She couldn’t picture it. “No, I don’t.”
“Then don’t do this!” Dawn burst out. “What good will it do? You know I didn’t kill her, so why put a target on my back by giving it to the police?”
“I have to.”
“They’ll arrest me.”
“I don’t think so. They’ll question you, sure, but they’ve got physical evidence against Geneva and they didn’t arrest her. Her fingerprints on the glass, remember? With any luck, you were somewhere else at the time this was purchased—at work, or with Kyra. You can prove you couldn’t have bought it.”
“Right,” Dawn said. “Like anyone can remember where they were at 5:08 on a Friday three weeks back.”
“The store might have cameras. If you—” Laurel stopped herself and rephrased. “You weren’t there, and you’ll be able to prove that somehow. It might be best if you come with me to turn this over to Boone.”
“I thought you were my friend,” Dawn said in a quiet, bitter voice that stunned Laurel.
She swallowed the saliva that suddenly collected in her mouth. “I am. But I’m also an officer of the court. It’s my duty to—”
“You’ve always valued duty, your ‘responsibilities,’ over everything else, even friendship,” Dawn said, anger or desperation flushing her cheeks. “Always. Two weeks into our first semester you had to turn in those guys four doors down for smoking marijuana in the dorm, a little harmless weed. And—”
“They were selling marijuana and oxy,” Laurel said. “Don’t you remember all the skeevy people that—”
“—and of course you became an RA sophomore year so you’d have a reason to run around enforcing the rules, doing your duty. Did you know you were the most hated RA in the dorm? The other RAs turned a blind eye to toaster ovens or a little underage drinking, but not you. Oh, no. You had to do your ‘duty.’”
Her scornful tone was like fingernails dragging across Laurel’s skin. “I did my job, what I thought was right,” she snapped. “I tried to keep people safe.” She hated how defensive she sounded. “Okay, I might have been a little overzealous, but I was nineteen years old. This isn’t the same thing at all, and you know it. You can come with me or not, but I’m taking this to Sheriff Boone.” She rose stiffly on the words and headed to the door. With her hand on the knob, she turned back. Dawn hadn’t moved. Her head was bent, hair falling forward to curt
ain her face. “Don’t you want to know who killed Evangeline?”
Dawn slowly raised her head, a blind look in her eyes. It took a moment for her to focus on Laurel. “No. No, I don’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me. The three of you and Kyra are my best friends in the world, the whole world, and if one of you killed her, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to compound the tragedy by seeing one of us end up in jail. I guess that’s where you and I are different, huh?”
“If by that you mean I want justice for Evangeline and Mindy, and you don’t, I guess you’re right.”
Laurel held Dawn’s gaze for a long minute, knowing the anger and hurt she saw in Dawn’s eyes were reflected in her own. Was this the end of twenty years of friendship? Dawn started to say something but shut her mouth, shook her head as if words were pointless, and brushed past Laurel into the hall. Laurel followed her, wanting to bridge the gully opening between them. She reached out a hand. “Dawn, wait.”
Dawn didn’t turn. She picked up her pace and pounded toward the foyer. A moment later she rounded the corner and disappeared from view. The front door wheezed open and then closed with a bang.
Laurel saw Boone’s car pull up as she was passing through the foyer, and she went to meet him. His expression was somber, heavy with the burden of having to tell a man the ex-wife he’d loved once upon a time was dead, and it lightened only slightly when he spied Laurel. His gaze went immediately to the paper bag she held. “What’s that?”
She handed it to him, explaining what it was, how she’d found it, and apologizing for both her and Dawn’s fingerprints on the box. “My fingerprints will be on the receipt, too.” She didn’t mention her bathroom encounter with Dawn, even when he eyed her elbow and said, “Where’d you get that bruise?”
“Slipped in the tub.”
“I’ll pass this along to the lab,” Boone said, putting the bag and its contents into a plastic evidence bag. “We’ll see what they make of it. They’ll be able to tell if the rat poison was the source of the strychnine ingested by the victim. You predicted this would turn up, didn’t you? Evidence pointing toward Ms. Infanti.”
She didn’t like the way he eyed her. “It fits the pattern,” she said coolly. A dust devil snatched up a handful of leaves, whirled them around, and dropped them. One came to rest on Boone’s foot, a bright red maple leaf. He dislodged it with a small kick.
“Keep in mind that patterns can be deceptive, especially when you don’t have all the pieces,” he said. “What you think is a horse may turn out to be a unicorn when you turn over the last puzzle piece.”
“How whimsical, Sheriff,” she said.
“Don’t knock unicorns,” he said, unfazed by her light sarcasm. “Ciara tells me they fart rainbows. I’m thinking about hiring one or two to lighten up the air in the squad room after a night of beer and brats.” He pounded his fist on his sternum and belched lightly to illustrate.
“Lovely.”
He grinned, creasing his cheeks and lighting up his whole face. “You’d better stay on your side of the law enforcement fence, Your Honor, where the shit doesn’t stink like it does in the trenches.”
“We’re on the same side, Sheriff.” Laurel cocked her head, suddenly impatient with him. “Don’t bother with that good ol’ boy routine around me. A black man from the city with a philosophy degree fits no one’s definition of a country hick. You’re more Mr. Tibbs than good ol’ boy.”
If anything, his grin widened at her annoyance. “It helps come election time. Besides, I’m not so far off good ol’ boy as you might think. I work hard, I like to fish and have a couple beers after a softball game, and I make the best barbecue sauce in the county. I’ve got a blue ribbon that says so.”
Before Laurel could respond, a paneled truck lumbered up the driveway, dripping water. Now that it was mud-free, Laurel could make out red lettering spelling out “Drummond and Sons,” with a logo of two cartoon men carrying a stack of armchairs, tables, beds, and lamps capped by a piano. Nat tooted the horn and waved as he drove past, angling onto the dirt road that cut toward the sheds.
“Who’s that?” Boone asked.
“One of the guys taking the furniture to the auction house,” Laurel said.
Boone lost interest. He started toward the front door, and Laurel fell into step beside him.
The beginnings of a headache made her massage her scalp. “I hate this,” she burst out. “The deaths, the suspicion. I came here this weekend hoping I could figure out what happened ten years ago, but this is all more than I expected and so much worse. Evangeline dead, Mindy dead, Cygne being gutted … I feel like I’m being gutted, like someone’s taking my memories of our times together and ripping them up, rearranging them so that none of them are what I thought they were. I don’t know what was true from those years. I feel like part of my history, part of me, has evaporated. Poof.” She opened her fingers in a starburst, as if releasing something into the air. She sucked in a harsh breath that hurt her throat. Why was she telling Boone this?
Before she could apologize and excuse herself, he gripped her shoulder. His hand was heavy and warm through the thin cotton of her blouse. She could smell the butterscotch on his breath, and it was oddly comforting. “Murder is like that always. Always,” he said. “We focus on the havoc it wreaks physically on the victim, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. It damages the survivors, too, mentally and emotionally. If the murderer was someone trusted, the victim’s spouse or friend, or, God forbid, someone related to us, we question our judgment in liking that person, in not suspecting that they could take a gun or a knife or their bare hands and steal the victim’s life. If the killer was a stranger, a psychopath, we question our understanding of the world as a place of order. We go through life believing that if we take reasonable precautions, interact with each other on a basis of goodwill, that we’ll be safe. Oh, we don’t think it explicitly,” he said, “but we believe it nonetheless. Then, murder happens and rearranges our perception of the world, like twisting a kaleidoscope so all the patterns shift.”
“That’s it exactly,” Laurel said, both taken aback and intrigued by his understanding. “You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“Of course I have,” he said, his hand dropping from her shoulder. A slight breeze stirred her hair. “I’ve investigated twenty-two murders. Of course I’ve thought about it.”
He sounded almost angry, and she couldn’t tell if the anger was directed at her or something else. Dawn would say that his philosophy major was showing. “How do people get past it?” she asked.
“By catching the murderer and seeing that justice is done,” he said promptly. “That’s the first step. After that, well, different people go about it different ways. Therapy, prayer, quests for revenge, alcohol. Some turn their experience into a cause, like Amber Alerts or Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Most just muddle through. I don’t have you pegged as a muddler,” he said with a ghost of a smile.
“Not usually,” she admitted.
Ellie came into the foyer and stopped when she spotted them outside the open door. “I’m looking for Geneva. Have you seen her?”
Laurel shook her head. “Last I saw her, she was going to ask Mr. Abbott about that cradle she’s always been mad about.”
Boone’s cell phone buzzed with a text notification. He glanced at it and cursed under his breath. As if feeling the women’s eyes on him, he looked up and said, “My daughter just threw up and her basketball coach needs me to pick her up.”
“Poor thing,” Ellie murmured, as Laurel asked, “Her mother … ?”
“Out of town on business. I’ve got Ciara for three days. Unless she’s in really bad shape, I’ll get a sitter and be back here as soon as possible. Don’t go anywhere.” His gaze fixed on Ellie. Without giving her a chance to reply, he moved away, already speaking on the phone to someone at the station to let them know his whereabouts.
Boone hadn’t been gone five minutes when Laurel’s phone rang. Recognizing Ari Berenson’s number, she answered it.
“Your father will kill me for this,” he said without preamble. She could picture him in his office surrounded by stacks of folders and documents, feet in their high-top basketball sneakers propped on his desk while his chair teetered on two legs. He was probably running a hand over his bald head. “I’m only passing this along because I’m going to miss seeing you around here when you put on your judge’s robes. Consider it a goodbye present.”
“What have you got?”
“An address.”
A clunk told her he’d dropped his chair onto all four legs. “For Ray Hernan?”
“One and the same. Thing is, the info is perishable. You don’t need all the deets, but poking around in Hernan’s files led me to a DEA buddy who admitted Hernan’s been his CI for the past two years.”
“Ray’s a confidential informant for the DEA?” Laurel couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.
“Yeah. Took me by surprise, too. He’s been dealing drugs for years, apparently, since high school, and got caught in a DEA sting two years ago. He agreed to become a CI and help make the case against his supplier, a Mexican cartel the DEA’s been after for years. He’s already helped them put one of the big bosses in prison. My buddy’s high on Ray, and he only gave me the address because he owes me big time. You’ve got to get onto him immediately, though, because he’s due to travel to Oaxaca tonight. Whatever you do, don’t scare him off because my buddy will have my balls if Hernan does a runner.”
“What if he killed Evangeline?”
That Last Weekend Page 23
