Detour

by Lorena McCourtney

  Rain now battered the top of the pickup with a clackety-clack that sounded as if we were stranded in a tin can under attack by a dozen nail guns. The mud smelled even worse in this enclosed space—definitely Black Lagoon-ish—although I didn’t mention that to Mac. He shivered, and I rummaged under the seat and found an old burlap bag he used to spread on the ground when he needed to crawl under the pickup. The bag was oily and dirty, with a surprise touch of dried mustard, but he mumbled grateful thanks when I wrapped it around his shoulders.

  Me, more minutes later and somewhat warmed by the heater: “I wonder who was trying to call her when I found her.”

  “Maybe the phone will tell the police something important.”

  Me again, after more minutes: “I wonder what happened to the gun.”

  Finally, Mac asked the questions that really mattered. “Who killed her? And why? And why way out here?”

  I thought of possible answers.

  She may have been here looking at what might soon be her new property, and someone saw her vehicle and wanted it. A vehicle theft that escalated into murder. Nothing personal. Maybe she’d encountered the thief while he was in the act of stealing the vehicle and he shot her and carried her to the far cabin.

  The facts punched an instant hole in that scenario. Renée’s SUV wasn’t stolen; it was in the parking lot in town, according to the upswept-hair lady.

  Of course, she may have owned some other vehicle in addition to the SUV and had come here in it. Maybe something sleek and pricey, like Brian’s Porsche?

  Awful as it was, I wanted to believe the car-theft version of her death. It was an impersonal kill-the-owner-of-the-car thing, not a personal kill-Renée murder. Not that it mattered, I reminded myself. Dead was dead.

  Renée had been playing a dangerous game involved with another woman’s husband. Especially if that other woman, sweet and gentle as she might look in a Dolly Dinosaur costume, had already killed once and probably wasn’t about to let Renée snatch the husband she’d killed to acquire. This put a new spin on Kathy’s nervousness that last time Magnolia and I saw her when we went to say goodbye. She very likely would be nervous if she’d recently put a bullet in Renée’s chest. Did she know anything about guns and shooting? Did she or Brian own a gun?

  Or maybe Brian never intended to leave his wife. Renée was just a fling, and he got rid of her, maybe in the heat of an argument when she forced a showdown. Kathy or me, Brian. Make a decision. And his answer was a bullet in her chest.

  Though the isolated, burned cabin seemed an odd place for a showdown. Had Brian killed her somewhere else and brought her to the cove?

  I felt as if I were floundering in sleaze as deep as the mud Mac had fallen into. Affairs. Infidelity. Murder. I took a mental sidestep and pointed out to myself that it could be some business thing, something totally unrelated to Renée’s messy personal life. Hadn’t I recently read about some real estate woman being murdered when she was holding an open house? Although the burned-out cabin was hardly open-house territory.

  Not my job to figure it out. We’d called 911. Help was coming.

  Sooner than I expected, a siren wailed in the distance, and then a white police car with Sheriff and an official emblem emblazoned on the side skidded up behind us. We both opened our doors and got out, although from the way the officer warily put his hand on his gun maybe we should have stayed in the pickup and let him come to us.

  “You called nine-one-one? About a dead woman?” He looked around warily, reminding me that 911 calls have been used to ensnare law enforcement officers in deadly ambush.

  “She’s back there.” Mac pointed to the line of burned cabins only partly visible through the fog and encroaching brush and vines.

  “How’d you find her?”

  “We were looking at the property, thinking about buying it, and I heard a phone ringing,” I said.

  I thought the officer might insist on more information, especially since he eyed muddy Mac warily, but apparently he figured the first priority was to make sure the woman was actually dead, not in need of emergency medical care. Non-law-enforcement people like us probably aren’t noted for their expertise in such matters. I didn’t see any need to tell the officer this wasn’t our first dead-body encounter. Not that such earlier encounters made us experts.

  He took a minute to take our names and check driver’s licenses for identity. He called them in on his car radio and then we headed across the old parking lot. The asphalt was buckled and rough, weeds rampant in the cracks, but it was easier walking there than struggling through the brush and ferns and vines growing around the burned cabins. Even with the old burlap bag draped around him, Mac looked shivery and miserable. At the cabin, the officer stuck out a hand to stop us.

  “Stay back,” he ordered, his other hand on his gun as he stepped through the doorway.

  I hadn’t seen a shoulder mic, but the officer must have been wearing one under the heavy jacket, or maybe he carried some handheld radio, because, although I couldn’t make out the words, I could hear him talking. I wished Mac had the officer’s wide-brimmed hat for protection from the rain. I guiltily corrected my wishing. I wished Mac had a hat like the officer’s; even in a wish I shouldn’t be depriving the deputy of his hat.

  After several minutes, the officer came back to the doorway. “Did you see anyone else? Any vehicles?”

  “No,” Mac said.

  “Did you touch anything in here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Did you see a weapon?”

  Mac’s turn to answer. “No. But we didn’t look for one.”

  “You know who she is?”

  I had the feeling he recognized Renée and was just checking to see if we did. I got out the card and handed it to him. It bore muddy fingerprints from when Mac had handled it with Black Lagoon hands.

  “You were meeting her here?”

  “Oh, no. We’d been trying to get hold of her, but she didn’t answer her cell phone, so we decided to come out and look at the property by ourselves. Her cell phone is how we found her body. I heard it ringing. Look, can we go back to the pickup? Or maybe on back to our motorhome? Mac is freezing.”

  “Let me get some information first. It’ll only take a minute.” He dug out the little notebook law enforcement people always seem to carry even in these times of high-tech equipment. He sheltered it under his jacket while we gave him phone numbers and where we were staying in the motorhome. He’d already written down the license number of the pickup, but now he also wanted the motorhome license number. Can anyone remember their license numbers right off the bat like that?

  We couldn’t, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that not remembering was somehow a black mark against us. He closed the notebook. “Just don’t pick up and leave. I’ll come to your motorhome to talk to you later.”

  “Okay.”

  He gave Mac a final wary glance. Rain had washed off some of the mud, but he still looked like a mud zombie from a horror movie. “What happened to you?”

  Mac apparently didn’t want to admit what he considered a dumb move in falling into the swamp, so all he did was mutter, “Little accident.”

  “Do you need medical attention?” the officer asked.

  “I need a shower.”

  The officer nodded without comment, but he asked, “The property is for sale? I didn’t see a sign.”

  “That’s why we were trying to get hold of Renée,” I explained. “We learned she had an option to buy it, and we wondered if she planned to sell. We’re in the area because Mac was doing an article about the Ghost Goat Dinosaur Park for a travel magazine, but we’re also looking for a place to settle down and live.”

  I had the uneasy feeling that was TMI. Too much information. Like a thief offering too much information about why he has a ham and two packages of steak under his coat.

  “We’re going to leave now,” Mac said. He held his arms away from his body as if the m
ud in his armpits might be hardening into solid lumps. “We’ll be at the motorhome.”

  We went back to the pickup, and Mac drove carefully to Sheila’s. I tried not to breathe too deeply of the swamp-mud scent that hung like a miasma around us. We met two more cars with sheriff department insignias on the sides, plus one from the California Highway Patrol.

  MAC

  Back at the motorhome, Ivy wanted to rush me into the shower, but even though rain had washed away some of my mud covering, this was still too big a project for the motorhome’s little shower system. Like trying to clean up a wallowing pig with a Waterpik. I got another hose out of a storage compartment under the motorhome, hooked it up to a faucet, and stood in the grass while Ivy hosed me off. I shivered. Even so, I was tempted to strip down to an elemental skinny-dipping state right there outside the motorhome. Inside the clothes, I could still feel mud in my belly button and between my toes and every other available spot.

  Ivy hustled me inside the motorhome before I got beyond loosening my belt. She tossed my wet clothes back outside, and I took a hot shower. She brought me slippers and clean, dry clothes from the skin out. By the time I’d dried off and dressed, she had the motorhome warmed up, her own clothes changed, and coffee made.

  Thank you, Lord, for Ivy. Hey, I’m getting better at this everyday talking-to-you stuff, aren’t I?

  And every day I’m more and more grateful he blessed me with Ivy.

  We sat at the dinette drinking coffee, and Ivy checked her phone.

  “There’s a text from Sandy. I’d asked her to see what she could find out on the internet about Kathy and her first husband back in Missouri, when she was Genevieve Higman. And also about Kathy and Brian.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, you know, just curious.”

  I didn’t question the why of her curiosity. Ivy is curious about everything, from shooting stars to shooting guns. Her mutant curiosity gene, as a friend of hers once put it, hard at work. “So what does she say?”

  “It’s pretty long.” She scrolled down the text. “And full of those abbreviations texting people use.”

  I knew some of those from deciphering messages from my grandkids. U for you. Ur for your. I even liked some of them. B3 for blah, blah, blah makes a useful comment in any number of situations. I’ve been tempted to use it in some live, person-to-person conversations too. But I’m still clueless about HAK and SLAP.

  “Do you want to read it?” Ivy asked.

  “Give me the highlights.”

  “Okay. Starting with Genevieve Higman and the dead husband Andrew. Sandy located several Andrew Higman death certificates, one of which she thinks might be him because of the city where he died. He died of acute myocardial infarction.”

  “More commonly known as a heart attack.”

  “Right.” Exactly as Kathy had said. “Sandy couldn’t come up with birth or marriage certificates for Genevieve and Andrew, but she found several interesting articles. One from an Alabama newspaper was about an Andrew Higman who was involved in the development of a new soft drink that was going great until various medical reports about severe intestinal complications surfaced, and it was pulled off the market. There was quite a stink about it.” She paused. “No pun intended.”

  “None taken.”

  She still paused, frowning, and I knew what she was thinking. This generation is changing the whole concept of spelling. Ivy, as a long-time librarian, probably didn’t approve. But maybe some spelling needs changing. Even after writing a couple hundred articles for travel magazines, I still have trouble with the spelling of “traveling.” Or is it “travelling”?

  “Then Sandy says she found an earlier newspaper article with the Andrew Higman name in it as part of an investment group building a shopping mall in Illinois that went bankrupt. And then there’s an Andrew Higman who showed up in a couple of criminal activities in Alabama. One for fraud in a car sales scheme, one for some kind of investment fraud scheme with stock in a mining company in Utah. He went to prison for that one.”

  “Do you think any of those could have been the first husband of our Dolly Dinosaur?”

  “If they were, wifehood may have been a roller-coaster existence for her.” And Brian and a quiet dinosaur park may be just what she needed.

  It occurred to me that Kathy and Brian probably didn’t expect to run into anyone they knew here at an obscure dinosaur park and, even if they did, a dinosaur costume probably made an effective disguise for Kathy in the gift shop. Was that the reason they were here? But why would she not want to be recognized? What difference did it make?

  “Did Sandy find out anything about Brian and Kathy as man and wife?” I asked.

  “Very little, actually. She found birth records on several Brian Morrisons, but it isn’t really an unusual name and none of them were the right age. No marriage records. Most states have tightened up access to driver’s license records, and she didn’t get anything that way on any of them. Neither Brian nor Kathy seem to have made their way into any news articles.”

  Just a nice, quiet, well-behaved couple. Although the thought occurred to me that their quiet life at a deteriorating dinosaur park might also be described as lying low. Even hiding out.

  “The last thing she says is that she’s mailing the surprise she has for me.”

  “You asked Sandy to find out about Kathy and her husbands even before we knew Renée was dead,” I pointed out.

  “I’ve thought about Kathy’s first husband’s death and how soon afterward she married Brian,” she admitted.

  I leaped over several tall buildings and landed in the middle of Ivy’s sometimes outside-the-LOL-box thought processes. “You’re suspicious about the first husband’s death.”

  “Not exactly suspicious, but . . . interested.”

  I tried to follow her trail of thinking. Actually, this pathway wasn’t as convoluted as some. Or maybe my mind is starting to work like Ivy’s. “You wondered if Kathy may have had a relationship with Brian before her husband’s death. You wondered if she may have hurried that death along.”

  Ivy nodded. “I’ve also wondered if Brian could have done the hurrying.”

  “And now you’re wondering, since Brian was involved in an affair with Renée, if he killed her. Or wondering if Kathy did it.”

  She nodded. “Those possibilities have occurred to me.”

  Either Kathy or Brian sounded like obvious possibilities to me too, and in real life, obvious possibilities often turn out to be the right ones. The killer is someone the victim knew. The husband or wife, girlfriend or boyfriend. But there is danger in making easy assumptions and jumping to wrong conclusions.

  “Maybe someone else is involved,” I suggested. “Unknown Man. Renée was an attractive woman. Maybe she had some other man in her life. A man who becomes enraged when he finds out she also has a relationship with Brian. He pulls a gun and bang. Or it could be that Brian objected to Renée’s involvement with this other man. You think we should mention any of this to the officer when he comes to interview us?”

  “I think what I’d really like to do is head on down to Arizona and get on with our honeymoon and not get any more involved in this,” Ivy declared. “If there was another man in Renée’s life, the official investigation will surely uncover it.”

  I agreed. Non-involvement was an excellent plan. “As soon as we’ve talked to the officer, we’ll take off.”

  “You mean leave yet today after he comes?” She peered out a window. BoBandy got up to look with her. “It’s almost dark.”

  “So? As soon as the officer leaves we’ll go over and tell Duke goodbye, and then we’ll just keep going.” I was suddenly impatient to be on the move, away from here, and there was nothing holding us here now. “You start putting stuff away. I’ll wash the mud out of the pickup and get it hooked up.”

  Ivy immediately started tucking the toaster and various other loose items into cabinets where they wouldn’t fly aro
und when we were on the move.

  It occurred to me that this ability to just pick up and go, to stop in a rest area for the night or drive all night if we wanted to, was really a wonderfully free way of life. Free as a bird. Did we really want to give up our bird freedom and settle down in one place?

  Ivy’s cell phone rang before I got out the door.

  Chapter 9

  IVY

  “Mrs. MacPherson?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Deputy Hardishan. I told you I’d be there to interview you today, but I’m still here at the crime scene and won’t be able to get away for a while yet.”

  My head was full of questions. Had the medical examiner arrived? Had Renée’s body been removed? Had they found the gun or any other evidence? Had anyone else fallen in the swamp? But I knew how far asking questions would get me. I’ve struck out in this ball game before. Besides, we’d already decided on Non-involvement. I didn’t need to know anything. One thing I should tell him, however.

  “In case you don’t already know, Renée’s SUV is in the parking lot at that real estate agency in Eureka where she worked. LeHigh Realty.”

  “You saw it there?”

  His question gave me the impression he already knew about Renée’s SUV and our inquiries about Renée inside the LeHigh office. I was uneasily reminded that someone who finds a body often heads up the suspect list. Often with good reason. Then I had to explain our visits to the two real estate offices, which somehow made us sound more involved with Renée than we really were. “So you’ll be here when?” I interrupted myself. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure what time. I’ll call you.”

  This changed our plans about scooting on out of here tonight, but I supposed one more day wouldn’t matter. As I kept reminding myself, honeymoon is a state of mind. Although a dead body, an oversupply of mud, and an upcoming questioning by a deputy did not add to the already shaky honeymoon ambiance.

  I thought that took care of everything, but then Deputy Hardishan added, “You understand that you can’t leave, of course.”