Unless I was much mistaken, Kimberly was supposed to fill it. And maybe it was the key that would unravel the whole mystery. If she would only tell me.
Twenty-Seven
I was supposed to decorate the statue of that woman on Main Street,” Kimberly said.
“Mama Cuento?” I said. “Decorate her how?”
“An apron and a rolling pin,” she told me. “I asked Grandma what the joke was, but she wouldn’t tell me. Do you know?”
“This is insane,” said Dorian.
I thought hard about it for a moment. “Maybe,” I said. “There’s a Scottish poem where a horse crossing a bridge has her tail pulled off—”
“I didn’t pull it off! I sheared it off. I was very careful not to hurt Agnetha. I ended up slicing my own finger open because I was being so careful with her.”
“—by the devil,” I continued. “And a witch dances in a short white dress at a lonely churchyard in the country.”
“That’s disturbing,” said Dorian.
“It wasn’t a churchyard,” said Kimberly. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“And the first half of the poem is all about this guy’s wife who’s waiting for him to come home from his drinking buddies.”
“Does she crack him one with a rolling pin when he finally gets in?” Dorian said.
“No, but she’s very angry,” I said. “She’s had it with him, basically.”
“But what does it mean?” Kimberly said. “Why did Grandma have me do all that?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “And—if I can make a suggestion—don’t ask her.”
“I’m not going to ask her,” Kimberly said. “She told me she’d disinherit me if I asked questions or told—Oh my God! Or told anyone.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I said. “Dorian?”
“What?” Dorian said. “I’m the soul of discretion.” While she paused Kimberly rolled her eyes and I worked hard at not rolling mine. “When there’s an inheritance in play,” she added, with a burst of self-awareness and honesty I was totally taking credit for. This was our second session after all.
Della joined us after dinner, greatly increasing the chances of us making some headway and, just as I was about to launch into an update, there was a knock on the office door and Devin, the kid from Room 101, sidled in too.
“I figured we could do with a millennial,” Noleen said. “Just in case.” She glared at us all and the message was clear. She was not getting soft; she did not have a little warm spot for this boy; she was hard-headed and all-business and we’d better not forget it.
Anyway, she was right. It was good to have a new pair of ears in the room, forcing us to set it all out in an orderly fashion. By the time we had told Devin about Tam and the stapled-on hat, the ring and the diving nephew, the kilt on the porch and the dry-cleaning errand boy, the horse’s tail and the cutty sark and the rolling pin for Mama Cuento and the obliging granddaughter, John Worth’s heart attack, the uses of lye and the occupation of Patti’s father and young Thomas back in the day, the yearbook and the graduation dance and the afterparty at the old Armour homestead, the bogus real estate deal, the grieving mother who might not be, and the suicide verdict that Mike was sticking to …
“I am done with RPGs!” Devin said. “This shit is awesome!”
“And don’t forget the cat decals,” I sang out. “Todd, did you tell them someone answered?”
“Did you get the rest?” he asked. “Did you try them all?”
“I got Joan’s and Mo Tafoya’s,” I said. “We already had John Worth’s and Mo Heedles’s, so that’s the set. But I haven’t tried them yet.”
“Well, what the hell are you waiting for?” Todd said.
“Roger?” I suggested.
“Roger’s pulling a double shift. Get with the dialing, girl.”
“Seriously,” said Devin. “For a buncha old farts, you guys have a lotta LOLs.”
Della caught my eye. “I’m twenty-eight,” she said and shook her head.
I would have said something kind about how great she looked and how I wouldn’t have put her a day over twenty-three but I was dialling. 09-30-15 TABI, as I had right back at the beginning of it all.
And once again the phone rang and once again someone answered with a brusque “What?”
I couldn’t speak. My American accent is just about at the Dick Van Dyke chimney sweep level, I grabbed Kathi by the shoulder and pulled her into the phone. No one was breathing.
“Mo?” Kathi said. A safe bet.
“Who is this?” she spoke harshly, urgently.
“Mo, is that you?” Kathi whispered.
And then Mo—because it probably was Mo—said something that raised every hair on my head and made Kathi dink the button to kill the call.
“Patti?”
Kathi threw the phone back into my lap and sat staring at it.
“Isn’t Patti the dead chick?” Devin said.
“What’s going on?” Noleen said. “How come more information just makes it more confusing? It’s a bullet wound! No, that’s a booty suit! It’s a poisoning! No, it’s a suicide!”
“So ya cut off the horse’s tail, Kimberly? Yeah sorry about the bloodstain. But it stopped me dressing up Mama C like June Beaver. My head’s spinning.” I sat back.
“Cleaver, Lexy. And mine isn’t,” Della said. “It’s like I save up all my brain power that I don’t use asking bratty kids if they want their dressing on the side and then when I do need it, I have it to spare.”
“Go on,” I said.
“The cutty sark, the hat, the horse tail, the scorned woman,” Della said. “All of that came from the poem, right?”
“Right.” It was a chorus.
“All of that pointed to the identity of the corpse, right?”
“Right.” We were coordinated like a church full of Baptists.
“And yet the thing that would have positively identified the corpse to the cops was removed. The ring, I mean. Why’s that?”
“Because,” I said, thinking it through, “Joan’s nephew, the diver, knew his aunty had just had a class reunion and here was a body with a class ring on it. He wanted a chance to warn her before the shit hit the fan. But he wasn’t in on the plan. Because Tam’s body was never supposed to be in the slough. It was supposed to sit rotting on a porch—John Worth’s porch—until the cops came.”
“John Worth wasn’t in on it either,” said Noleen. “And when he found the corpse, he got rid of it.”
“So let’s forget the class ring,” said Della. Then she caught her lip in her teeth. “But if the class ring was supposed to be on the corpse and the class ring would have ID’d him, why was Kimberly running all over town planting all those other clues? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The class ring doesn’t ID him,” Devin said. “It just narrows it down. It was all the shit from the poem that pointed to his name.”
“Overkill, wouldn’t you say?” said Kathi.
“I would,” Della agreed.
At which pregnant moment, the door to the office opened and there was Roger, a pizza box in one hand, a six-pack hanging from the other. He was still in scrubs and looked the kind of knackered a paediatrician gets after a double shift.
“Todd,” he said. “Honey, this pizza and beer was meant for me and you. I’ll order more.”
“What happened?” Todd said. “You don’t come home with carbs unless something’s happened.”
“I went for a cup of coffee with Maurice.”
After a Sergio Leoni kind of a silence, Devin piped up: “Who’s Maurice?”
“A homewrecking stalker who’s going to chain my ex-husband up in his basement, which is no more than he deserves,” said Todd.
“He’s a pathologist at the hospital where I work,” said Roger. “And he moonlights
for the county. He’s a weirdo all right, but he gave me some pretty hot information today.”
“What’s on the pizza?” said Noleen, which broke the tension.
When we all had a slice and a share of a beer, Roger swept the room with a gaze and made his announcement.
“They got Thomas Shatner’s medical and dental records,” he said. “They were archived in our hospital. He never sprang them when he moved to Florida. He broke his ankle when he was kid and he had his appendix removed.”
“Okay,” said Todd.
“The corpse in the morgue had plenty of problems,” Roger said. “He drank lye, for a start. And he had cancer too. Prostate, bone, kidney, liver, pancreas … but he had no fractures in his lifetime. And no abdominal surgery.”
This silence wasn’t so much spaghetti western as Buster Keaton. Della broke it.
“Of course!” she said. “Of course! Why didn’t we see?”
“Right! Of course!” I said. “See what?”
“Why there was the overkill,” Della said. “Why all those clues were planted to say ‘Thomas Shatner’.” She beamed at us. “Because it wasn’t Thomas Shatner at all!”
“Bingo,” Roger said. “I’m getting more pizza, Della, and you can choose what kind.”
“It wasn’t Thomas Shatner?” I said. “But it looks like him. The teeth. It looks exactly like him.”
“So … you knew this guy?” Devin said.
“We’ve got pictures of him,” I said. “Todd, show Devin the yearbook. It’s right behind you.”
Todd opened the volume at the Future Homemakers of America and handed it over.
“Seriously?” Devin said. “This Photoshopped guy?”
It landed like a grenade. We all clustered round him to see if it could possibly be true that we’d missed something so obvious. I even put down my pizza slice. And looking at it with that idea in our heads, it was unmissable. The girls on either side weren’t ignoring Tam. They just didn’t know he was there. Because he wasn’t there. And the reason his picture wasn’t in the run of senior class thumbnails was that there was no room to shoehorn him in there. And as for the portraits of the senior class council? He had never been there at all.
“What about the guy in Florida?” said Kathi, pulling up the Facebook page of Thomas O. Shatner and handing her phone to Devin.
Devin studied the blurry pictures of the motorshow and the poker game and the barbecue and shrugged. “It’s the same guy,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s Florida. The light’s all wrong. I think this one is Arizona. And I think that one is Mexico. Look at the beers on the table.”
“So did Thomas Shatner not exist?” I said.
Roger cleared his throat ostentatiously. “What did I tell you?” he asked. “We’ve got his records at the hospital. He existed. But he’s not this guy Photoshopped into the yearbook, or looking like he’s having such a great life on Facebook, or washed up last week in the slough.”
“So we’ve got two questions,” Noleen said. “Where’d he go? And who’s that laying in the morgue?”
“So what happens now?” said Devin. “Aside from more pizza,” he added, just in case Roger had forgotten.
“Now,” I said, “we go and talk to Mrs. Ortiz. Of all the people we’ve spoken to this crazy week, she’s the only one who’s been straight with us. Joan hid her married name and for sure she hid her nephew. Mo Heedles hid a nephew too, and as for Mo Tafoya! She hid a fake real estate deal and a granddaughter paid to do God knows all what. And no matter what Joan said about Mr. Ortiz killing his daughter and Mrs. Ortiz covering it up, my money’s on that old lady as the source of truth around here.”
“Right,” said Todd. “No time like the present. Devin, you stay here and order another pizza, if you like. Della, can you come? Where’s Diego?”
“Chuck E. Cheeze’s and a sleepover,” Della said. “Try and stop me.”
“I’m on the desk,” said Noleen. “But I’ll be with you in spirit. Rog?”
“Tuckered,” said Roger. “I’d be no good to you.”
“Just don’t sext with Maurice,” said Todd, “or I will cut you.”
“I’ll drive,” said Kathi. “I’ve hardly touched my beer.” I knew it was more that she loved Roger’s car, but I wasn’t going to argue with her.
“At least she’s still up,” I said when we got to Mrs. Ortiz’s little house on Lark Place. It was blazing with light inside and out. Fairy lights strung along the porch and every window lit it up like an advent calendar. There were a good handful of cars parked on the street too.
“You know,” I said, looking at them, “if these had decals on their back windows, I’d be tempted to say they were Mo’s, Mo’s, and Joan’s.”
“But they don’t,” Todd said.
We could hear voices as we walked up the path and music too as we got close to the door. I rang the bell.
“Adelante!” a voice cried out. It sounded like Mrs. Ortiz and she sounded happy.
So we opened the door and took in the view.
Joan was in the chair that had been empty. Mo and Also-Mo were in the love seat. Little old Mrs. Ortiz was standing up halfway to the kitchen with a tray of cakes (blue), and in the other chair was a middle-aged woman I didn’t know.
“Hello, everyone,” I said.
Kathi was more on the ball than me though, because what she said was, “Patti. Welcome home.”
Twenty-Eight
If Mrs. Ortiz’s house had swinging saloon doors; if Todd, Kathi, Della, and me were wearing spurs; if Mo, Mo, Patti, and Joan were playing poker; and if the music had stopped, it still could not have been a more classic stand-off. Hoo, those things can last a long time when everyone’s truly gobsmacked.
“It was the cat decals, wasn’t it?” Mo Heedles said at last. “I’m sorry, girls. I should never have tried to persuade you.”
“No,” said Mo Tafoya. “I overdid it with the real estate listing. It’s all on me.”
“Oh please,” said Joan. “It was me picking the wrong porch, trying to send a message. I’ll never forgive myself. And wanting to clean that stupid kilt.”
“It is my doing,” said Mrs. Ortiz, putting down the tray of cakes and coming to squeeze Patti’s shoulders. “I told the wrong story to them when they came. I couldn’t do that to the memory of your father, Patti. I couldn’t bring myself to say he harmed you. I spoiled everything. Old fool!”
“It was none of you,” I said. “You all played a total blinder. You knocked it out of the park, I mean.”
“All except Howie!” said Mrs. Ortiz.
“Oh, Mamá,” said Patti, while the rest of us—the Last Ditch contingent anyway—were all thinking who?
“Is that one of the nephews?” I said. “Because it was the youngsters that blew it. Your nephew taking the class ring off, Mo. And your granddaughter cutting herself on her shears, Mo. And as for your nephew, Joan, blundering into the wrong dry cleaners! They all sucked. But none of you put a foot wrong. Mrs. Ortiz, we never doubted your story for a moment. Your story made us think Joan was lying.”
“I’m sorry,” said Joan.
“And your porch thing worked,” Della said. “We thought John Worth was lying.”
“Poor John,” said Patti.
“And the real estate listing worked too,” said Kathi. “We thought Mike was lying.”
“Who’s Mike?” said Patti.
“Sorry,” Kathi said. “Molly Rankinson. Cop on the case.”
“And no one busted the decals,” said Todd. “I still don’t know what the hell they were supposed to be for.”
“Me either,” said Patti.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I busted the decals. I knew they were phone numbers. I’ve been saying it for days and no one believed me.”
“Yeah, the cat memorials were phone numbers,” Mo Hee
dles said. “For our burner phones. So we could stay in touch with each other without a record of it. I couldn’t believe it when you started calling instead, Lexy.”
“Burner phones?” I asked her. “Like the one you tried to hide in your key bowl?”
“We got carried away,” Mo Heedles said.
“And why didn’t John’s work?” I said.
“Because his is real,” said Mo Tafoya. “He must have loved that cat. He’s not part of this. We just … at the planning stage, it seemed like a good idea. To mock him. It was only ever supposed to be a private joke.”
“And putting a corpse on his porch?” said Della. “Was that a joke too?”
“It was a warning,” Joan said. “When the body was IDed as Thomas Shatner, John Worth was supposed to keep his mouth shut. He was supposed to find the body, call the police, and then agree that it was Tam Shatner.”
“But he found the body, stripped it, redressed it, and dumped it in the slough,” said Todd.
“Because he lives down in L.A.,” I said. “And he didn’t know Creek House was in the way.”
“And then the missing class ring slowed down the ID,” said Kathi.
“This is all very interesting,” Della said, “but we’re not really getting to the heart of the matter, are we? Who is that in the morgue? And who killed him?”
“The case is closed,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “Thomas Shatner is the one in the morgue. And it was suicide.”
“Except a doctor friend of ours found Thomas Shatner’s medical and dental records, and it’s not,” I said. Todd bridled at the word friend but said nothing.
“What medical records?” said Joan. “I ID’d him on the slab and I loaned the cops my yearbook too.”
“A doctored yearbook?” I said. “Oh yes, we’re onto that.”
“Was it you who stole it from the library?” Mo Heedles said. “That wasn’t very helpful. We knew the cops would go there first because they need a warrant to look at the one in the high school archive. When they discovered it was missing, they were pissed. Luckily, they came to me regarding the real estate listing over the weekend so I gave them my copy—doctored, as you put it—and they IDed from that.”
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