The Decorator Who Knew Too Much

by Diane Vallere

  “Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”

  The look on Hudson’s face was sweet and helpless at the same time. Despite the lifetime of curveballs and tragedies that had aged him, right now, he looked like a kid. “She’s my sister,” he said. “She’s the only family I have. She’s going to get hurt. I can’t do nothing.”

  I stood up. “Then we go back to the river where I first saw the body. Where it all started.”

  “No,” he said. He shook his head, and for a split second I thought he was having second thoughts about getting involved. “If everything you’ve said is true, it started the day we arrived in Palm Springs, when Dr. Hall almost drove us off the road.”

  I took Rocky out for a brisk walk while Hudson attended to Mortiboy’s litter box. We left the animals with fresh water, food, and the TV turned to the nature channel. Hudson drove to the street where Emma and Jimmy lived and parked at the entrance. A hand-painted sign cautioning drivers to slow down had been nailed onto a tree. Jimmy must have added it after our accident like he said he would.

  I stepped out of the car and misted myself with sunscreen and then turned the nozzle toward Hudson. He put one hand on the hood of the Jeep for balance and braced himself as if I were about to spray him with pepper spray instead of Coppertone Sport 50+. I blasted his face and then each of his arms. His legs, clad in his standard faded blue jeans, were safe from whatever the sun cast his way.

  We walked slowly down the road toward the scene of the accident. I could tell Hudson was still hurt, though he pretended otherwise. He had called Emma before we headed out of the motel and mentioned we were taking the day to play tourist. He casually mentioned we might stop by, but nothing definite. I’d offered him privacy while he made the call, but he told me to stay. Regardless of what he thought of his sister’s actions, he kept any judgment out of his voice. Now that we were here, wandering around their neighborhood, I think both of us hoped we’d fly under their radar.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s been almost a week since the accident.”

  We split up, Hudson following the tree line to the hairpin turn where he’d been trapped inside the car, and me shuffling along the opposite direction, scanning the ground from left to right with every step I took. The dry dirt left a coating over my sneakers, and I was happy I’d had the foresight not to wear sandals. No matter how gently I stepped, I ended up with a trace of dirt around the topline of the shoes, which turned into grit inside. Both my sneakers and my feet were going to be in need of a scrubbing by the time this adventure was over.

  I pulled my sunscreen out of my bag and sprayed my bare legs with a second coating. The spray left a shiny residue behind. I turned around to see if Hudson was anywhere close, and when he wasn’t, I pulled my halter away from my chest and sprayed there too. Sunburned cleavage wasn’t attractive on anybody.

  I wedged the can of sunscreen under one arm, put my hand under the neckline of my striped top, and rubbed the sunscreen in so as to make it appear less like a coating of shellac. When I finished, the palms of my hands were greasy. I tried to move the sunscreen and it slipped from between my fingers and landed on the ground. With no other options, I wiped my hands on my skort, shaking my head at the dirty handprints I left behind, and then looked on the ground for the can. It had rolled a few feet away and came to rest against what appeared to be a rock.

  Only it wasn’t. The closer I got, the more I knew the rock wasn’t a geological formation; it was a crushed amber pill vial ground into the loose gravel at the edge of someone’s driveway.

  And all of a sudden, I didn’t care so much about getting dirty.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I dropped down to my hands and knees and used my fingers to claw dirt away from the broken amber vial. The portion of the label that was showing was mostly faded thanks to exposure to the desert sun. It took a while to get enough of the dirt dug out from underneath the bottle for me to get a grip on it without breaking it further. I slowly tugged on the edge of the vial and wiggled it back and forth against the ground until it came loose. A shadow cast across the portion of the ground where I was stooped.

  “So you’re the one who’s been snooping around my property. Can I help you?” asked a man’s voice. I looked up and saw an older man, somewhere in his eighties or nineties, standing in front of me. He was dressed in a short-sleeved Hawaiian print shirt unbuttoned over a thin undershirt, madras plaid shorts, white socks, and the kind of rubber sandals I’d seen people wear around the pool to keep from getting foot fungus.

  The strain on my knees was too great for me to remain where I was, so reluctantly, I pushed myself up to a standing position. A zing of pain shot through my bad knee and I bucked back down to the ground. “Ow!” I uttered.

  “Madison?” Hudson shouted.

  Slowly, I stood up again. I shifted my stance so my sneaker rested on top of the vial, obstructing it from view. I turned to the man. “I’m sorry. Bad knee.”

  “You don’t get to be my age without knowing the pain of bad joints,” the man said. “Ernie Middleton,” he said. He held out his hand.

  “Madison Night.” Hudson rounded the corner. He had one arm wrapped around his ribs. When he saw Ernie, he dropped his arm. “This is Hudson James,” I added.

  Ernie let go of my hand and shook Hudson’s. “I saw you looking around. Lose something?”

  Hudson spoke first. “We took a pretty hard turn out here a few days ago and our Jeep tipped over.”

  I smiled a somewhat sheepish smile and jumped in. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think my overnight kit opened up and spilled out a few items. I convinced Hudson to bring me back and help me look.”

  “My wife told me about that. Said she saw a car tipped over. Never saw a car tip over before. When I looked out the window, there was no car. I told her she imagined it.” He looked at Hudson. “Is that how you hurt your head?”

  Hudson nodded slowly. “Freak thing. My friend came along and helped flip the car back over before things got worse. No damage to the car, so we drove off.”

  Ernie turned back to me. “I think I might be able to help you out with what you lost from your overnight kit,” he said. “You want to follow me inside?”

  I misunderstood his offer.

  “It’s not important. I can replace just about all of it with a trip to the drug store.”

  “Won’t take but a minute. ’Course if you want to wait here in the hot sun, it’s your choice.”

  I glanced at Hudson. He looked as surprised by Ernie’s generosity as I was. Before either of us had a chance to respond, he turned around and headed toward his carport.

  “What is he planning on giving you?” Hudson asked in a low voice.

  “I have no idea. I said overnight kit because I thought it was generic enough it would sound believable, but personal enough that there wouldn’t be any questions.”

  “Quick thinking,” he said. “But I gotta say, I’m curious. For all we know, you’re about to become the beneficiary of a very large jug of Metamucil.”

  I punched him lightly on the upper arm. “Be nice,” I said. “That could be you one day.”

  He shook his head. “He lost me with the white socks. Mine are going to be black.”

  “I’ll remember that.” I reached around the back of my head and pulled my hair off the nape of my neck to try to cool down. When I looked back at the carport, the door was open, but Ernie wasn’t there.

  The carport, a popular feature on houses from the mid-fifties, was attached to a gem of a structure. It was a white ranch with a butterfly roof. The front yard was a perfect example of Xeroscaping, where grass had been replaced with a yard of pebbles and rocks set about in a pleasing display. Pinkish pavers were nestled throughout, creating a path that led to the front door. A bright bougainvillea, popular in this dry climate thanks to its
minimal water consumption, sat by the front porch, the only jolt of color against the otherwise muted residence.

  As I stared at the house, admiring the details, the front door opened and a woman stared out at us. She held a serving tray with a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she said to us. “I’m letting all the air out of the house. Come on, lemonade is getting warm.” She turned around and the door slowly swung shut behind her.

  Ernie came out of a door on the side of the carport with an olive canvas duffel bag in his grip. “She means business. You want your bag, you’re going to have to drink lemonade with Eunice.” He shuffled to the front steps and went inside. The door slapped shut behind him too, but he turned back and spoke to us through the screen. “Come on, you heard her,” he said.

  Hudson leaned down behind me and spoke in my ear. “Do you recognize that bag?” he asked quietly.

  “I think so.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “Nope.” I turned my head and looked up at Hudson. “Ernie thinks it fell out of the Jeep when we tipped.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “The last time I saw a bag like that was on the pier the morning I saw the body in the water. Emma said she saw Albert throw a bag like that onto the passenger side seat of the truck. Are you as curious as I am?”

  He smiled. “Let’s go have some lemonade.”

  Eunice and Ernie Middleton lived in the kind of house I dreamed about. The interior was what mid-century enthusiasts called a time capsule: decorated and maintained in the original style from the middle of the previous century. The foyer and living room were carpeted with bright green wall-to-wall carpeting. The sofa and chairs were upholstered in a cheery green, yellow, and white stripe, and an accent chair coordinated with a whimsical daisy print fabric. A bowl of potpourri sat on a boomerang coffee table, and a small metal stand bursting with magazines was tucked between the daisy chair and a green floor lamp. Behind the sofa hung a pair of large Maio paintings featuring young women dressed in harlequin costumes. The girl in the painting on the left wore a yellow and white costume and held a black cat; on the right, the subject wore shades of green and held a violin.

  This was exactly the type of estate I tried to discover by reading the obituaries every morning. In the first thirty seconds I spotted several pieces I’d love to add to my inventory. In the immediate couple of seconds after, I cringed at the morbid connection between those two thoughts.

  “You have a lovely home,” I said to Eunice.

  “Most people think it’s old fashioned,” Ernie said. Ernie had settled down into the sofa. He held half of a windmill cookie. The other half appeared to be sprinkled in the form of crumbs down the front of his shirt.

  “Not Madison,” Hudson said. “She’s a decorator.”

  Eunice cast me a sideways glance. “You probably want me to throw it all out and paint the place beige.”

  “No!” I said quickly. “Absolutely not. It’s perfect the way it is.”

  “Do you hear that, Ernie? Perfect. From a decorator.” She looked at me and smiled. “It was featured in one of those magazines,” she said. “Want to see?”

  To anybody else, sitting in that living room three feet from the olive duffel bag that possibly held a clue to the murder of Dr. Hall, agreeing to see the magazine where Ernie and Eunice Middleton’s house had been profiled might have been torture. To me, it was a much-needed respite. Decorating was the one thing I did without thinking. It was what calmed me when I was stressed and was the most satisfying thing I could do with my time. That duffel bag could sit there all day for all I cared.

  Or at least for the next fifteen minutes. I could ignore it for fifteen minutes, I was pretty sure.

  Maybe even twenty.

  Eunice pulled a magazine out of a brass rack next to her orange tweed chair. She handed Hudson the magazine. “Page twenty-three,” she said.

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked.

  “Since 1956,” she said. “The year we were married.”

  “’56,” I repeated. “That was a good year.”

  “You’re too young to know anything about 1956,” Ernie said.

  “That’s the year The Man Who Knew Too Much came out,” I said. “Doris Day was thirty-two. She was so upset by the treatment of the animals on set a lot of people think it’s what led to her becoming an animal rights activist.”

  Ernie got a sour look on his face and flapped his hand at me in a gesture that made me stop talking. “That’s a remake,” he said. “The original was better. Peter Lorre, now there’s an actor.”

  Eunice reached over and slapped Ernie’s knee. “You’re old, but you’re not that old,” she said.

  “I saw it when it came out,” he said proudly. He turned back to Hudson and me. “I was eight years old. My dad used to give me a nickel and drop me off in front of the theaters. In those days you could pay for a movie and stay in the theater all day watching it over and over. I saw The Man Who Knew Too Much three times.”

  I had never seen the original, but if it was anything like the Doris Day remake, where Doris Day’s son is kidnapped in a foreign location, I questioned the impact the storyline would have on an impressionable eight-year-old boy.

  Hudson spoke up. “Madison is something of a Doris Day expert,” he said. “They share a birthday, and—and—” He looked at me. “What was your first Doris Day movie?”

  “Pillow Talk, of course,” I said, and we all laughed. “I didn’t see The Man Who Knew Too Much until much later. Hitchcock bought back the rights to it as part of his legacy to his daughter, so it was largely unseen until the eighties.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Hudson said.

  “There were others too, but I don’t know which they were.”

  Ernie sat up a little straighter. “Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry, and Vertigo,” he said. “They’re called ‘the Five Lost Hitchcocks.’”

  “Ernie used to work at the theater downtown,” Eunice said. The expression on her face changed from mild annoyance at his cookie-eating abilities to pride in his knowledge. She reached forward and brushed the crumbs off his shirt.

  “Thanks, honey,” he said. He took her hand and squeezed it. “Why don’t you give the young lady a tour?” he asked her. “She hasn’t touched her lemonade or her cookies. I think she’s going to burst if you don’t show her the aqua bathroom.”

  “You have an aqua bathroom?” I asked.

  Eunice dabbed at her lipstick with a cloth napkin and then set it down on the coffee table. “Come with me, dear.”

  The tour lasted well over fifteen minutes. Thoughts of the olive duffel bag had all but been replaced by the interior of Eunice and Ernie’s house. Not only did they have an aqua bathroom, but their bedroom had yellow and white daisy wallpaper and a green shag rug. If the house had been for sale, I would have made an offer.

  When Eunice and I returned to the living room, Hudson and Ernie were sitting on the sofa watching the TV. The plate of cookies was empty. At this rate, we’d be moved in by dinner. Ernie reached for the remote and clicked off the TV, and then stood up, keeping one hand on his lower back.

  He turned to Hudson. “You two seem like a nice enough couple,” he started. “And I know the kids today look for something entirely different from what Eunice and I were looking for when we first started dating, but I think you two are going about this all wrong.”

  It should have been charming—funny even—having this lovely older couple calling Hudson and I “kids” and giving us advice on how to date, but something about the tone of his voice felt off.

  Hudson didn’t pick up on it. “Madison and I have known each other for a couple of years, but we only just started dating recently,” he said. “I appreciate your perspective, but I think we’d like to let our relationship take its course on its own.”
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  Ernie flapped his hand in Hudson’s direction the same way he did when he’d been trying to cut me off earlier. “I’m not talking about your relationship, son. That’s none of my business. I’m talking about this,” he said. He picked up the olive duffle bag and shook it at Hudson. “You think I didn’t look inside? You think I don’t know what you’re really up to?” He tossed the bag on the sofa behind him.

  “Ernie!” Eunice said. “You said you’d keep quiet.”

  “You shush, woman. I’ve just been waiting for someone to show up and start asking about that bag. It’s a good thing I called the cops when they got here.”

  “The cops? Why would you call the cops?” I asked. I looked at Ernie and then Eunice, and then back at Ernie.

  “Fell out of your car, my ass.” He glanced at his wife as if anticipating a second reprimand. She wrung her hands but said nothing. “You seem nice enough, but I think it’s an act. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I do know everything you’ve said since I found you in my driveway is a lie.”

  He unzipped the duffle and dumped out several gallon-sized plastic freezer bags filled with pills.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Eunice gasped. “Ernie! Where did you get all those pills?”

  “That bag I found in the driveway,” Ernie said.

  “That bag doesn’t belong to you. You had no business looking inside,” Eunice said.

  “Yeah? Well it’s a good thing I did. These two here are up to something. They were out front digging around in the bushes looking for it.”

  I looked at Hudson. I didn’t know if we were thinking the same thing. The problem was I didn’t know for sure what I was thinking. Emma had told me she suspected that Dr. Hall had been up to something illegal, and Dr. Hall had practically driven us off the road at this very spot. Now it turned out a bag of pills had been found nearby.