The Decorator Who Knew Too Much

by Diane Vallere

  This bit about seeing a body in the water was troubling though. Madison had been in the middle of more than one of Tex’s investigations and she’d shown a knack for seeing things others often did not. His first impression of her had been so far off base he’d questioned whether or not he was losing his edge. But after getting to know her, he recognized what made her different. She valued her independence to a level that went beyond a desire for equality. She’d experienced painful loss and betrayal in her life before they’d met and it had left her unapologetic about who she was and unafraid in a way he didn’t expect.

  He’d lost count of how many times he picked up the phone to talk to her. Especially after Captain Washington announced his retirement. It wasn’t like Tex had been pining away for a desk job, but things had changed after the abductions. He’d been on the verge of going renegade to try to get justice. Twenty-five years on the force and he’d never come close to crossing that line before. He scared himself with his capacity for anger and his need to right things. If it hadn’t been for Madison’s involvement, the case might have had a very different outcome.

  Tex picked up the phone and called Madison’s design studio. The message told him her business was closed for two weeks. They’d both turned the page on their respective lives. There was no point in leaving a message.

  NINE

  So in the wake of the Lakewood abductor case, Captain Washington had retired and Tex had been promoted. I should have been happy for Tex. I couldn’t blame him for not telling me. I’d been the one to retreat from whatever odd friendship we’d formed over the past two years, but finding out like this hurt.

  I tried to hide my reaction. “Oh, you mean Lieutenant Allen.”

  “Captain Allen now,” Buchanan said. “He told me you might not know about his promotion. Like I said, he spoke pretty highly of you. Said it was no accident you ended up involved in that case and you went out on a limb for the precinct. He also said he’s been worried about you.” He pointed to my handbag. “Do yourself a favor. Try to get an appointment with Dr. Hall.”

  I smiled and thanked him, and then left the police station. I sat in the Jeep and stared at the number written on the piece of paper for two solid minutes before pulling out my phone and making the call.

  When a recording answered, I hesitated for only a moment. “Dr. Hall, my name is Madison Night. I’m staying in Palm Springs for a couple of weeks, and your number was given to me by Officer Buchanan at the police department to help me work through a few issues. Please let me know if you’re accepting new patients and if we can set up an appointment.” I said my phone number, repeated it for courtesy, and hung up.

  I headed back toward the park. If the police were right and the keys belonged to someone who needed them to drive their car away, then I was making a stranger’s life more difficult by holding onto them. I turned off the main road and followed a series of hand-painted signs indicating Parks and Recreation. About a mile down a dirt trail, I skidded to a halt next to a small wooden cabin with a sign out front that said, “Office.” I parked the Jeep and approached the building.

  Like just about everything else, the windows had a layer of dirt on them. I tried to look inside, but couldn’t see through the glass. I wiped my hand across the outside of the window, leaving a small smudged circle, and pressed my face up to the glass again.

  “Can I help you?” said a voice from behind me.

  I stood up straight and turned. A woman in a khaki shirt and Bermuda shorts stood in front of me. She had a patch over the left sleeve that said “City of Palm Springs, California,” in a circle around an orange and yellow image of palm trees. Embroidered on a patch above her left chest pocket was the name Lora. It took me a moment to realize why she looked familiar.

  “You work at the Moroccan restaurant, don’t you? I ate there last night. I’m the decorator.”

  “I thought I recognized you.”

  “You work here too?”

  “Yep. It’s the curse of Palm Springs in the off season. Everybody cuts back their hours so a lot of us work two jobs to pay the bills.” She smiled. “I’m Lora,” she said, pointing to her shirt.

  “Madison,” I said. I glanced down at my striped top as if looking for a name tag, but then looked back up and smiled.

  “Let me guess. You’re looking for the restrooms? They’re over there.” She pointed to a building off to the side of us.

  “I’m not here for the restrooms. You, um, you didn’t happen to find a straw hat with multicolored tassels on it, did you?”

  “Nope, sorry. When did you lose it?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Give it a couple of days. It might turn up.”

  I pulled the keys out of my bag. “I also wanted to turn these in to Lost and Found. I found them on the pier on Whitewater River. They were jammed between the slats. There’s an abandoned SUV in the parking lot, and I think whoever drives it might be looking for them.”

  She took the keys and stared at them for a few seconds. The angle of the sun highlighted the planes of her face. “What makes you think the car’s abandoned?” she asked.

  “It’s been there for a few days.”

  She shifted her attention from the keys to me. “You’ve been keeping track?”

  I smiled. “Not intentionally. I noticed the car yesterday when I was first at the river and again today. When I told the police about the keys, they suggested the owner might have lost them and I should bring them to you.”

  “How’d the police get involved?” The rhythm of her voice was different. I studied her face, trying to place what it was that had changed. When I’d first arrived, she’d seemed casual, relaxed. It could have been in my head, like everything else, but I sensed she was making an effort to appear calm while hiding other emotions below the surface.

  “I thought I saw something in the river yesterday and I called the police. Turned out to be my imagination.”

  I expected her to press me for more information, but she seemed satisfied with my answer as is. She looked back down at the keys in her hand and rubbed her thumb back and forth over the Chevy logo. “I’ll put these in lost and found, but if the car’s been there for a few days and the keys were on the pier, it doesn’t sound to me like the owner looked very hard.”

  “How long do you hold on to lost items?”

  “Thirty days.”

  “What happens to them when nobody picks them up?”

  “You don’t think the owner is going to come looking for them, do you?”

  “It was just a question.”

  Her fist closed around the keys. “We say thirty days, but we usually don’t throw things out until the bin gets full. Sometimes the finder calls us to see if an item was claimed and if not, they make a case for finder’s keepers. Not sure that applies in this case,” she finished.

  While we were talking, a man wandered into the park. He was tall and thin, dressed in a torn T-shirt and faded camouflage pants that were frayed at the hems. His face was gaunt with pronounced cheekbones and an upturned nose. His thinning black hair was combed straight back, exposing a high forehead. I hadn’t seen a car drive up and wasn’t sure where he’d come from.

  Lora looked at him and shook her head, as if telling him to go away. Her eyes cut to me and then back to him.

  “How long until somebody runs the plates on the car?” I asked. “It’s just sitting there collecting tickets.”

  “Towing a car costs the city too much money. Since we’re in the off season, it’s cheaper to leave it where it is. They won’t tow until after it’s been there for at least a week, maybe longer.” She put the key into her pocket. “Problems like this tend to solve themselves. I’m sure the owner will come around.”

  I didn’t say anything to Lora, but I could think of one type of person who wouldn’t come around to collect their car: a dead one.

  To
o many thoughts were crowding my mind: the body in the water, the abandoned SUV and the recovered keys, and now Lora. The only thing for me to do was the one thing I’d done in the past: throw myself into work.

  I followed Jimmy’s directions to the quarry and parked in an expanse of loose rubble that resembled a parking area. I climbed out of the Jeep, sprayed my face, arms, and ankles with a misting of sport-level sweat-proof sunscreen, and approached the dumpsite.

  Hudson hadn’t been kidding about what Jimmy had accumulated. If I’d originally had any doubt about the potential of taking a strip of vacant and rundown businesses and converting them into a mid-century enclave, I had more than enough evidence in front of me to put those doubts at ease. The quarry, easily two hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep, was filled with signs and architectural elements from businesses established fifty years earlier. The sun had bleached them to washed-out pastels, but hours of sanding and repainting would restore them to their glorious bright colors, perfectly perfect for the desert.

  The perimeter of the quarry gave me a good view of the wreckage that had been amassed in the center of it below. There were metal arrows and zig zag archways, beams and poles that would set off entrances. Giant letters piped in now-broken neon tubes were mounted on pastel rectangles, spelling out LIQUOR. One façade appeared to have been dumped there almost completely intact. The lettering along the roofline simply said, “Dot’s Kitty Cat Lounge.”

  It gave me an idea.

  I went back to the Jeep and rummaged around the back until I found my sketchpad and markers. I stuffed as many markers into my small handbag as I could, and then scanned the perimeter of the quarry until I located a narrow set of stairs that led down to the bottom. Minutes later, I stood among the cast off relics, pausing every now and then to stop and sketch.

  I assumed it had been Jimmy and his crew who moved the discarded fixtures to the landfill, because up close, I could tell they’d been placed with a modicum of care. Narrow spaces between each set of building scraps allowed me to weave between them, knocking on and climbing over the individual pieces. After an indulgent stroll around everything and a makeshift inventory in my notebook, I balanced on a once-red now-pink metal arrow that pointed to a yellow circle with faded letters.

  I flipped to a blank page in my notebook. Jimmy would have no problem finding the decorative elements to add to whatever business he wanted to rent out to, but what if he approached it differently? What if, instead of renting out and then retrofitting, he determined what businesses he’d want in his small pocket of Palm Springs and then offered incentives toward new business owners to set up shop there? Palm Springs already had an assortment of great restaurants. But restaurants were destination spots. You went to eat and then you went home. A whole other concept might be to create a destination neighborhood, where you could take care of all of your errands in one fell swoop.

  I made a list of the businesses I frequented: coffee shop, dry cleaner, veterinarian, paint store, bookstore, drug store, shoe repair. I scratched out the last one because there was a very good chance it was too specific to me and my often-inherited estate sale wardrobes, but then changed my mind and wrote it again. Like so many other crafters, good cobblers were scarce. Besides, even new shoes needed TLC now and then.

  Once I had a comprehensive list, I started on sketches. First was an exterior of a white building with a white slab roof. I glanced up at the rubble and spotted a pile of concrete tile with a diamond pattern in it. I sketched it onto the exterior street facing façade, and then on either side, added red beams that caged in the roof line. Above the roof, I drew a facsimile of the blue metal arrow and white oval sign that lay in the pile in front of me, and then lettered DRY CLEANER in the blank space. On the next page, I started with a circular building and sketched in stools around the perimeter.

  I mocked up several sketches and then stood up and walked closer to the pile to see what I’d missed. It wasn’t until I was about twenty-five yards from my belongings that I realized I wasn’t alone.

  TEN

  The man who’d entered the park while I talked to Lora stood at the end of the quarry. Three men stood behind him. I’d been so engrossed in my work I hadn’t even noticed them, though their presence inside the quarry with me—not on the outer edges looking in—told me they’d been there awhile. As he approached me, he smiled, revealing a mouth filled with crooked teeth yellowed from smoking, a fact confirmed by the scent of nicotine that grew stronger as he closed the gap between us.

  “Hello,” he said. “Pretty lady in the quarry. What a lucky day for us.” His words were over enunciated in a way that suggested English wasn’t his first language, though there was no accent to confirm my suspicion.

  He was a few feet in front of me. I stood rooted to the ground. “I was just leaving,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Pretty lady is all alone. That’s unfortunate. I will fix for you. Pretty lady now has a date for the afternoon. Pretty lady has four dates for this afternoon.”

  Behind him, the other men chuckled. One of them said, “Save something for us, Benji.”

  He turned his head to the side. “Give us a little privacy, boys. You’ll have your turn in a moment.”

  My fear alert went on high. Even though I’d told Hudson and Jimmy where I was going, I was alone. If I yelled, the only people who would hear me were the ones standing in my path. My personal belongings were on the rock where I’d been sitting and sketching, easily seventy-five feet from where I stood. My phone and anything I might have used as a weapon to defend myself quite literally out of my reach.

  “Pretty lady is all alone. I could think of lots of ways to keep pretty lady company.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. It was my worst fear. Adrenaline coursed through me. I didn’t know how much of what the man said was for scare tactics, but it was successful. There were four of them and one of me and I didn’t like the odds. I also didn’t like their inferences.

  The skeletal man stepped close enough for me to pick up the scent of body odor. Involuntarily, my stomach clenched and I gagged. I put my hand to my face and stepped backward.

  “What, don’t you want a date?” he asked.

  “I already have a date,” I said.

  “Funny, I don’t see anybody here.” He looked over my head. He reached his hand out and slipped his fingers under the zig zag hem of my top. Nausea and fear and rage swept over me.

  I had a split second to act. I tightened my left arm and brought it up fast, knocking him under his chin. His head snapped back. Caught unprepared, he stumbled. I stepped forward and kneed him in the groin. He yelled and bent forward, too late. I turned around and ran away from him, across the quarry. He’d recover in a couple of seconds and be after me, and between him and his three friends and me and my occasionally bum knee, the odds were in his favor.

  I scrambled through the mess of wreckage in the quarry, the shortest distance between two points being a direct line and not a wide circle around Jimmy’s fixtures. Behind me, I heard cursing. I kept moving forward, but tripped twice. A length of metal scraped my leg, leaving a gash in my pale flesh. As I got closer to the rock where I’d set up camp to sketch, I got ready to grab what I could. My hand closed around the strap of my bag. The base of the bag fell against the sketch pad and knocked it to the ground. I had to sacrifice it.

  I kept moving up the makeshift steps that had been carved out of the wall of the quarry, occasionally bending forward and using my hands in the dirt to help with traction and balance. I didn’t hear anyone behind me, but I didn’t stop. When I reached the top, a new burst of adrenaline propelled me to the Jeep. I scrambled inside, dumped my bag on the passenger seat, found the key, and then took off toward the river. I gripped the wheel tightly to stop my hands from shaking.

  Hudson was alone under the pavilion when I arrived. He had a purple bandana rolled up and tied ar
ound his forehead, keeping his hair away from his face. “Hey, Lady,” he said. “I was about to come looking for you.”

  I climbed out of the Jeep. His expression changed and he jogged to me. “What happened?”

  “I had—there were—I’m okay,” I stammered. I felt vulnerable, exposed. I looked back at Hudson. I didn’t want to worry him. I didn’t want to be any more trouble than I’d been. I turned around and looked at the parking lot, still afraid the men had followed me. We were alone.

  Hudson looked down at my leg. “You’re bleeding.” He scooped me up and carried me to the picnic area, and then set me down on a table. “What happened?”

  “I think I just met a couple of the locals,” I said.

  He looked the direction I’d come. “Where?”

  “At the quarry.” Being in the wide open space of the riverside with Hudson, the residual adrenaline converted to inappropriate giddiness. “You should see the other guys,” I said.

  “Guys? More than one?”

  And then, the house of giddy collapsed. The almost suffocating fear that I’d felt in the quarry shivered over my bare skin and I wrapped my arms around myself. Hudson pulled me close and held me against his chest. “You’re safe now,” he said. “Do you know how you cut your leg?”

  “I think I scraped against an old sign. I’m going to need a tetanus shot, aren’t I?”

  He uncapped a bottle of water and poured it onto my blood-caked leg. The water turned a faint shade of pink and ran down my calf. The scrape was about three inches long, but not as deep as I originally thought. “Yes,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Talking to Hudson helped bring down my heart rate, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was still being watched. Had I not gotten out of there when I did, any number of bad things might have happened. The immediate tangible threat of danger had passed, but the sense I’d created a bigger one in its wake was left in its place.