by Sandra Balzo
She laughed. ‘Time is all I’ve got,’ she said rubbing her bare arms. ‘Damn Aurora for taking my coat.’
Not to mention getting killed in it. ‘Maybe she thought it was tit for tat,’ I said.
‘Twit for what?’ Aurora asked.
‘No, no. Tit for tat. It means...oh, never mind.’ I figured ‘tit’ would be even tougher to explain than ‘twit’. ‘What I meant was that maybe Aurora figured that since you took her husband, she’d take your coat as revenge.’
‘Believe me on this one,’ Verdeaux said. ‘The coat was worth more.’
I wasn’t surprised to hear that from her, given Jacque’s earlier evaluation. Of Verdeaux, not Way.
Still, I made my eyes widen in surprise. ‘Really? Way was...’ I hesitated. ‘...legendary around here.’
‘Legendary pain in the butt, as far as I’m concerned,’ Verdeaux said. ‘We were all set with this deal and he starts listening to his ex-wife. Tell me something, who does that?’
‘A man who still loves her?’ I hazarded.
‘Pfft,’ she said, continuing down the aisle and around the corner to the stationery section.
I scurried after her. ‘Pfft’?’
Verdeaux had stopped at my digs and picked up my tablecloth. ‘Pfft. As in, Way didn’t love anyone. Except maybe that kid of his.’
‘Oliver?’ I was too surprised at what she’d said to stop her from wrapping herself up in Sponge Bob. ‘Way barely paid attention to him.’
‘Pfft,’ Verdeaux said again.
I wanted to smack her one. For both the ‘pfft’ and the tablecloth.
‘That son of his? A crazy,’ she continued, ‘but Way still insisted he be allowed to work here at the plaza. Even after Gross National Produce and I took over the place.’
Interesting. Way apparently had cared about Oliver. Or at least he didn’t want to risk having to support him.
Verdeaux pulled off the tablecloth and dumped it back on the floor. ‘This is worthless,’ she said. ‘I want my coat.’
‘Go and strip it off Aurora’s body,’ I said, deadpan. ‘It’s in Luc’s freezer. Now, why do you say Oliver is “a crazy”?’
Verdeaux shivered. That would teach her to diss Sponge Bob. ‘You’re kidding, right? He’s like that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber guy, except he lives in a shopping mall instead of a cabin. Keeps to himself. The only thing I’ve seen the kid wear is that camouflage sweatshirt. The one with the hood. He had it on today - or maybe yesterday, by now - when he was snow-blowing, for God’s sake. You think that’s not crazy?’
‘I think it’s being a teen...’ I stopped. ‘Wait a second. Oliver was snow-blowing? Not Way?’
‘Way? Snow-blow?’ Verdeaux looked shocked. ‘He couldn’t even change a light bulb.’
It might be true, I guessed. I’d certainly never seen Way change a light bulb. ‘You are absolutely sure it was Oliver snow-blowing? You saw him?’
‘Of course I saw him. He was clearing the sidewalk just past your shop when I circled the lot the first time to see if Way was in his office.’
‘And you say Oliver was wearing his hooded sweatshirt?’ I couldn’t even imagine it in the midst of the snowstorm. Then again, I had a teenaged son, too, and I knew what it took to get him to put on a jacket. Eighteen inches of snow would be just about right. ‘Did Oliver have the hood up?’
‘He did.’ Verdeaux just looked at me.
‘So how do you know it was him?’ I asked triumphantly. It was an ‘aha!’ moment, and I don’t have a lot of them.
Verdeaux shook her head and walked by me, treading on Sponge Bob as she did. ‘Because the hood blew down as he turned the corner.’
So much for ‘aha’. This felt more like ‘uh-oh’.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Which corner?’
‘The one right by your store,’ Verdeaux said impatiently.
‘But that’s not far from where Way’s body was found.’
‘With the snow-blower.’ Verdeaux was speaking slowly and distinctly, like she was talking to a moron. Which, arguably, she was.
‘You’re suggesting that Oliver killed Way?’ I asked. ‘But why didn't you say something earlier?’
Verdeaux shrugged. ‘Unlike you, I thought I'd let the police handle it. I am stuck here with him, you know.’
‘But what about Aurora? Even if Oliver hated his father, I think he genuinely cared about his mother.’
‘Oh, I do, too,’ Verdeaux said, pausing at the corner. ‘But maybe Oscar didn’t intend to kill her.’
‘Oliver,’ I automatically corrected. ‘And what do you mean that he didn’t intend to kill his mother? You think he bashed her in the head by accident?’
‘Of course not. The kid saw Aurora wearing my coat and thought it was me. Pfft.’ A dismissive wave of her hand. ‘After all, I was the one boffing his father.’
Chapter 20
It was true, of course. Naomi Verdeaux was ‘boffing’, as she put it, Way Benson.
She wasn't the only one, though. Not now, nor over the last few years.
Yet Aurora had been wearing Verdeaux’s coat. Who had known about that?
The answer was simple: anyone who had been in Goddard’s when Aurora donned the coat and went outside.
But who was ‘anyone’?
My name badge chart told me who had left Goddard’s long enough to kill Aurora outside. What it didn’t tell me was who was in Goddard’s at the moment she’d stormed out.
I tried to think.
I’d been talking to Verdeaux, of course, after her argument with Aurora. Both of us had watched Way’s widow leave. I also had a memory of Luc and Caron being around. I honestly wasn’t sure who else, if anyone, was.
Because it made my head hurt, I set that question aside in favor of a more intriguing one.
Verdeaux said Oliver had on his camouflage sweatshirt. That, in itself, wasn’t a surprise. He wore the shirt virtually everywhere. What was a surprise was that Oliver didn’t have it on now. He’d been wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt when he’d arrived at the scene of his father’s murder. I remembered it clearly because his face seemed to match the green of his shirt when he’d looked down at Way’s body. I thought he might be sick.
So where was the hooded sweatshirt now? Could it be hanging up somewhere, drying out from the snow? Or from his father’s blood?
Intriguing question number two: If Oliver had been wearing the sweatshirt - which, like most of Eric’s ‘favorite’ clothes, was nearly threadbare from washing - how had he managed to hide something as bulky as a cleaver or hatchet under it?
And, speaking of washing, the clattering sounds in the kitchen indicated that someone was doing their best to clean up the dishes from dinner even without running water. Since Oliver had abandoned the magazine rack and Mrs G was nowhere in sight, I assumed they were in the kitchen.
The perfect opportunity to talk in private.
As I stuck my head in, I saw Oliver waiting to scrape a pile of egg salad into the garbage. Mrs G was attempting to shove something already in the trash bin farther down in order to make room.
‘Wait!’ I cried, just as Oliver dumped the egg salad. I peered into the trash container. Ugh. Camouflage, ala egg salad.
As Oliver and Mrs G backed off, I grabbed a plastic glove from a box on the sink. Slipping it on, I gingerly reached in and pulled out the sweatshirt. In addition to the egg, mayo and a little chopped onion and pimento, the shirt was spattered with dark brown teardrops.
‘Does one of you want to explain this?’ I asked, dangling the shirt in front of them.
Oliver was looking down at the floor like Frank as a puppy after being caught in a puddle of his own piddle. ‘I...I...’ He looked up hopefully. ‘Cut myself?’
‘C’mon,’ I said, ‘we all know that DNA testing will show this is blood all right, but not yours.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Mrs G said. ‘I think a lab will find the alleles in common with Oliver here.’
Alleles? Alleles?
&n
bsp; Apparently, Mrs G was a closet CSI fan.
Well, two could play that game. ‘Certainly they will, because Oliver is Way’s son and this -’ I raised the sweatshirt dramatically and a glob of egg salad fell on to my shoe - ‘is Way’s blood.’
It looked like Mrs G was going to argue the point, but Oliver interrupted. ‘I didn’t kill him.’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘At least I don’t think I did.’
‘Of course you didn’t kill him,’ Mrs G said, coming up and putting her arm around him. ‘He was already dead.’
I wasn’t so sure, given all the blood sprayed around the John Deere at the scene, but I wanted them to keep talking. ‘Your father was dead when you got there?’
Oliver nodded, relieved, I thought, to finally be able to tell his side of the story. ‘After I cleaned off the sidewalk and the first row of parking on your side, I went around the corner, like toward the service entrance? I saw something sticking out of the snow and figured it was the handle of a shovel.’
‘Something you’d no doubt be blamed for leaving out, knowing that father of yours,’ Mrs G added, shaking her head.
Objection. Leading the witness.
But Oliver just shrugged. ‘Probably. So I snow-blowed over to pick it up, but before I got close enough to reach it...’ He held up his hands in front of his face and closed his eyes, as though remembering the moment. Or, more likely, trying not to. Good luck with that.
I was buying Oliver’s version, since I’d also thought the handle of the cleaver was a shovel nearly buried in the snow. The position of Way’s body, head pointing toward the snow-blower, supported it, too.
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘Do?’ Oliver’s eyes were wide now. ‘I didn’t know what I’d hit, but I figured it had to be something big. A fox, maybe, or even a coyote, on account of there being blood everywhere. So I put the John Deere in reverse and backed up. That’s when I saw it was...was...’
I knew that Pavlik, in my place, would keep quiet and let Oliver finish the sentence, hoping he would reveal more in his struggle to explain what he’d seen and how he’d felt about it.
However, I’m not Pavlik. ‘So you realized it was your dad. What did you do then?’
Oliver looked at Mrs G. ‘Freaked. And ran straight here to Goddard’s.’
‘That’s true,’ she confirmed. ‘He was hiding right over there when I got back from your place.’
I followed her pointing finger to the corner beyond the trash barrel. Coming back to both of them, I said, ‘Then why didn’t you say anything? You had to know it would all play out eventually.’
Mrs G answered indignantly. ‘Not if you kept your nose out of it. The boy didn’t do anything.’
She punctuated the last three words using her pointing finger to poke my chest. The imposing old lady stood toe-to-toe and nearly nose-to-nose with me, her flowered dress billowing in contrast to my navy-blue tights, oversized T-shirt and fuzzy socks.
A catfight seemed less than prudent. And a lot ridiculous.
‘So what did you do next?’ I asked meekly.
Mrs G took a step back, but fixed me with an I’m-keeping-an-eye-on-you glare. ‘I gave him one of Mr G’s long-sleeved flannels from the Goodwill box and took the sweatshirt from him. Before I could get rid of it, Jacque came looking for flashlights and something to eat.’
‘Wait a second, wait a second,’ I said, holding up my hands.
Mrs G started to wag her pointing finger at me, but I was having none of it.
‘You have a Goodwill box with flannel shirts in it and you gave me just this thin T-shirt -’ I did a pirouette - ‘to wear?’
‘They’re Hank’s clothes,’ she said tightly.
‘Wearing a man’s clothes still would have been a whole lot warmer.’
‘Nobody wears Hank’s clothes.’ She poked me in the chest again. ‘Nobody.’
Except, apparently, Oliver Benson, her surrogate grandson. Mrs G’s unblinking stare and obstinate stance was starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. I hoped we wouldn’t find Hank in a rocking chair somewhere, hunting rifle clutched in his skeletal hands.
I backed down again. ‘OK, OK. I get that. No one wore Ted’s clothes, either.’
‘You divorced your husband,’ she said, eyes narrowing.
‘Damn right, and the minute he was out of sight, I burned anything he’d left behind that would catch fire.’ So, come to think about it, not even Ted got to wear Ted’s clothes.
Mrs G seemed all right with that. ‘I was going to burn Oliver’s sweatshirt, too,’ she admitted. ‘That’s why I started the fire in the woodstove. But, like I said, when Jacque came in, I had to throw the thing into the trash and leave it here.’
As with Oliver’s version, Mrs G’s made sense to me.
Then she shrugged. ‘I figured we’d dump egg salad on top of the sweatshirt and pitch the bag so no one would be the wiser.’
‘Except you, now,’ Oliver said to me.
I gauged him carefully to see if the words had been a threat, but he just looked glum.
‘The snow-blower wasn’t running when I found your father’s body,’ I said to him. ‘Did you turn it off?’
Oliver shook his head. ‘No. When I hit...umm...’
‘Your father’s body,’ Mrs G prompted.
‘Yeah.’ Oliver looked grateful he didn’t have to say the words himself. ‘Anyway, the auger jammed, so the engine cut out.’
I’d heard the John Deere’s engine die when I was in Uncommon Grounds. Rudy had come in looking for gas for the generator and I remembered thinking that the snow-blower must have run out of gas, too.
I’d assumed, as everyone else had, that it was Oliver clearing the snow. It was only after I’d found Way dead next to the machine that I had jumped to the conclusion he’d been the one operating it.
Which meant I’d been right in the first place, and just didn’t know it.
Cold comfort.
I shivered and rubbed my arms. ‘Did you see your dad this morning?’
‘No. Well, at least not until...’ Oliver hesitated. ‘...the accident. I’d gotten a text message from Mom saying he was ticked because he couldn’t find me. That he wanted to keep the parking lot cleared as the snow fell so cars could get in and out.’
You could say lots of things about Way, most of them unflattering, but he did do what he could to keep us in business and paying rent. Until he kicked us out.
It occurred to me, suddenly, that I didn’t know which of Oliver’s parents he lived with. I asked him.
‘Both,’ he said. ‘Like some nights I stay with my dad, other nights with my mom.’
Aurora had said Way called her looking for Oliver. ‘So you weren’t at your father’s place last night?’
‘No, it was my mom’s turn.’
‘But you weren’t there, either,’ I said with all the ‘mom-ness’ a mother could muster.
It worked. He turned red. ‘I...umm, I stayed with friends.’
That felt right, too. The next question I’d ask Eric was which friends.
But I wasn’t Oliver’s parent. In fact, nobody was anymore.
‘And when you got here?’ I asked, my voice softening. ‘You didn’t see your father when you took out the snow-blower?’
The machine and other maintenance items were stored in the dumpster corral about thirty yards from the rear service door.
‘Uh-uh.’ Oliver shook his head. ‘I was trying to avoid him because I knew he’d give me shit - sorry, grief - for not answering his calls. I just went straight to the corral and wheeled the thing out.’
‘Then, could your father have been lying near the service door already?’
Oliver seemed to think about it. ‘Maybe, Mrs Thorsen. You see, I went straight from the corral to the parking lot and did the front row of that and your sidewalk. Then I went back around the building toward the service door.’
I said, ‘Did you hear anything?’
A glimmer of a smile. ‘Not over t
he four-cycle engine of the John Deere I was pushing.’
Maggy, you’re an idiot. ‘OK, did you see anything?’
‘Just the...the...’
‘Shovel handle,’ Mrs G said, giving his shoulder a squeeze. ‘And that’s enough for now.’ A fierce - fiercely protecting, like unto murderous - stare at me.
It was enough, not just because I believed Oliver and felt sorry for what he’d been through. I also needed time to mull over this new information, especially on the sequencing of events. Not to mention that Mrs G was continuing to give me the creeps.
I nodded stiffly and left the kitchen, stopping by the wood stove’s guttering fire to warm myself.
Once I had assumed - wrongly - that Way was the one snow-blowing and the John Deere’s engine had stopped when it chopped up his head. I’d been right about the last, at least.
Thing is, though, by the time Oliver stumbled on Way, he already was on the ground with a hatchet in his back. And, enough new snow had fallen to hide the body, if not the ‘shovel handle’.
But which had actually killed Way? The meat cleaver? Or the snow-blower? The medical examiner would have the answer. But only eventually.
Either way, though, the collision with Way’s head must have been an accident. For Oliver’s sake, I hoped his dad was dead when the boy hit him. If Way hadn’t been, though, I imagined he was bleeding out and well on his way to freezing to death already.
But enough cheery thoughts. Back to what I once heard our Sheriff Pavlik call the ‘objectivity of chronology’.
The new information meant my timeline was wrong. I needed to figure out not who was unaccounted for at the exact moment the snow-blower had cut out. No, I had to find out who didn’t have an alibi for the period of time between Way starting the generator and when Oliver had found his body.
Time to reshuffle my name badges.
Chapter 21
As I stepped into my dead-end aisle, I saw Frank at the far end.
His head popped up and he looked overjoyed to see me.
This posed a problem, since my aisle-wide suspect chart was between us.
How Frank had gotten to the opposite end of the aisle, I didn’t know. Levitating - along with sit, stay, down and fetch - was not in his doggy bag of tricks.