Deadly Reunion

by Mary Bowers

  “How are you going to pack all the stuff you’ve bought when it’s time to go home?” I asked her.

  “Oh, I’m not bringing this on the airplane. I always ship the things I buy when I travel.”

  I got an image of an exploding house, clothes flying out in every direction, spike heels impaling trees, lacy bras hanging from overhead wires, because Coco’s closets had finally burst.

  I thought fast. “When you do your spring cleaning, ship the things you want to get rid of to Girlfriend’s. I’ll pay for the shipping.” It’d be worth it. Coco only bought the best.

  * * * * *

  The lucky fellas were Benny Flannery and Sarge Pickering. Michael golfed with both of them. Benny was in the regular foursome; Sarge filled in sometimes.

  They met us at Cadbury House and we all piled into my SUV and headed for the condo. We’d have to pass by Neptune’s to get to the condo, but nobody suggested meeting at the restaurant. The guys wanted to go to the ladies first and be introduced.

  They were both from Tropical Breeze. Benny was born and raised there, and Sarge had moved to town about five years before. I’d met him once or twice, but I’d never heard his real first name. Benny I knew well. He’d been playing golf with Michael for 30 years, at least.

  Patty got Benny. Coco got Sarge. Michael figured that out, and I agreed. I didn’t know if Sarge had actually been in the military, but he had that bearing, and he looked like the type who still gets out of bed in the morning and does 100 push-ups before breakfast. Benny looked like he could use a few, but I thought he was a good match for Patty. He was accessible. She was definitely happier now that she had her dress, but she was still skittish, and I knew that Benny wouldn’t scare her. He was a teddy bear, and he had a wonderful, warm smile.

  I was amused to realize that the men were skittish too, even Sarge, who looked like he could wrestle an alligator. Not every man who can face an alligator can face a lady, though. Different kind of thing altogether.

  When Sarge got a load of Coco in her taupe silk, he looked like his knees were going to buckle. He shook her hand, called her ma’am, and stared.

  Benny said, “Hiya,” and Patty melted.

  Michael and I stood there grinning like adoring parents before the prom.

  So everybody was happy, and we were off to a pleasant evening. We put Patty and Benny in her rental car and took the lead in my SUV with Sarge and Coco, understanding instinctively that they were the couple that needed watching.

  Sarge might require backup.

  * * * * *

  Neptune’s is just the other side of the dune from the ocean, and from the second floor it has a fabulous view of the waves coming in on the beach. It happened to be the night of the full moon, and we’d made reservations for 7:30. Minutes after that, moonrise would begin.

  When the full moon rises from the ocean in St. Augustine, it comes up like a dull red planet, lurking on the horizon, an angry thing in the sky. As it rises, it clarifies, rounds out and liquefies to gold, then hardens into silver. Hours later, it’s a plain white coin in the sky, cold and distant, but during moonrise it goes through a life cycle that’s fascinating to watch.

  Michael and I sat ourselves with our backs to the windows so our friends could see it all. We took our time at dinner, going through long, small courses, and sharing nibbles. At the end, we tipped lavishly, since we’d held the best table in the house for so long.

  Oddly enough, Patty, who’d been so nervous, had relaxed the minute she’d met Benny, and they were acting like old pals by the time we were ready to leave the restaurant. Coco had been more than ready to do anything up to and including jumping into Sarge’s lap, but he was so formal and visibly nervous through apps and dinner that it wasn’t until we had dessert drinks that he started to unwind. Coco’s usual approach of going full vamp on her dates was backfiring this time. Sarge, the tough guy, was like a startled fawn when faced with Coco in maneater mode.

  I couldn’t wait to discuss it with Michael, but we went home with them in the backseat of the car, so we couldn’t talk openly about them until later on. I could see from occasional looks from him that he was thinking the same thing I was, though.

  But in the end, we never did discuss it. There were distractions.

  The moment we entered the security gate of the Anastasia Resort, we could all see that something was wrong. Halfway down the main drive, opposite the pool, red lights were flashing and a few people were standing around. In the dim, ornamental lights of the landscaping, we saw them hovering back from an ambulance and a few hastily parked squad cars.

  “Who lives down there?” Michael asked, pausing the car at the head of the main drive. My friends’ condo was the first one on the right, but he didn’t turn.

  Coco said, “A few of the people who live here have condos right there. Candy has the corner one and Betty is across the back from hers. Fred used to live in the next one next to Candy, then the Footes on the other side of Fred.”

  Decisively, Michael turned to the right and parked in front of the condo. Patty pulled the rental car in beside ours and we all got out and looked at one another.

  Before we could decide what, if anything, to do, I heard a distraught voice and turned back to the main drive. It was Candy Cutter.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Who’s the ambulance for?”

  “They found a body right in front of my condo! Nobody will tell me anything, and I’m just about to die of fright. Harold is standing right there, but he won’t talk to me. He’s acting like he’s in shock. I don’t know what’s going on, and neither do any of the other people standing around. They won’t tell us anything.”

  Giving one another uneasy glances, we began to walk hesitantly down the main drive toward the flashing lights. The medics were on the ground, working hard next to some flowering bushes, and as we watched, they lifted a stretcher and slid it into the back of the ambulance. Harold climbed in after them, and after a flurry of slamming doors and hustling around, they were off.

  “Did anybody see who that was on the stretcher?” I asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it was Edith Foote,” Michael said.

  Candy, incredibly, said, “They could have at least told us what was going on.”

  I looked through the small group of people walking away and didn’t recognize anybody I knew, but Candy called out a name and buttonholed a middle-aged woman, then came back.

  “She doesn’t know anything either, but you were right, it was Edith, and she didn’t look good. What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know that we should do anything,” Michael said. “She’s in good hands. I’m sure we’ll find out in the morning.”

  “I don’t want to wait until morning!” she said like a bratty child.

  We turned and walked away from her without comment.

  “Do you know her?” I heard Benny ask, once we were far enough away from Candy.

  Patty’s voice answered, “You mean Candy, or the lady on the stretcher?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Not really. They were at the party.”

  “Oh,” Benny said. Nobody asked any more questions.

  The next morning, Michael made a few calls and found out that Edith had been dead on arrival. She’d been strangled.

  Chapter 14

  I wore the cat pendant every day after that. Michael and the rest of the Breezers viewed it with a bit of uneasiness, Patty said, “That’s cute,” and Coco did an in-depth fashion-accessory analysis that went way over my head. I think she approved. Who knows?

  We got bits of information about the tragedy throughout the day. Edith had gone to the beach to watch the full moon rise just about the time we’d started out for Neptune’s, and Harold had been with her. For some reason he’d come back without her, and when she hadn’t come home within a reasonable time, he went looking for her with a flashlight; it was dark by then. He’d walked all the way out to the beach and back before finding her lying under a big ole
ander bush at the end of their condo block. He must have walked right past her when he’d started out to look for her. She was cold by the time he found her.

  Nobody knew why he’d come back without her in the first place, but an out-of-town couple that had gone to the beach at sunset confirmed his story. They’d had a brief, friendly encounter with the Footes on the beach, then had walked with Harold back to the Resort, leaving Edith standing at the edge of the ocean, gazing at the eastern horizon. There had been no argument. They hadn’t seen anyone else approach her. She’d been fine when they had left her.

  I decided to spend the day in the condo with Coco and Patty. It was Friday already, and the next day they were leaving for home. Now that they were going, I realized I was going to miss them. Realized how much I must have been missing that comfortable closeness for all these years and not even known it. Strange, I thought, driving north on Route A1A, I hadn’t seen them in the flesh for almost fifty years, and within hours we were the same old gang again, hanging out, knowing what the other one was going to say before she said it, making smart remarks and knowing nobody was going to get mad, not really. It was going to be hard to say goodbye. I got wistful.

  A stray thought passed through my mind, suggesting that the St. Augustine police might ask them to stay longer. They really could, although it would mean moving from the condo, which they only had for the week.

  They could come stay with us at Cadbury House!

  But of course they wouldn’t be asked to stay in the area. Edith’s murder might or might not be related to Fred’s, but it didn’t take a bloodhound to notice the juxtaposition, and my friends had a rock-solid alibi for the time that Edith was killed. They’d been in a public place about four miles down the coast at the time.

  We hadn’t made any plans for the day, and I was wondering what to do with them besides sit around and talk, (which would have been nice), as I pulled next to their car in front of the condo. Before I could even get out of my SUV, I saw someone coming toward me from the main drive.

  It was Jason the handyman, and he looked determined.

  “Can I talk to you?” he asked.

  I don’t know why I felt afraid, but I did. I took my faience pendant in my hand and held it.

  “About what?”

  He leveled his gaze at me. “You know what.”

  I suspected it wasn’t The Cattery’s floor, back at Orphans of the Storm.

  * * * * *

  I’d tried to talk to Carlene about her kissin’ cousin and gotten a whole lot of nothing out of her earlier that morning. She’d just looked at me with big brown eyes and said what a nice guy he was, and didn’t he do a good job on the floor?

  I was coming out of the kennel after the early feeding, and she was coming out of The Cattery; she was especially good with cats, and unofficially, she’d become our feline specialist. The floor that had needed mending was in her territory, in a way, and that’s why, she explained, she’d felt it was her job, sort of, to find somebody to fix it, and she’d asked Jason once but he’d been too busy, but suddenly, a few days ago, he’d called her and asked if it still needed fixing, and wasn’t he wonderful?

  Yeah, wonderful, I thought, looking at him with my hand around my lucky pendant.

  “I’ve been trying to talk to you. Edith is dead. Did you know?”

  “Why would you want to talk to me about that?”

  He stared at me for a moment, then looked down at the hand that clasped the pendant. Slowly, I opened my hand and dropped it at my side.

  He hesitated, then let it out in a rush. “You’ve done it before. Figured it out, I mean. Ever since that cat . . . I read that guy’s book . . . Visions of Ancient Egypt? It’s about you, right? And that cat?”

  The self-fulfilling prophesy. Bernie was right. I was just going to have to deal with it. I don’t go out of my way to get involved with murders, but ever since that first time, people keep bringing them to me, like cats with dead mice, presenting little treats to their humans.

  I heard a car pulling up and parking behind me, and Jason’s eyes got wide.

  “I gotta go,” he said, and he left me standing there, blinking. I turned around to see Detectives Bruno and Carver coming toward me.

  “What did he want?” Bruno asked lazily, like it didn’t matter.

  “He never said.”

  Bruno gazed a moment, as if he didn’t believe me.

  “My friends and I were out on a date last night,” I said. “You know – when Edith – I heard about it. What happened?”

  Carver glanced at his partner, but Bruno continued to calmly stare at me.

  “Why did you park down here?” I asked. “The Footes live down there.”

  “Mind if we come in and talk to you and your friends for a bit?”

  “I told you –“

  “We won’t take up much of your time.”

  I glared with my mouth slightly open and finally said, “Oh, all right!”

  Here it was, my last full day with my lifelong friends, and we had to have police hanging around!

  When we finally got into the condo, I was whipsawed again.

  “Don’t worry, officers,” Coco said, floating forward in a gauzy beach cover-up. “We’ve already changed our reservations. We can’t leave Taylor in a mess like this. We’re going to see this thing through, aren’t we, Patty?”

  “It’s not my mess,” I told her. Then I blinked and added, “I thought you had to give up the condo.”

  “We do. But there’s plenty of room at that mansion of yours, isn’t there? And really, Taylor, we haven’t been able to catch up much, what with all the interruptions. We got to talking about how much we were going to miss you, and how bad we felt leaving you with all these murders going on, and we decided there was no reason to rush home. We want to spend more time with you.”

  I’d been thinking the same thing myself twenty minutes before, but I wasn’t ready for it when she laid it on me. I tried to look happy, but I’m not sure I managed. All I could do was graciously offer them the comforts of our home, and send Michael a quick text: Tell Myrtle to get 2 guest rooms ready. They’re coming to stay tomorrow. With us. Don’t know for how long.

  Myrtle was going to be furious. I thought about that and felt a little better.

  * * * * *

  “Under the oleander bush,” I said pensively, once we were all settled around the dining room table with coffee. It’s amazing that Detective Bruno always looks so sleepy, with all the coffee he drinks.

  Coco had decided that young Detective Carver was no Adonis, but he was cute enough, and she made sure she took the seat next to him and proceeded to coo. Disgusting. Especially since I already suspected that Sarge Pickering was the real reason she wanted to hang around a while.

  “Kind of a theme,” Bruno said. “But she wasn’t poisoned.”

  “Somebody said strangled.”

  “Garroted.”

  “Gar – you mean with some kind of device?”

  He nodded blandly. “A garrote.”

  Coco giggled for some reason. For myself, I didn’t take it as sly humor.

  I began to make little motions toward my neck. “Was the . . . .”

  “Garrote.”

  “Yeah, that. Was it still around her neck?”

  “No. It’s in the river by now, or the ocean, or buried somewhere. Skin cells. Those murder shows on TV get all the police procedure wrong, but they tend to get the forensics kinda right, except for the fact that they make them lightning-fast. Everybody’s grandma knows by now that if you do more than just look at something, you leave your DNA on it. The garrote would have had the killer’s skin cells, unless he’d worn gloves.”

  “’He?’”

  “Actually, a garrote gives you leverage. Makes it easier. And Edith Foote was 81, and very small. It could have been a woman, if she’d managed to catch Mrs. Foote off-guard. The main drive through this development has no lights. There are some tree lights on timers, but if people don’t
leave their porch lights on, it’s not very bright in here at night. Whoever it was could have popped out of the bush at Mrs. Foote and made quick work of her.”

  “If they’d known she was coming,” I said, realizing that the only one who knew Edith would be coming was her husband, Harold.

  “We’re still looking at the husband,” he said, reading my mind.

  “Oh, no, you can’t!” Coco exclaimed. “He’s such a sweetheart. They were devoted to one another.”

  I thought about Candy’s gossip about Fred and Edith. Love triangles can happen at any age, and even octogenarians have been known to kill for love.

  “What are you thinking?” Bruno asked me gently.

  “Something stupid.”

  “Stupid is sometimes true.”

  With plenty of disclaimers, I told him what Candy had said, finishing with, “Not that I believe it. Have you talked to Candy?”

  Detective Carver had said nothing, at the mention of the lady who’d popped out at him in a negligee on the night of Fred’s murder, he gave a weary little sigh. Well, what had he expected when he’d joined the police force? That he’d be hobnobbing with royalty all the time? Or even people with all their clothes on?

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, I guess you’d better put her back on the daily joy list.”

  He shrugged.

  Patty’s cell phone rang, and she excused herself and went into the living room to answer it. I heard bits and pieces of her conversation in between what Bruno was saying, and gathered she was telling somebody about her change in travel plans, and the reason why. Coco turned right around and eavesdropped, but I continued to concentrate on the detectives.

  They didn’t stay much longer, but before they left, as a kind of afterthought, after they’d stood up and taken one step toward the door, Bruno turned back.

  “By the way, Mr. Rambo’s poisoning turned out to be a waste of the murderer’s time and talent.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Fred died. Was somebody else supposed to be the victim?”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean Mr. Rambo was dying anyway.”

  My mouth fell open.