“Sheriff,” she said. Remorse twinged at me. I’d babysat her back in the day. No trace left of that cornsilk hair or soaring giggle. Yet she was still pretty, though I could see the hardness in her, the determination that she’d sooner die than ask for help.
“Missy,” I said, shifted my eyes meaningfully toward the kids. She nodded, lips pursed, said sharply, “Boys! Shawna! Go outside for a while. Grownup talk.”
Shawna and the boys did as told, though they did not turn off the TV. Missy did that, sat hunched on the sofa. “Someone complainin’ about me?”
“No. I just wanted to ask you if you had a visit from Lee Tucker at the end of August. The night Lisa Littlepage was killed.”
“Lee…” she began.
“No, he’s not a suspect. I just need to confirm he was here.”
She relaxed. “Yeah, he came over with some beer around ten. We stayed up, talking.”
She said it with a straight face, but not an honest one. Her cheeks flamed hot red, and she developed a sudden interest in picking at the fringe on a throw pillow.
“When did he leave? About?”
“I dunno. Maybe midnight? I’m not real sure.” She shrugged, face still afire. “We only, um, talked once, but it took him a while to get around to, um, talking.” With every word, her blush deepened, and my embarrassment shifted closer to a laughing fit. Between the scene at the Chute, and the absurdity of the euphemism talking, I couldn’t last much longer.
“Thanks, Missy.” I managed not to offer her money or help, though it took doing.
“It true you got money and gave it away?”
Startled, I admitted, “Yeah. Aunt Marge is building an animal shelter.”
She measured me with her eyes, gave a slight, approving nod. “Yeah,” she said. “You can’t let yourself get bought.”
She said it with no sign of irony I could see, and I escaped to the cruiser, where Boris was enjoying the adulation of the three kids. Their squeals and chatter stopped abruptly when they noticed me, and the girl drew her brothers sharply away, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. Boris looked at me, and I swear his eyes told me to do something.
“I can’t,” I told him unhappily as I drove away. “She’d think she was being bought.”
Boris twitched his tail, turned his back on me. I sighed to myself. I didn’t understand human nature myself. How was I supposed to explain it to him?
***^***
With a description like “a little pick-up with flame things”, I really wasn’t any better off than I had been to start. Yet I felt wonderful as I swung jauntily into the office with Boris riding my shoulder, preening at all the attention he’d received from a couple of misdirected tourists.
“That’s him!”
The shriek startled me into levitating. Boris squalled, and used my shoulder to launch himself through the air. I caught him around the middle, to his disapproval, thinking I couldn’t afford to have him attack someone in the face. I braced for claws, but Boris cuddled close, having apparently decided that if I wouldn’t let him run, I would protect him. Or maybe he’d gone into shock at the sound of a piercing scream of terror.
Kim raced out of the lavatory, white-faced. “Oh my God,” she gasped, hand to her bosom. “Mrs. Teague, it’s all right.”
I’d never heard of a Mrs. Teague. She stood five-four, with a hard mouth and glaring eyes, and some part of me thought she had to be sixty, though she appeared to be around my age.
“That cat,” she cried, eyes squinted at Boris. “I heard you had a cat that bites, and I thought it was him!”
My heart went cold. Boris scrunched his face into my armpit, wriggling, and I let him escape to his condo. He sleeked into the drum, huddled himself into a tiny bundle, and watched with huge eyes as Mrs. Teague thrust a finger at him.
“That’s my cat!”
Kim traded appalled looks with me. She slunk back to the lavatory. Coward.
“How long ago,” I gulped, “did you, um, lose him?”
“Lose him?” she shrilled. “I dumped him! On the road! Figured a car or something would get him!”
I started to hate her. “Why?” I demanded hotly. “Pet abandonment is…”
“He’s not a pet, he’s a monster!” she snapped, cheeks reddening. She had what I call the all-purpose she-mullet, a curly puff of hair up front and permed kinks to her shoulders behind, and she fussily flipped it off her collar. “Do I have to take him back?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Not at all. But why…”
“Oh I knew it was him, I knew it,” she fumed. She opened her handbag, an old-lady job with cheap brass clasps, and patted her face dry with a tissue. “My husband brought a whole litter home, for our barn, but that one he liked. He brought it inside!”
Clearly, she and her husband had different ideas about pet ownership. I harrumphed neutrally. The idea of dumping a pet on the road, hoping a car kills it, seriously disturbs me. I kept rubbing my holster, snapping and unsnapping it, as I gritted my teeth and visualized Mrs. Teague reincarnated as a cat in the middle of a dog pound.
“He gave it tuna from a can, just like it was a person!” she went on, nostrils flaring. I watched them, fascinated. I’d never seen nostrils flare like that in a human before. “Babied it. Called him Baron. He loved that damn thing.”
No wonder Boris liked his name. It sounded similar to the one he’d had.
“When he got sick, I told him that cat wasn’t going to sit around making him sicker,” Mrs. Teague continued, “and he got upset. And that thing bit me! Hissed at me like it owned the world and bit me!”
Silently, I cheered. Hurray, Boris!
Mrs. Teague paused to wait for sympathy. I raised my eyebrows. She pursed her mouth, bit out, “Oh it was awful to me! I’d go in to give Chad his medicine and that thing would chase me out! Of my own bedroom!”
“Cats,” I said icily, “are very territorial.”
So was Mrs. Teague. “Well, I fixed its wagon all right. When Chad went into the hospital, I took that damn thing out and dumped it in the middle of nowhere.” She gazed around as if to emphasize her point that Crazy is, indeed, the middle of nowhere. “I can’t figure how it survived. It wasn’t hardly a year old.”
Her story sickened me, but it helped me make sense of Boris’s decision to like me. In some way, with that can of tuna, I’d reminded him of his beloved human.
“And it came back!” She snorted, not unlike Boris in a huff. “Well, my husband came home to die—it was cancer in his brain—and he couldn’t stand to have Boris out of the room. But it wasn’t right. To have an animal in there while he was dying. And that damn thing made more racket when I threw it out…! Chad couldn’t get a bit of rest.”
I doubted that was Boris’s fault.
She shot a malicious glare at Boris. “Then when Chad passed… Oh, you couldn’t get that cat to shut up! I must’ve driven an hour to get down here and get rid of it. And it stayed gone, thank God.”
I tried to envision it. Boris, a year old, pampered, turned out to die, grieving for his human. I focused on the knots in my shoulders as a distraction from wanting to strangle Mrs. Teague.
She thumped her bag on the desk, still glowering at Boris. I said, with unusual calm, “You’re happy, then, if I keep him.” I emphasized him. I didn’t like the way she kept calling Boris it. Too much like criminals I’ve had the misfortune to encounter.
“I’d be happier if you killed it,” said Mrs. Teague, indomitable cat-hater.
“May I ask,” I inquired, “how long ago your husband passed away?”
“Two years, come November.”
She’d dumped Boris in winter. My God. She transcended the word bitch.
She spun on her heel. “Well, as long as no one expects me to take it back.”
A thought occurred to me. “What happened to the barn cats? The rest of the litter?”
She looked blank, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I stopped feeding them when Chad got sick.�
�
I showed her the door, held it open for her so she could leave. “I’d like to give you a piece of advice, Mrs. Teague.”
She paused. People always do when a cop offers advice. They’re expecting an unofficial warning about some minor illegality.
“You might want to pray God’s not a cat-lover.”
***^***
It was pure meanness—as Aunt Marge might say, I felt Hell in me—but I took down her license plate number, and called the police in Albemarle County. I told them she was guilty of animal abuse and abandonment, but the statue had run out, and they’d want to keep an eye on her for future reference. I think she’d already earned a bit of a name, because the man I talked to said, “Oh. Mrs. Teague,” in a strangely flat way.
Meanwhile, Kim coaxed Boris out of his condo, and he slunk to my desk with his tail low and his eyes dark. I petted him idly as I read the information Kim had scrounged from various sources on Nelson Hunter. It completed the picture I’d started to assemble. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised, even though there’s a prevalent and ridiculous idea in the world that wealthy people don’t participate in certain types of crime. For example, child abuse, molestation, wife beating, all that. Plainly, the Hunters proved otherwise. Nelson had a very good knowledge of physical violence. No arrests were made, nor reports officially submitted, but young Nelson and his sister spent a lot of time in the emergency room. It also explained why he made his own money, not taking a dime from his father. He, like my late cousin, was notorious for not touching alcohol.
I crossed him permanently off my mental list of suspects. That narrowed it down to a few billion.
I stared at my white board, with its stark black words. They blurred into meaningless squiggles after a few minutes. I’d stared at them too long to see them. It didn’t matter. I knew them. Lisa had sex before she died. Her stomach contents made no sense. Her dress was wrong for her complexion. No one knew where she’d gone after the party. Her mother claimed she’d gotten a ride home. Body was dumped after she was stabbed to death. She died around 2 a.m., but had left the party around ten-thirty.
That was when I remembered the cuff watch. I stood, wrote that on the board, and pulled the watch out of the drawer I had tossed it in while I dealt with the threat of Fiona.
It was garish, in a pseudo-classy way. The sort of thing Aunt Marge would have called typical of the nouveau riche—or the gauche. I flipped it over to see if I could identify a maker, and saw a familiar store name. My face flushing, I ran out the door, leaving Boris alone to recover from the trauma of Mrs. Teague, and sped home. I couldn’t find her, and went to the site of the new shelter. She was standing in the shade of a spreading oak as Donny Tucker oversaw the pouring of the foundation, and smiled as I ran up. “Yes, dear?”
I thrust the watch at her. “Does that say what I think it does?”
She peered at it closely through her reading glasses. Though Aunt Marge these days only wears organic cottons and silks and wools, all of them dyed using renewable plant or mineral sources, she has, in the past, gone for brightly patterned and colored clothing from a certain boutique. Known, I must add, for catering to a certain type of woman of a certain age. The chain was named for someone’s pet, but I’ll just call it Fifi’s. When Aunt Marge cleared out her wardrobe five years ago, she donated it all to the bargain shop run by the county’s various churches. One woman bought a pile of those very expensive Fifi’s clothes from the shop, then took it to Fifi’s in Charlottesville and dumped them on the counter to demand a cash refund. Needless to say, since she had no receipt, that didn’t happen. I have to marvel at the many ways people will try to steal, and tell themselves it’s okay. You buy a $300 Fifi’s jacket at Goodwill, and pay maybe $20 for it. Then you have the nerve to take it back to Fifi’s, without a receipt, and demand a refund. A cash refund. For the full $300. And you tell yourself it’s thrift, not theft. Granted, it’s about impossible to prove or prosecute, but technically, that’s attempted robbery. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? What people do to avoid having to pay for their instant gratification and extravagance.
Anyway, Aunt Marge said, “It’s from Fifi’s. It’s…rather tawdry.”
I had to agree. I’d seen Fifi’s jewelry on women, and most of it was oversized, garish, or plain ugly.
“Does it help?”
My elation fizzled. I’d have to get a search warrant to get a list of women who’d bought this watch, and even so it might have been a gift. Or purchased second-hand. Not to mention the annoying fact it might have been dropped by accident a year ago, or a week after Lisa’s death, and have no bearing on the case at all.
I watched the cement mixer turn for a while, shoulders slumped. To avoid Aunt Marge’s questions, I told her about Mrs. Teague. She, to my surprise, gave a prim “Hmph. I know her, in the sense we’ve been introduced. Selfish bitch.”
So much for the genteel lady. “Aunt Marge!”
“She is,” said Aunt Marge in stately fashion. “She was born a Fielding, and her mother is a pretentious hag. They live in Albemarle now, but they’re from Fluvanna.” Aunt Marge clicked her nails together, a rare sign of contempt. “They think they’re clever at business, and deserving of their money. The truth is, if someone hadn’t been so desperate to build that subdivision, the Fieldings would still be farming dirt and scrub pines. They got their millions because they were too stupid to take the first offer, not because they had any sense.” She grimaced daintily. “I knew them slightly when I still golfed.”
Aunt Marge once golfed every weekend it didn’t snow, up at Farmington. It’s by Charlottesville. Fairly exclusive. I must have shown my shock, because she smiled thinly, said, “They’d come as guests of anyone who owed them a favor or just wanted them to shut up. He wasn’t bad, but her?” A theatrical shudder. “And the daughter was always a bitch. And she married a Teague. Hmm. Poor man.”
I had to agree, then asked her opinion about the watch. I gave her the details, knew defeat when she shook her head slightly. “Dear,” she said with a sigh, “I can name you a dozen women in this county who shop at Fifi’s, or did.”
I hadn’t known that. I deflated. Another beautiful idea shot down by ugly truth. I trudged miserably back to the cruiser, half-lifted a hand to return Donny’s wave, and went back to the office to comfort Boris with chicken and myself with chocolate.
***^***
That evening, I sat on the porch, Boris a happy lump on my lap, tapping me now and then with a paw to remind me to pet him. Or reassure himself I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d bend down occasionally to kiss his forehead and croon to him, letting my mind float wherever it liked, here and there and everywhere. Cousin Jack Littlepage had left three messages on my cell phone, but I didn’t like to call him until I had something to say besides I’m sorry.
Funny, to think my mother was a Littlepage. Helen Louise Littlepage, named for her grandmothers. Most people called her Hel, like the old Norse goddess of the underworld. Aunt Marge always sighed when she spoke of my mother. Such fire in her, she’d say. She gave you your fire, you know. But what I have of the Ellers beyond a surname and my hair, I don’t know. Aunt Marge always told me Your father was a gentleman and a good man. That was all. No clue why they’d met or married. Each seemingly typical of the respective clan, from the pictures I’d seen. My mother with that mousy hair streaked bright gold or henna-red, a face-cracking grin, the Littlepage purity of complexion and the dignified little nose. The glow of beauty that came in part from being pampered all her life, from her diet to her dental checkups. A little tall for a Littlepage woman. Fond of wearing black, or tie-dyed shirts even I admitted were better suited for the rag bag. My father had the dark Eller hair, a thick thatch of it, and was always smiling in a reserved sort of way. Tall, of course, like most Ellers, and with that lean build. The Eller nose, which is more prominent than not, long to fit the long, lean face. I looked a little like both, and knew a little about each. No idea what made them leave behind th
e families and the fortunes, why my mother gave up being a Littlepage to become, of all things, an Eller.
Aunt Marge emerged, bringing one of the many fruit or veggie shakes that kept us both going. I may moan a bit about Aunt Marge and some of her ways, but I know what I owe her. Besides my childhood, my health.
Aunt Marge spends hours concocting new fruit or veggie shakes. They’re not really shakes, as in milkshakes, by the way. They’re usually pure puree of something. Sometimes she’ll throw it into an herbal infusion or some vegetable broth, and she always adds some herbs or spices. Delicious stuff, and so healthy you can feel the glow run through you after you’re done slurping. That night, it was cantaloupe pureed with honey and mint. Looked odd, but tasted great.
“I left you some chamomile,” she said genially. “You’re worrying again.”
True enough.
She gave a long stretch and sigh. “I must say, it’s wonderful to see the shelter started. Now that the foundation is poured, I feel much less anxious. Donny and Roger have both been incredibly helpful.”
I contributed “Good” to the conversation and stayed lost in my thoughts.
“I’ve tomatoes by the bushel to can, and there’s pounds of carrots to freeze. Oh, and cucumbers, too, of course.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, not paying total attention.
“The cherries and berries are over, of course, but apples—I don’t know where I’ll find time.”
Autumn is Aunt Marge’s busy season when it comes to produce. She buys or raises it by the bushel, and freezes it. Some of it whole, like carrots. Some of it pureed, like cucumbers. Since most vegetables are just water with fiber and vitamins, it works pretty well for a lot of things. When she has to can something, like tomatoes and applesauce, the whole house is a nightmare of boiled glassware and the stink of cooked-down whatever. By Halloween, the two chest freezers in the cellar, and the pantry shelves, are stocked to the limit.
Crazy, VA Page 8
