Dead Giveaway

by Joanne Fluke

  Both Walker and Ellen looked puzzled and Jayne sighed. “It’s a little complicated. Paul was going to tease Walker about watermelon pizza, but I assured him that it was in bad taste.”

  Walker nodded solemnly. “It certainly would have been. I tried watermelon pizza once and it was awful.”

  At the sound of a key in the lock, the Caretaker flicked off the light and pressed himself against the kitchen wall. The footsteps headed down the hallway toward Clayton’s office and he followed silently in the semidarkness. The hallway had floor-to-ceiling windows and the lights from Betty’s suite above reflected harshly against the freshly fallen snow.

  The figure darted into Clayton’s office and when he reached the door, he saw the glimmer of a penlight traveling across the floor, stopping at Clayton’s file cabinet. The drawer opened almost noiselessly and the intruder propped the light on the handle of the drawer above to shine down on the files below.

  Delicate hands, small-boned. It was a woman, but which one? And what did she want?

  They’d all gone to their own kitchens to bake the pizzas, and any one of them could have come here on the pretext of borrowing something from Clayton’s refrigerator. Then he noticed a wedding ring, which eliminated Ellen. And Grace and Moira. Jayne had long, strong fingers from years of practicing the piano. And Laureen’s hands were larger, he recalled from close-ups on her cooking show. It certainly wasn’t Betty, which left the nurse and Vanessa.

  He watched as she located a file and flipped through the contents, pulling out a single piece of paper. As she sat down in Clayton’s chair to study it, he could almost make out her face. Something glittered by her left ear, reflecting the tiny glow from the penlight. It was a diamond earring shaped like a heart. Vanessa had heart-shaped diamond earrings. But why was she so interested in Clayton’s files? He took one step closer, and then another. When he got close enough to make out the label on the file, he smiled. Vanessa was going through Hal’s papers. That was nothing to worry about, but he’d keep an eye on her until she left.

  Vanessa almost laughed out loud. Hal had moved over four million dollars into his numbered Swiss account. He was a real bastard, and a dumb one at that. His birth date was the access code. Jack had once told her how common that was, when she’d asked him about the security business.

  She put the file back in the drawer and closed it. Now she’d act perfectly normal until the access road was cleared, then take off for Switzerland on the very first flight.

  Vanessa smiled. Switzerland. She’d always wanted to go there and she might just do that once she’d gone to the bank and cleaned out Hal’s account. They had wonderful skiing, and she’d always wanted to shop in the boutiques at St. Moritz. Best of all, there wasn’t a thing Hal could do. There was nothing illegal about a wife making a withdrawal from her husband’s Swiss bank account. That’s exactly what had happened in the movie she’d seen.

  She shined the penlight all around the office, checking to make sure she hadn’t left anything out of place and then she headed for the door. If Hal decided to check up on her, she wanted to be in bed, sleeping like a baby.

  Vanessa was nearing the end of the hallway when the lights in the rose garden came on. She whirled and bolted for the door before remembering that Clayton had them on a timer. There was no need to be so jumpy. She stopped and took a calming breath as she looked out at the garden. It had been beautiful the first time she’d seen it, with tiny sparkling lights and a white latticework gazebo. Two round wrought-iron tables, painted dazzling white, were surrounded by eight matching chairs. Darby had been fond of having her morning coffee in the garden, surrounded by the sweet scent of her beautiful roses.

  Things were a lot different now that Darby was dead. The paint was peeling off the wrought-iron tables and the roses looked as if they were growing wild. Nevertheless, one perfect pink rose bloomed on a bush in the back. It would look lovely in the silver vase she had in her bedroom. Hal hadn’t given her roses in at least a year and they were her favorite.

  Opening the French doors, Vanessa stepped into the garden. It was lovely out here in the climate-controlled dome. There was something magical about flowers blooming in the dead of winter. Roses in the snow. A great title for a movie and now that she was about to become a wealthy woman, she might just decide to finance it.

  She grabbed the clippers from the nail in the gazebo and headed for the perfect rose. It would only take a moment. As she took a detour around two bushes that had grown together in a tangle of branches, her sandal sank into a patch of soft ground. Someone had been digging out here and the soil was loose. Had Clayton hired a new gardener? Vanessa bent over for a closer look.

  Lines of concentration creased Betty’s forehead as she tried to make sense out of the talk show. The host had a towel wrapped around his head and the audience laughed every time he spoke. Betty didn’t think he was very funny, but the people did. Perhaps you couldn’t appreciate him when you had a disease like hers.

  She was watching the regular channels now because Nurse would be back in a minute to give her the needle and put her to bed. It had been a pretty good night for television, and she’d enjoyed the charades on forbidden channel two. The cowgirl had been very good and so had that nice colored man. Betty seemed to remember that colored was an obsolete term. Now they wanted to be called black, or maybe Afro-American, she wasn’t sure which. When the colored man came to visit her, she’d just say hello and avoid calling him anything. That was the smart thing to do.

  When the charades had stopped, Betty had switched through the other forbidden channels. There had been a lot of cooking shows on tonight and she didn’t feel like watching those, but she’d found something very interesting on channel five.

  That pretty young actress was back, searching for something. She seemed to be typecast in the role of searcher. When she left the room where the papers were kept, Betty had assumed the movie was over. She had been about to switch the channel when she’d seen the actress open the doors to the garden, the same one she’d seen in the funeral movie. Would the undertaker appear? Betty hoped so.

  There he was! Betty had clapped her hands together in delight. He was her very favorite actor, unless you counted Jack, who was in the hospital. They didn’t run many hospital movies now.

  Betty reached for a blank disk and put it into the machine, pushing the button to record. She’d start a collection to show Jack when he came back home. While the undertaker series wasn’t as funny as the movies that Jack had recorded for her, it was still very exciting. She gasped as the sharp metal thing crashed down. You’d never guess they made those things out of Styrofoam so they couldn’t hurt anybody. Then the actress had crumpled to the ground very gracefully, and since she was pretending to be dead, she hadn’t moved at all.

  Would the undertaker bury her in another funeral? Betty had leaned forward to peer at the screen intently. No, he just put the Styrofoam shovel back in the gazebo, wrapped the pretty actress in a big plastic tarp, and carried her down the hall to the stairwell. Once they’d gone through the door, Betty had known that the forbidden channel five movie-of-the-night was over, but she might be able to catch the rest of the film on another channel.

  She had been looking for the ending of the movie when she’d heard Nurse coming with the warm milk and cookies she always had before bedtime. She’d barely had time to switch to a talk show before Nurse had come into her room with the tray. It had been a close call. Very close. She had to remember to be more careful in the future now that Jack wasn’t here to remind her.

  The man who loved Budweiser beer was rolling his eyes at something Johnny had said and the audience was laughing again. Betty frowned. She liked the forbidden channels much better. Should she take a chance and scan them to see if she could find the end of the movie?

  There was water running in the bathroom. That meant Nurse was fixing her face. Nurse took a long time every night in the bathroom. She’d explained it all to Betty. When people got older, their sk
in dried out. That meant they had to use moisturizers. Nurse put a pink cream on her face every night that had to stay there for five minutes. Then she washed it off and put on a moisturizer. Betty hadn’t said what she’d been thinking out loud, that nothing could help Nurse from looking like one of those big black birds.

  Betty took a chance and reached for the remote control. She had to find out where the undertaker would bury the actress. It was a very important part of the movie.

  There he was again on forbidden channel one, carrying the searcher into a room of ice. There was a word for a place like that, but Betty couldn’t think of it. She winced as he rolled her out of the tarp, then chuckled at her own foolishness. Of course they’d stopped the cameras to put in a mannequin just like the doll-lady made, so the actress could go back to her dressing room to rehearse her next scene. It looked so real, it had almost fooled her. Movie magic was wonderful!

  When the water stopped running, Betty put on the talk show again. She was laughing at the towel around the host’s head, it took a certain amount of courage to appear on television in a silly-looking thing like that, when Nurse came in with the bedtime needle.

  They all sat on pillows covered with Royal Stewart plaid, the tartan Moira claimed she was entitled to use since her grandfather’s name had been Stewart. The pizzas were arranged on the living room table, a huge, round knee-high slab of black marble and the only furniture in the room. The walls were still white, the windows bare, but Moira had lit a cheerful blaze in the black marble fireplace and the cavernous room was a perfect place for games. When Paul had inquired, Moira had called the effect her Terminally Lazy Look and sworn she’d finish with her decorating just as soon as the roads were clear.

  Laureen and Alan sat at one end of the table, passing slivers of pizza back and forth. There were the standard varieties: Jayne’s sausage and cheese, Ellen’s Canadian bacon and pineapple, Moira’s was Italian meatballs and fresh tomato, and Walker’s was pepperoni and onion. There were also some very unusual creations like Paul’s sardine and cream cheese, Hal and Grace’s feta cheese and Greek olive, which they’d made together in Grace and Moira’s kitchen because Hal hadn’t wanted to wake Vanessa, and a strange concoction which Marc refused to name. When they’d tasted them all, Laureen looked at Alan with a question in her eyes. He took another bite and nodded.

  “And the winner is . . .” Laureen paused for dramatic effect. “Marc’s braunschweiger and Swiss cheese with pesto sauce. It’s the most unusual thing we’ve ever tasted.”

  “Pesto sauce?” Marc looked surprised. “I thought it was green onions, all ground up.”

  Laureen laughed. “Why did you use it if you didn’t know what it was?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have any tomato sauce and I had to use something. It looked kind of interesting when I opened the jar, so I just spread it on the top.”

  “Then it was a lucky accident.” Laureen nodded. “Tomato sauce would have been horrible. And Paul gets an honorable mention. I don’t know anyone who ever tried to put sardines on a pizza before. Moira? Bring out the prize.”

  Moira got up to present Marc with a long, narrow package wrapped in newspaper.

  “Uh, oh.” Marc accepted it gingerly. “Is this one of your father’s things, Grace?”

  “Open it and see,” Grace ordered with a grin.

  Ellen studied Marc carefully as he started to unwrap the package. Why on earth would he buy pesto sauce if he didn’t know what it was? Of course, she’d bought tofu ice cream once, and she hadn’t been sure what that was. She guessed it wasn’t so strange, after all.

  Everyone leaned forward as the wrapping fell away from a large stuffed rattlesnake.

  “Just what I needed!” Marc lifted it up, taking his unusual prize in stride. “I’ll put it on my desk when the roofer comes in with his bid. That way he’ll feel outnumbered.”

  “Let’s eat.” Moira passed out plates and napkins. “Will you open more wine, Gracie?”

  “I’d be glad to, but we’re out and I was going to pick up some on the way home, but then there was the avalanche and I forgot all about it and we couldn’t have brought it up on the snowmobile anyway because there was barely room for the two of us in all those bulky . . .”

  “Never mind, Gracie,” Hal interrupted her. “I’ve got a jug, if no one minds drinking jug wine. Vanessa bought it and she doesn’t know much about wines.”

  Grace nodded. Vanessa didn’t know much about anything, but it would be uncharitable to point it out. “If you don’t mind getting it, that would be nice. And if Vanessa’s still awake, why don’t you ask her to join us? There’s plenty of pizza.”

  After Hal had left, Laureen turned to Grace. “Why did you have to be so polite? Nobody wants Vanessa down here.”

  “That’s precisely why. She’s got feelings after all, plus we have to live in the same building with her so we might as well make the effort because we all like Hal and . . .”

  “Okay, Gracie.” Moira patted her arm. “We understand.”

  Hal was back in a couple of moments, carrying the jug of wine. “Is Vanessa here?”

  “We haven’t seen her. Did you stop at the spa?” Hal nodded and Grace frowned slightly. “Don’t worry, Hal. Maybe she went out for a tramp in the snow.”

  “A tramp in the snow!” Laureen burst into laughter. “Sorry, Hal. Do you want us to help you find her?”

  Hal looked concerned. “It’s just that she always wears those ridiculous high-heeled boots, and she could have slipped or something.”

  “If you will all excuse me, I will get my parka.” Paul stood up and bowed. “A brisk walk will stimulate the appetite.”

  As the other men got to their feet, Hal looked doubly concerned. “But the pizzas will get cold.”

  “Don’t be an as . . . idiot!” Moira patted his shoulder. “Laureen knows how to reheat pizza.”

  Laureen nodded. “Of course I do. You guys go look for Vanessa and we’ll take the pizzas to my place. They’ll be even tastier if I heat them on bricks. It’s the only way to get the crusts properly crisp.”

  It didn’t take long to cart the pizzas to Laureen’s kitchen, where she stuck them in her huge, restaurant-size oven. Ellen had brought down her thirty-cup coffeepot and the five women sat around Laureen’s butcher-block work island on bar stools. A full array of copper pans and kitchen utensils hung above their heads, suspended by hooks on a revolving frame, and Ellen pointed up at a big slotted spoon with prongs around the circumference of the bowl. “What’s that?”

  “A spaghetti separator,” Laureen informed her. “I have two. One here and one in the bedroom.”

  Jayne giggled. “Some days you step in it, other days you don’t, but I have to ask anyway. Why do you have a spaghetti separator in the bedroom?”

  “Because Alan uses it for a back scratcher. He says it’s a lot better than those little plastic ones you buy in the store.”

  “I wonder if they found Vanessa yet.” Grace looked worried.

  “Oh, who cares?” Laureen sighed deeply. “Remember how much nicer it was before Hal married her? Personally, I wish she’d take a hike for good. We’d all be a lot better off.”

  “True enough.” Grace admitted, pouring herself a cup of coffee before it was quite through perking. “But not tonight. I saw a pack of wolves right next to the building and I know they don’t attack humans unless they’re starving, but the avalanche may have cut off their food supply and my dad told me stories of how hungry wolves band together and if they see any kind of prey they . . . okay, Moira, I won’t go into details.”

  Laureen said snidely, “Wolves wouldn’t bother Vanessa. She’d just invite them up to her bedroom for a drink.”

  “Come on, Laureen, honey.” Jayne reached out to take her arm. “You’d be a lot better off if you could just put that whole mess behind you.”

  Laureen gave a bitter laugh. “I still wish she’d rot in hell! And I don’t think you’d be quite so charitable if she’d taken o
ff after Paul.”

  “Well . . . maybe that’s true.” Jayne smiled slightly. “That’s the only good thing about our fight. It took Paul out of the lineup.”

  “So how may scalps did she actually get?” Moira wanted to know.

  Laureen counted them off on her fingers. “Marc, and Clayton, and Alan, for sure. I’m not sure about Johnny or Jack.”

  Ellen winced at the mention of Johnny’s name, but this wasn’t the time for confidences. “I know that Jack managed to keep his distance.”

  “How about Walker?” Jayne changed the subject before anyone could notice that Ellen hadn’t mentioned Johnny.

  “Oh, she counted Walker out from the beginning.”

  “She did?” Moira was amazed. “But Walker’s a handsome man, and single.”

  “Vanessa’s a Southern girl. She might not have many scruples, but black is one of them.”

  “Well, she’s got a fu . . . screwed-up sense of priorities, that’s all I have to say. I can’t believe she left Walker alone and tried to pick up on me.”

  “She tried to seduce you?” Jayne was clearly shocked.

  “You don’t have to look so surprised, Jayne. For an aging broad, I’m not so bad.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” Jayne’s face turned red. “I just didn’t realize that Vanessa swung both ways.”

  “I doubt she did. She just ran out of men, and it was desperation time. If she’d had any brains at all, she’d have known that I’d never look at anyone except Grace.”

  Grace reached out to squeeze Moira’s hand under the table, feeling pleasurably foolish and insanely relieved. Moira had known exactly what was going on.

  “Well, I’m going to make another pizza.” Laureen reached for the last can of pizza dough. “If I recommend this stuff, I have to test it myself, and nobody made a pizza with anchovies.”

  Jayne laughed. “That’s because nobody but you goes to the gourmet shelf in the grocery store. How about anchovies and Cheese Whiz? I’ve got a couple of jars you can borrow.”