by Sam Cheever
“I’m more than Josh’s friend. I’m also a private investigator. I’ve been deep on assignment for a few weeks, doing some legwork for a new client. When I heard Josh was dead, I dumped my caseload to figure out who’d killed him.”
“Why do you assume it was anything but an accident?”
“There are things I can’t tell you.”
I frowned. “You pulled me in here to tell me nothing?”
He grabbed a plate off the nearby buffet, handing it to me. “No. I came in here because I was hungry. Aren’t you?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m slightly less impossible when I’m not hungry.” He started filling up his plate, and I did a mental shrug. I was there. Food was there with me. I might as well have some of the food. I made a concerted effort not to pile too much onto my plate. A grieving girlfriend probably wouldn’t fix herself a plate fit for a lumberjack like Deitz was doing.
Besides, I could always come back for seconds.
I was stuffing a tiny cheesecake in my face, so I didn’t have to put it on my plate where it was in danger of mixing with the sausage lasagna I’d just heaped on there when the small, balding man from the funeral home potted palm incident walked into the room. He jolted to a stop as I sucked cheesecake down the wrong pipe.
I hacked, choked, and coughed explosively as Eddie smacked me hard on the back.
The man by the door burst into motion. He hurried over and grabbed a glass off the buffet, filling it with water from a crystal pitcher and handing it to me. “Drink this.”
I gave him a jerky nod and succumbed to another violent bout of coughing before I could get a few sips of the water down.
A few minutes later I was feeling better and was able to talk. Though my voice sounded strained and rough. “Thanks for the water.”
The little man gave me a smile. “That happens to me all the time. Usually, it’s when I’m eating too quickly.” He lifted an accusing brow and I coughed again, trying and failing for a pity pass.
I had been shoveling those little cheesecakes pretty fast behind Eddie’s back. I didn’t want him to know I was a sugar and fat girl.
Eddie held his hand out to the other man. “Doctor Leland. How’s Val?”
I knew from my Exit Stage Left dossier that Val was Valerie Mitner, Josh’s mom. But I hadn’t realized the man who’d been sharing secrets with Val’s husband was apparently their personal physician. That made their whispered conversations take on a different tone altogether.
“She’s finally resting. The poor woman’s taking her son’s death really hard.”
I frowned. It would be a strange woman indeed who didn’t. “It’s truly a tragedy,” I said, dabbing at a nonexistent tear in my eye with my linen napkin.
Doctor Leland offered me his hand. “We met at the funeral home.”
He did one of those hand over and under things that didn’t allow me to retrieve my hand when we were done shaking. I tried to ignore the way his thumb swept over the inside of my wrist.
“We did,” I admitted with a guilty flush. I gave my hand an experimental tug. Nope. Not getting it back any time soon. “I’m May Ferth. Josh and I were dating.”
Leland swept Eddie a quick look, and I turned to find Eddie’s expression snapping back to neutral from something else.
What secret was I not in on that everybody else knew? It was starting to make me cranky.
“Well. How nice.” Leland finally dropped my hand. “I always said the boy had good taste.” He winked at me.
If I’d been snarfing mini cheesecakes, I’d probably have choked to death on the spot.
Leland headed over to the buffet and grabbed a plate. Eddie and I took that as our cue to skedaddle. He put a hand in the small of my back and urged me into the hallway. The noise from the front of the big house had doubled; voices were no longer subdued. Someone had turned up the music and it was starting to sound more like a party than a wake.
Eddie steered me toward the back of the house and into what looked like a family room, with comfortable leather furniture and a television as big as a car. A pair of pretty French doors on an outside wall led to a patio lit with strands of clear lights.
We stepped outside and the sounds of the crowd inside the house faded to the distant background. It was replaced by the soothing sound of crickets and, somewhere in the distance, the throaty croak of a bullfrog.
The night was warm, and the air smelled like rain. Beyond the softly glowing lights, the sky was a leaden mass that looked volatile.
Sure enough, as I glanced upward, a shot of light speared the bank of clouds in the distance.
“Looks like we’re finally going to get some relief from this drought,” Eddie told me as he indicated a comfy looking reclining chair. We settled down next to a softly rippling pool, the water a pretty blue under the lights.
“I heard we’re five inches below normal for the year.”
It was so easy to fall into discussions of the weather. I could talk to a complete stranger about the lack of rain or the overwhelming heat of a summer day. But Eddie and I weren’t going to be allowed to hide behind easy topics. We had murder to discuss.
“What do you suppose Mr. Mitner and Doctor Leland could have been saying about Josh?”
Eddie popped a bite of meatloaf into his mouth and chewed. He shook his head as he grabbed a hunk of bread. “I’m not aware of Alex being sick, but if he is, I guess they could have been worried Josh found out about it.”
“Why would that matter now?”
“I don’t know. None of this makes sense.” Eddie stopped eating and seemed to lose interest in his food. He set the plate aside on a small table. “I spoke to Josh minutes before he died. I was probably the last person to talk to him.”
“How did he sound?” Despite the charade of my pretending to date Josh, I found I really wanted to know about my pretend boyfriend’s last moments. Maybe because of the way it affected the man sitting next to me.
Eddie shrugged. “He sounded happy. He was razzing me about working too much. He said there was a party this weekend…” Eddie swallowed, his gaze locked on the pool. “There was always a party with Josh.” He shook his head. “Even if I hadn’t been working, I probably wouldn’t have gone. That makes me sad.”
“I’m sure Josh understood why. You’re different people. With different motivations.”
Eddie didn’t respond. Finally, without looking at me, he asked, “Did he ever talk to you about me?”
I wanted to curl up and hide. It was one thing to play a role. To pretend to be someone I wasn’t because that was my job. But to lie to someone I was starting to kind of sort of maybe like…a man who was making himself painfully vulnerable by asking… It was suddenly too much. I opened my mouth, ready to confess.
Eddie didn’t give me a chance. “Your silence is my answer.” He sounded so sad it nearly broke my heart.
In desperation, I dragged him back to the phone call with Josh. “What did you talk about with Josh that morning?”
My intention was pure distraction. I really didn’t expect to gather any useful information.
“He was telling me about the woman who was having the party. He met her at the gym, I guess.” Eddie gave a snort of laughter. “Josh made friends everywhere he went. And everybody he met was an instant friend. But he forgot them just as easily, which made for some really awkward moments when old dates approached him.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Then he told me he needed to go because…” Eddie sat up straight in his chair. “He said there was a call he had to take.” He looked at me. “Maybe the call was tied to the crash.”
I frowned. “You mean he crashed because he was talking on the phone, not paying attention?”
“No, maybe it was the killer.” He turned in the lounger and put his feet on the ground. His mind was clearly focused on the dark intersection of that fateful, pre-dawn morning. “Eddie didn’t usually travel on that particula
r road in the mornings. He went that way a lot at night, heading to the bars in Asheville. But to go to work he usually took the highway. I wondered why he was traveling that particular road when he was killed.”
“You’re thinking maybe he received a call from somebody telling him to go somewhere, so he changed his route? Where could he have been heading?” I asked.
Eddie stood up and started to pace. “An early morning meeting with one of his bar buddies, maybe?” He shrugged. “Josh was friends with several of the bar owners. Ultimately, the destination didn’t matter. It was the route that mattered to the killer. A route that took him through a particular intersection.”
“It’s a good theory. But it’s still just a theory, right?”
“It’s more than a theory. I believe Josh was lured to the spot where he was killed.”
“How do you know that?”
He hesitated, clearly trying to decide if he should tell me, and then sat back down, resting his arms on his knees as he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “The truck that hit him. The witness said she thought it looked like a trash truck. But I talked to the trash hauling company, they aren’t missing a truck, and none of their people reported an accident that morning.”
“Maybe their people are lying.”
“Did you see the wreckage of Josh’s car?”
I flinched, shaking my head.
“There’s no way, even a truck as heavy as a trash hauler could demolish a car like that and both the truck and the driver walk away without some evidence that it happened.” He suddenly stood up. “I need to get Josh’s phone.” He started for the house and stopped, turning back. “Wait here. I’ll take you home after I get the phone.”
I realized I really needed to mingle a bit, but Eddie was gone before I could tell him I should stick around a while. I decided to wait for him to return and then tell him.
I wasn’t stalling or anything. Of course I wasn’t.
Though it was really pleasant out there next to the pool, with the potent scent of rain filling the air.
I picked at the food on my plate, taking care to eat very small bites so I didn’t choke again. Everything tasted like sawdust, so I set the plate back down. Talking about Josh’s horrible death had made my stomach twist.
A breeze slid past, filled with moisture that hadn’t resolved to drop yet. I decided I’d better go inside. I’d do some mingling and then find Eddie.
A small tree next to the pool house shimmied and I narrowed my gaze at it. Was there a dog or something in there? “Hello?”
Nothing.
I did a mental shrug and turned away, picking up my plate and Eddie’s. A brisk wind flashed past and the lights flickered off. The area was barely lit by the lights inside the house. Lightning flashed again, followed almost immediately by thunder.
The storm was close.
Quick footsteps sounded on the concrete behind me as I turned toward the house. Before I could turn around, a heavy body slammed into me and the plates of food went flying, crashing on the patio blocks a few feet away.
I yelped as an arm snaked around my throat, tightening like an iron band and making it hard to breathe. My hands clawed at the arm, my feet scrabbling on the stones for a moment before my panicked brain told me to kick my attacker’s shins.
I connected with the second attempt, pleased by the resulting grunt of pain. But the arm around my throat tightened, cutting off all air.
I went very still.
“Tell your partner to keep his nose out of this or it’s going to go very badly for you both.”
Before my brain could even make sense of the harshly whispered command, the arm straightened from around my throat and my attacker shoved me hard. My feet left the ground, and I flew through the air.
I hit the pool hard, a solid belly flop that stung the inadequate amount of air in my lungs right out of me.
Light flared overhead, followed by a teeth-rattling boom, and my feet hit the bottom of the pool as a shadow fell over the water, and something crashed down into the frothy water on top of me.
6
A hundred tiny branches tangled around me, catching in my hair and stabbing through my clothes. I shoved desperately at them, trying to get loose, but they bent without breaking, leaving me stuck like a pincushion and fighting to keep from being shoved to the bottom of the pool.
My lungs were screaming as I finally managed to rip a thick strand of hair loose from one of the bigger branches. I kicked against the bottom but was jerked violently back down. I made a small sound of pure terror, my chest on fire.
Glancing down, I saw that a branch as thick as one of my fingers had impaled my blouse and I wasn’t going anywhere until I wrenched it free.
I clasped the wet fabric, yanking as hard as I could, but the water made it both slippery and strong, impossible to break with my bare hands.
Panic swirled in my chest, building with the pressure in my lungs as getting air became the only imperative.
A solution danced just beyond my understanding, too much for my oxygen-starved brain to grasp.
There were several loud splashes above my head. I was dimly aware of dark forms shooting like arrows in my direction.
The blouse wouldn’t come free and the branch was too thick to break. I’d begun to thrash, giving in to panic, when a pair of hands found my shoulder and another grasped the branches holding me under water.
Between the two men, I was yanked from side to side, their efforts to release me not much better than my own.
Without warning, Eddie slipped his hand between the buttons of my blouse and yanked, ripping it open. We fought to pull my arms out of the sleeves and then, finally, I was free.
Still, if Eddie hadn’t been there to help me get to the surface, I don’t know if I could have managed it.
My legs and arms were weak, pathetic, from fighting with the tree and lack of oxygen.
We burst from the surface of the pool—me, Eddie, and another guy who looked strong enough to break the tree apart by himself.
Somebody grabbed my wrists and pulled me from the water. Somebody else wrapped me in an oversized towel. And I found myself being led into the house and taken to a bedroom on the first floor.
Valerie Mitner shoved my rescuers out of the room and closed the door. She turned a red-rimmed gaze my way and frowned. “You’re very lucky they found you in time.” She almost didn’t sound happy about that.
I couldn’t answer. My teeth were too busy clacking together.
She took another look at me and seemed to take pity. “I think I have something in here you can wear home.”
Josh’s mother rummaged around in the closet for a minute and came out with a velour tracksuit that looked like it might cover one of my legs. I eyed it doubtfully. I wasn’t a whole lot taller than Mrs. Mitner, but my curvy form would definitely test the limits of the tracksuit.
She laid it on the bed, eyeing it dubiously. “Well, at least it’s stretchy.” She glanced at my bare feet. “I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of shoes for you. My feet are smaller.” She disappeared into the closet for a minute and came back out with something, placing them on the bed with the velour. Then she headed for the door. “Get dressed and I’ll have Eddie take you home.”
She stopped with her hand on the knob, her head lowered. I waited for her to speak, knowing whatever she wanted to say was dragging her down and she needed to say it.
After a long moment, she finally looked up, her red-rimmed eyes meeting mine. “I’m sorry. I know you’re just doing a job. But Josh wasn’t a job to me. He was my pride and joy. He was everything…” Her voice broke. She closed her mouth, her eyes downcast, and finally nodded. “Thank you for coming tonight. I know it hasn’t been easy.”
She was gone before my cold-infused, oxygen-deprived brain could come up with a response. I wanted to kick myself for not giving her some comfort.
Moving stiffly, I pulled off the sopping wet towel and dropped it into a puddle on the car
pet. My drenched skirt and soggy underwear were next. The velour fit me like a second skin. Literally. The top was zippered and I didn’t have anything to wear underneath it. The result was barely decent.
I looked at my bare feet. My favorite open-toed dress shoes were lying at the bottom of the Mitner’s pool.
They’d never be the same again.
Then I cast my gaze on the shoes Mrs. Mitner had added to the velour. I grimaced. “Revenge footwear,” I muttered as I slipped them on.
I picked up the towel and went to the adjoining bathroom to drape it over the side of the tub. I wrapped my bra and underwear in my once cute short black skirt and, taking a deep, bracing breath, I headed for the door.
Eddie was standing in the hallway, dripping onto the hardwood floor. He looked worried. “Are you okay?” He reached for a sopping ribbon of my dark gold hair and gave it a gentle tug. “That tree really had a grip on you.”
I nodded, my teeth still clacking together. “I’m fine. I just want to go home.”
Wrapping an arm around my shoulders, he walked me down the hall.
As we neared the front door, another towel-draped figure emerged from the area where the guests had been. I noticed the house was all but empty and wondered if my unscheduled dunking had anything to do with that.
The man who came toward us was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick dark hair, olive-toned skin, expressive brown eyes and a wide, square jaw that sported a chin dimple. He was gorgeous.
“Is she okay?” he asked Eddie. Then he smiled at me and I felt my knees go weak.
“I’m fine,” I managed to stutter between clanking teeth.
“I need to get her home, James.”
I giggled. “Home, James…” My teeth clacked loud enough to rattle my brain. I slammed my lips closed.
“She’s a little punchy from lack of oxygen, I think.”
James nodded. “We weren’t introduced before,” he told me. “But I wanted to meet the woman who finally captured Josh.” His grin showed two rows of perfect white teeth. The man was impossibly perfect. “I’ve never known him to go out with any woman more than a couple of times.”
