“My name is Lyd … Honey Huckleberry,” I gasped, as I told them my south side address. “There is a man on my living room floor who is dying.” In the dark, I tried to see the wet, sticky hand I held before my face. “He’s been shot or hit or something. He’s bleeding from the head.”
“All right, Honey. We’re sending help. Help is on the way. Stay on the line.” Then the familiar, “Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see the accident happen?”
“No, I just got home.”
“Are you alone in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see the perpetrator leave the house?”
“No.”
“Could he still be in the house? Where are you?” The voice was calm and professional, but I realized that there was concern that whoever had hurt Steven Miller was still in the house, which meant they could hurt me, too.
I was huddled in the corner of the room, holding on tightly to the phone. The flashlight was still by Steven Miller, its angle lighting a far corner of the room. Was someone still in the house?
The sudden storm abated as quickly as it had come. The house was filled with silence, only the pleasant sounds of the rain running from the eaves of the top story reached my straining ears. I knew there was no one else in the house.
Then I realized it was too quiet.
Dropping the phone, I crawled across the carpet, its rough nap burning my kneecaps. When I reached Steven Miller, I touched him, his heavy shoes, limp legs, and sprawled arms, then the sticky wet of his face.
I raised my hands to my face. “Oh, Steven,” I whispered. “I don’t know what to do for you.” My hands fluttered down again, searching for him. I knew that somewhere in the depths of the big city that alarms had been sounded, help was coming, but all I could do was hunch on the floor and stroke and pat Steven Miller’s shoulder, murmuring the sounds my father had used to quell my nightmares. “There, there, there. It’ll be all right. Everything’s all right.”
Later, I learned that the police had approached the house silently, suspecting that there was still the possibility that the perpetrator was in the house. That’s why the first indication I had that they were there was when they burst into the living room, having slithered through the kitchen and dining room in their trained, crouched approach, guns drawn and held in two fists. When they reached where I was on the floor, one of them aimed his gun at me, the other at the adjoining front hall.
“Hold it right there.”
How strange to be sitting on my living room floor with my hands instinctively raised in a pose of innocent surrender while a dead man lay at my side. For I knew he was dead, had known it since I’d dropped the phone and scrambled in the dark to be by his side. The police confirmed that I was the one who had called, was as much a victim as Steven Miller—almost.
They continued their military-like search up the stairs as more of them poured through the kitchen, bringing with them huge lights and a policewoman who took me by the shoulders and helped me up off the floor and out of the room into the kitchen.
More police and more lights, and then I realized the electricity was on again. I remember giving them the key to the third floor, awed at their thoroughness. A sideways glance at the pantry door standing ajar told me they’d even opened and searched that forbidding hole as a possible hiding place. I shuddered, and the woman gave me a cup of hot tea, made with my own tea bags with water heated on my stove.
She was the one who brought me a warm, wet kitchen towel to wash Steven Miller’s drying blood from my hands. In the light, it wasn’t black, not even red; the blood was a rusty brown, already caking and peeling from my fingers. And I must have rubbed some on my face, too, because she washed my face with the towel that smelled like the Lemon Joy I keep in the cabinet under the sink. She swabbed the stained cloth at spots on my dress and then shrugged and turned to the sink where she rinsed the towel and wrung Steven Miller’s blood down the drain.
I could hear an army of them in my living room. Someone lit a cigarette, and someone else authoritatively told him to put it out. No one spoke to me except to comfort as I had tried to comfort the dead man in my living room. Then I felt the mood change as the ones clustered in the kitchen parted to let another through their protective ranks. It was Silas Sampson.
“Honey,” was all he said. He gathered me in his big arms, and I cried against the fourth button on his white shirt.
TWELVE
It had been three o’clock in the morning when I had returned home. It was seven-thirty before the police finished taking their pictures and sealed their last evidence bags and took Steven Miller away.
I’d turned my head away from the scene when the policewoman had taken me to the bathroom; the only one was upstairs.
Finally alone, I had washed away the remaining bloodstains beneath my fingernails and combed my hair. Outside the bathroom, I had asked her if I could change my dress, and she’d watched while I dropped the dirty, stained, and crumpled sundress from my shoulders and dressed in a clean skirt and blouse.
I felt my fatigue as I picked up the soiled dress and shoved it into the dirty-clothes hamper. I looked at it uncomprehendingly before closing the plastic lid. Had it been just yesterday when I’d put it on at South Padre Island? Vaguely, I remembered Harry straightening one twisted pink strap before we’d left for … Where? Brownsville. Was that yesterday? Or the day before?
Ignoring my guard, I stared for the first time at my bed. I choked and headed toward it, and there in a crumpled nest of pillows, bedclothes, and papers, I curled up and fell asleep at last.
Silas woke me about noon with an apology. “I’m sorry, Honey. I’ve let you sleep as long as I could. You’ve got to answer some questions now.”
He’d brought me coffee and a sandwich that had its origin at one of the fast-food restaurants on Rosedale. It was ham and cheese, and I ate it greedily, sipping the hot coffee and generally becoming awake and aware of what was going on in my house.
The Steven call had taken on new proportions—increased significance—since Steven Miller’s actual death, and one of the first questions Silas asked me was if I had heard from him again.
Until I answered him, I hadn’t known I was going to say, “No.” I don’t know why I thought I had to protect the mysterious Steven. I hope the guilt of the lie didn’t show on my face. I’m not a very experienced liar.
“All I know is that Steven Miller was watching my house for me while I was away,” I lied. “No, he didn’t say anything to me before he died. Just some groaning,” I lied again. I didn’t know how to explain that Steven Miller had called me by a name that I hadn’t known he knew. Wrestling with that question had added spirals of doubt throughout my tormented night of restless sleep. Had I heard him correctly? Had he really called out, “Lydia”?
“When will all these people leave my house?” I asked him.
“Soon. Soon. Just a few more questions.”
He was embarrassed and angry with himself that he had not been more thorough with my first complaint. And now someone had died. Maybe it was a coincidence. “Maybe not,” he voiced.
There was another policewoman on duty, standing behind us as Silas interrogated me. The police could change shifts and go home, but I had to stay because it had happened to me … in my home.
“No.” No, there was no one I wanted to call. Nowhere else I wanted to stay. Harry, I thought, then … “No.”
Silas brought us cardboard-packaged servings of chicken-fried steak from The Paris Coffee Shop for supper, and we ate in my bedroom.
“I’ll stay. I’m off duty,” he offered.
Again. “No.”
And he made me come downstairs with him to lock the front door. After he was gone, his footsteps reluctantly crossing the front porch, I leaned my head against the glass on the front door. I had my house back again. Without raising my head from the door, I twisted my neck to look into the living room. It didn’t look like m
y room; tables were moved, shades were raised, and on the floor before the fireplace was a gray outline of Steven Miller’s body.
I whispered Silas’s earlier pessimism: “Maybe not.” Maybe I’d never have my house back, like it was before the first phone call. Before Steven Miller had died in it. Before all those people had crowded into it. More than had ever entered it in my remembrance.
“Maybe not,” I repeated.
I went upstairs without entering the living room. I took a bath and got into bed after first straightening out the nest I’d slept in earlier. I waited for a phone call, but it never came. Eventually, I fell asleep.
THIRTEEN
By prearrangement, Silas picked me up the next morning and we went to eat some more chicken-fried steak at The Paris Coffee Shop—from their breakfast menu this time. As we sopped our biscuits in the cream gravy, Silas told me about the status of the investigation into Steven Miller’s death.
“Unless we can trace the phone call you received two weeks ago—and I don’t think we can … I’m glad I investigated that as much as I did after you called me. Unless that call was genuine, we’re seriously considering that Miller was unofficially patrolling the grounds and saw something—a light or something—that caught his eye enough so that he thought it necessary to enter your house. We figure the back door was already open, and, well, the rest is obvious.”
To him maybe.
Seeing my questioning look, Silas continued, “You know, the perp surprised Miller trying to surprise him, and shot him.”
“So … Steven Miller was shot?”
“Yes, in the head … in the back of the head. Right above the neck. He would have died anyway, but actually … he bled to death.”
I pushed away my plate in disgust. “If I’d gotten home sooner …”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. Like I told you, it was a massive trauma, and he’d have died anyway. There was nothing you could have done. We’ll have a full autopsy report tomorrow, but we think Miller was shot about midnight.”
At midnight I had been driving through a blinding rainstorm somewhere north of Austin, driving as furiously as the rain to get home and get a stranger out of my house, and now I knew, out of my bed. For I had known when I looked at my bed the day before that I would never have left the pillows piled up against the headboard that way or the covers so scrunched up.
To the policewoman’s eyes it must have looked as if I had been reading—there were papers scattered on the bed—and had gotten up and neglected to straighten the covers—make the bed—before I’d left on my sales trip. Only I had known that I never left a mess like that, especially when I was away. But to seal the conclusion in her mind that I was accustomed to such disorder, I had fallen across the disarranged pillows, pulled the rumpled spread over me, and fallen asleep, the unfamiliar smell of another body rising from the white eyelet pillowcase under my head. The uncomfortable feeling of sleeping in what felt like someone else’s bed and the horrible reality of the murder of my friend had created a night’s sleep that surpassed all my childhood nightmares.
“… so I’ve been assigned to the case for the time being, although homicide is not ordinarily my beat.” I realized Silas was still talking, pride in his voice at this unexpected assignment.
“So,” he said again, “Honey, why did you come home at three in the morning? I’ve checked the itinerary you gave me. You weren’t due in until late yesterday. I called Alice, and the motel clerk said you’d checked in there Thursday night but were gone Friday morning. She said they were concerned about you, and to tell you the bill would be charged on your credit card. What happened to make you drive all night, in a rainstorm, to get to Fort Worth?” Silas was all detective now.
“Why didn’t you stay in Alice?”
More lies. But I had anticipated the questions.
Not fully understanding the rigid schedule I lived by, Silas believed me—or seemed to—when I told him that I had been too keyed up at Alice to sleep. So wideawake, in fact, that I had gotten up and started the drive home. It hadn’t been raining then. That was the truth. And then I’d been too nervous about stopping at someplace I didn’t know so late, so I’d just kept on driving.
“Now I’d like you to take me home, Silas. It’s Saturday, and I have to make some stops. I’ve been gone two weeks. I have to get to the cleaners and the grocery and …” Just reciting the list of my familiar Saturday schedule calmed me and seemed to reassure him as to the sincerity of my previous remarks.
He was leaving me at my front door when he warned me against leaving town.
“But, Monday … I have to go to—”
“Boston. I saw it on your schedule. You’ll have to miss it, Honey.”
It was useless to protest, and to tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I was up to flying to Boston for the spring book fair. It was to be the first one I had ever attended. But it was on my schedule, and I suddenly felt lost knowing I’d have to change my plans, even if I didn’t feel much like attending a three-day booksellers’ convention in a city I’d never visited.
Silas was reminding me that I would want to attend Steven Miller’s funeral next week, anyway, when the coroner released the body. Probably by Tuesday. That’s when we heard voices coming from the backyard. Silas gestured for me to be quiet and to stay put as he slid his hand under his coat and moved off the porch toward the back of the house.
Good God, I thought, he’s pulling out his gun. I followed him.
“It’s okay,” I shouted as Silas approached two men standing midway in the backyard. He turned and grimaced as he saw me right behind him, but he withdrew his hand from under his coat.
“Silas, this is Ralph Ketchum, Dr. Ralph Ketchum. From the clinic. Ralph, this is Detective Silas Sampson from the police department.”
The two men shook hands.
“I’ve talked to you on the phone, Detective,” Ralph said. He looked crisp and preppy, handsome in his designer suit and gleaming loafers. Ralph just killed me with his pretentiousness. He did everything to excess. Just like his plans for a garden.
“Yeah, sure. You’re the doctor I called about Honey’s … Miss Huckleberry’s threatening phone call. How are you?”
Ralph looked at Silas and said, “I know about Steven Miller. Your officers questioned me and the others at the clinic yesterday.” He turned and spoke just to me. “I tried to come in and talk to you, Honey, but they kept me out.” He jerked his thumb toward Silas. There was no animosity in the gesture, but he seemed annoyed that the police hadn’t recognized his importance. After all, as he often said, Ralph ran the slickest operation—cleanest clinic—in town. The best of everything was his motto, including the blond wife who occupied the passenger side of his black Porsche parked in the lot near my house.
I waved to her and then looked away, distressed and embarrassed as Silas filled Ralph in on the events of the night Steven Miller had died. As Ralph reacted to the news of how Steven had been shot and the details of the investigation, I walked toward my father’s rose garden.
The stranger with Ralph moved away also, seemingly as embarrassed as I was at eavesdropping on such a sordid tale. I looked over the tallest of the bushes, a Peace variety that was responding to Thursday night’s rain and today’s sunshine by sending out promises of early summer blooms through new, red-tipped green leaves, and smiled at him. He smiled back, his black eyes full of sympathy and an unspoken apology at being present at such a time.
“Honey. Honey. Honey.” Ralph was coming toward me, arms outstretched. I let myself be gathered up in them, and he patted my back helplessly. After a minute, I pulled away.
“I’m okay, Ralph.”
“Steven Miller!” he said with genuine disbelief and grief in his voice.
“I know. I know,” I answered, glad that someone finally thought of the dead man as a person, not just a body on the carpet.
“It’s all such a shock. Do you think his death has anything to do with your phone call?” Ralph looked at
first me and then to Silas for an answer.
Silas answered for both of us. “No, Doctor, we’ve checked and rechecked, and there’s nothing to make us think this murder is anything but what it seems; Miller interrupted a burglar and got shot for his efforts.”
“My. My. My,” said Ralph who seemed incapable of saying anything less than three times for emphasis. Then he twirled around and said, “Honey, forgive my manners. I was coming over to see you … about Miller, of course, and to introduce you to the gardener I told you I was going to hire. This is Joaquin Verde.”
“Hello,” I said to the man who had smiled with me a few minutes earlier. I would have shaken hands, but he ducked his head shyly and missed seeing me reach out to him. He looked like a Mexican with his dark, shaggy hair and unkempt mustache. I decided that he didn’t speak English, but he surprised me by suddenly looking up and speaking to me softly with only a trace of Spanish accent.
“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Huckleberry. The doctor has told me much about you.” He stopped, blushed, and then added, “And I am sorry for your recent bereavement.”
As I was saying thank you, Ralph beamed as if he had produced a performing animal for me. “Isn’t he great? He’s going to do wonders for us, Honey.”
“I don’t know, Ralph.” I turned and looked at the yard. It looked clean and neat, but certainly it didn’t rate being called a garden.
After my father died and the clinic began to take shape, it was obvious that not only my strange house but also the shaggy backyard was a thorn in my new neighbor’s side. As a concession to good relations with them, I had agreed to let the clinic tear down the leaning garage in exchange for a covered, locked area on their property, and for the builders to bulldoze the rest of the yard—except for my father’s rose bushes. Money had seemed no object.
The architects laid out a system that pleased them: simple walks leading to a small white gazebo, planted everything in grass, and disappeared, the garden being the last of their project for the doctors. It was nothing special, but it showed more humanity than the white brick and chrome boxes they had built for the ophthalmologists. Watered and mowed by the maintenance staff, the area was a success with the patients; their children ran around the yard playing tag while they waited for their parents, and I liked the sound of their laughter. And I was home so seldom. Yes, it had been a good solution all the way around, but now, a real garden?
The Complete Honey Huckleberry Box Set Page 6