“I asked a friend once, and he said he didn’t know anything. But most of Travis’s friends would rather lie than tell the truth any day. Travis used to talk about going down to South America. He said he wanted to live where there weren’t so many rules and regulations. So I thought maybe he’d done that. Although sometimes I did think he might be dead. He lived kind of a … reckless life.”
Cate had a sudden intuition. “Was he into motorcycles?”
“Oh yeah. He never could hold a job for long, but he was good at buying and selling and trading bikes. I got fired from the only job I ever had because Travis came in and accused the guy I worked for of groping me. Which he never had. But Travis punched him and smashed the windows of his car with a tire iron.”
“Did you try to locate him after he left?”
“No. Marrying Travis was the biggest mistake of my life. Mom practically begged me not to marry him, even if I was pregnant. And she was right, of course. He had a terrible temper. He put a fist through our apartment wall one time and threw a frying pan through a window. He shot up a bunch of beer bottles right in our backyard. The cops came, and they told him to get rid of the gun or else. He did, but he got another one right away, of course.”
Rolf had been right. Travis was a bad dude. A follow-up thought was, It takes one to know one. Maybe the question here was, who was the baddest dude?
“Mom said I was lucky I lost the baby too, because that meant I could get on with my life. But I never really felt that way.” Kim touched her abdomen as if regret for the emptiness still lingered. “Then, after Travis took off, I moved here to live with Mom and met Ed. The lawyer had to do the divorce some special way, since I didn’t even know where Travis was.”
Kim may have had a rough life with Travis, and losing her mother was also hard on her, but Cate wasn’t about to offer instant sympathy. “But Ed was married. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“It bothered me, but Mom knew some people who knew Ed, and she told me they said his wife was naggy and mean and money hungry, and they were about to split up anyway.”
An actual account of what the people had said, or a little tweaking by Celeste? Although, even if Kim believed what Celeste told her, that didn’t make involvement with a married man morally defensible.
“What kind of marriage did you and Ed have?”
“We were fine. Very happy.” Then faint lines cut between Kim’s eyebrows, as if an unexpected streak of honesty made her reconsider that instant response. “Of course he was busy and had a lot on his mind. The restaurant and vineyard and everything. And we, um … well, he was a lot older. He didn’t like dancing and I didn’t like golf. I didn’t like watching boxing or football on TV, and he didn’t like figure skating. I love Mexican food, but it bothered his stomach.”
Had Ed Kieferson also discovered there were flaws in trophy wife acquisition?
Kim wiggled the toe sticking out of the brown sock. “Sometimes I even wondered …”
“Wondered?”
“If maybe he wished he’d stayed married to Jo-Jo.” The wrinkle across her forehead deepened, but she determinedly straightened her back. “But mostly we were happy. Very happy.”
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.
“Were there money problems?” Cate asked.
“He never said I shouldn’t spend so much on the house or yard or clothes or anything.” Kim’s vague wave took in the expensive furnishings and probably that strange sculpture outside. “But from what the lawyers and accountant are telling me now, yes. Big money problems. I think Ed was just too considerate to tell me.”
Or afraid she’d burn rubber taking off in the Mustang if she knew the money supply was fizzling out?
“What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. Mom said we could keep things going after Ed’s death. I always thought the wedding business out at Lodge Hill was interesting. When I was a teenager, I used to dream about a huge, beautiful wedding. I was always cutting out pictures of wedding gowns and articles about what food to serve at the reception, who stood where in a receiving line, all that kind of stuff. I had lots of weddings for my Barbie and Ken.”
Kim leaned her head back and closed her eyes, as if she longed to go back to those days. She didn’t say it, but somehow Cate doubted Kim’s wedding to bad-dude Travis had lived up to those fantasies.
“Did you and Ed get married at Lodge Hill?” she asked.
“No, we flew down to Vegas. I thought maybe, after awhile, he’d let me take over running the wedding business. I gave him a few hints. But I never wanted to be involved with the restaurant or vineyard. No way. And now …” She lifted her shoulders as if she had no idea what to do with them.
Cate started to say that Rolf was there to run the vineyard, but, under the circumstances, Rolf might not be running anything for long.
“What about the Mystic Mirage?”
“Mom handpicked everything for the store. She knew all about tarot cards and incense and astrology stuff. But some of it makes me feel …” Kim wiggled on the sofa as if she’d like to squirm out from under the weight of the Mystic Mirage. “Uncomfortable, I guess. Once a woman came in and said we were flirting with demons with the witchcraft books.” Kim gave a nervous tinkle of laughter, as if she were embarrassed to be giving that kind of thinking any credibility.
“Did you ever do that regression thing into past lives with your mother?”
“She wouldn’t do it with me. I never knew why.”
Maybe because Celeste knew it was all a big, fat phony?
Back to the husband before Ed. Kim hadn’t really answered Cate’s question about why Celeste may have been thinking about investigating Travis. Cate repeated the question.
“I think Travis called the store one time. I was there. Mom said the caller was an annoying salesman, but I just had this, I don’t know, feeling it was him. I never let her know, but I called a friend back in Tigard to ask if he’d been around there. My friend said yes, and that he’d been asking about me.” As something of an afterthought, she added, “And Mom.”
“So the friend told him where you were?”
“No. She was suspicious even though he said he needed to find me because my name was on the title of some old pickup he owned. But someone else could have told him.”
“Do you think Travis could have killed your mother?” Cate asked bluntly.
She thought the abrupt question might shock Kim, but Kim clasped her hands together and almost primly said, “The thought has occurred to me.”
“Why would he do it?”
Kim’s fingers worried a half inch of purple thread hanging from a seam on the pillow. “Mom and Travis never got along. As I said, she didn’t want me to marry him. And she was so right. He never actually hit me, but I-I kept thinking he was going to. He broke some guy’s elbow when they got in a fight. I know he made money buying and selling bikes, but sometimes it seemed as if he must be getting more somewhere else.”
“Doing something illegal?”
“Probably.”
“Was he into drugs?”
“I never knew him to use anything, but maybe that was just because I was dumb and naïve. He laughed about some guy he knew who made meth right in his kitchen. I always wondered if Travis helped sell the stuff.”
“Did your mother know about his possible connection with drugs?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
They sat in silence for several moments, Kim’s expression pensive.
“Could you tell me more about your mother?”
“She had a psychology practice where she saw clients at an office in Portland three times a week. She wrote her book, and it turned out to be really successful. Then she closed her office in Portland, moved down here, and opened the Mystic Mirage.”
“Why did she close her office?”
“She said she got tired of driving into Portland all the time.” Kim paused to think for a moment. “Once she said something about some cli
ents being really unpleasant.”
“Did she have a medical degree?”
“No. But she’d earned a doctorate degree from a special metaphysical college in the Midwest.” A little defensively she added, “She had a right to put ‘Doctor’ in front of her name.”
“Why didn’t she open the Mystic Mirage in Tigard?”
“She said Eugene was bigger and more sophisticated. That there were more intellectual-type people here because of the university. She wanted me to leave Travis and come here with her right then, but Travis warned me no way was he letting me go. He always acted as if he … owned me.” She swallowed. “Sometimes I had the feeling he’d rather see me dead than free from him.”
Kim wasn’t dead, but Ed and Celeste were. Now that those obstacles were out of the way, did Travis have in mind reclaiming Kim? Or was she targeted as a third victim on his hit list?
“But he walked out on you anyway, even after he said he’d never let you go.”
Kim smiled in a way that added a grim maturity to her face. “Travis never let logic clutter up his thinking.”
Kim twisted the purple thread around her finger, tightening it like a noose until it cut into the skin. In some peculiar way, that reminded Cate of the hand tightening around her throat. She swallowed.
“Sometimes I wondered if Mom gave him money to leave me,” Kim added.
“Would she do that?”
“She might have figured paying him off was the best way to get rid of him. And she had money from her book.”
“So why would he have gotten in touch with her now?”
“I don’t know that he did get in touch with her,” Kim said, with another hint of defensiveness. “I mean, I thought it was him on the phone that time. But my feelings about people …” She shrugged and made a phfft sound about the accuracy of her own feelings. “Mom had real insights into people. Like how right she was about Travis, and how she could see into people’s past lives too.”
Kim apparently didn’t doubt that there were past lives, or that her mother had the ability to delve into them.
“Even if he contacted your mother, why would he kill her?”
“Maybe he blamed her for breaking up our marriage. Maybe the money ran out, and she wouldn’t give him any more. Maybe he turned even badder while he was gone.”
Travis was a gun-packing kind of guy. Ed had been killed with a gun. A gun that, so far as Cate knew, had never been found. Which brought up a possibility, of course.
“Could Travis have killed your husband too?”
Kim made a choking sound as if her breath had caught in her throat. Cate realized this was a shocking but not totally new thought to Kim when she said, “Maybe.”
“Why?” Although it wasn’t a question Cate really needed to ask. The ex-husband viewed Kim as a possession. He had a violent temper. If he figured Ed Kieferson had taken something that belonged to him, he might well have gone into murder mode. “Have you told the police about him?”
“I didn’t when Ed was killed. It never even occurred to me then. But, since I thought he called Mom that time, I did tell them about him after … what happened to her.”
“What did the authorities say?”
She yanked the purple thread, ripping the whole seam on the pillow. “Oh, you know the police. They don’t tell you anything. They just ask questions.”
“Do you have any other thoughts about who might have killed your husband? Business enemies, maybe?”
“I’ve wondered, since I found out about all the money problems Ed was having, if maybe he’d borrowed money from, I don’t know, who is it that lends money and then kills you if you don’t pay it back? The Mafia?”
Cate had never heard of a Eugene branch of the Mafia, but, who knew? That opened up a whole new arsenal of faceless suspects.
“Is it possible Ed was involved with drugs in some way?”
Cate expected instant denial, but what she got was Kim shifting uncomfortably on the sofa. “After he was killed, and I found out about all the money difficulties, I’ve wondered about … some things.”
“Such as?”
“If maybe they were growing something other than grapes out there at the vineyard. Maybe using those old buildings, barns or sheds or whatever they are. Pot growers sometimes grow stuff indoors, you know, using lights. Travis knew some people who grew marijuana in their basement that way.”
“Ed wouldn’t have been out there planting and watering pot plants himself. He’d have had to have someone in on it. Who?”
Kim gave a minuscule shrug, and Cate offered a name herself. “Rolf?”
“Rolf got in trouble on some pot-growing thing before Ed hired him.”
“Rolf told you this? Or Ed?”
“I knew Rolf a long time ago, back when I was a kid. So we’ve talked a few times.” She jumped up. “But if you’re thinking there was something going on between Rolf and me, you’re wrong! And I don’t really think Ed was into any drug thing either.” She slumped back to the sofa, her moment of fiery denial fizzling. “I mean, if he were, he wouldn’t have had all those money troubles, would he?”
Probably true. Or maybe there were some guys who could lose money even growing or dealing drugs.
“Rolf also told me he was on probation, and I don’t think he’d do anything to risk getting sent back. He said when he was locked up he felt as if he couldn’t even breathe. As if the jail cell didn’t have enough air to go around. But Ed was really mad at him about something. I think he was about to fire Rolf.”
“But you don’t know what the problem was?”
“They were pretty close when Ed first hired Rolf. Ed spent a lot of time out at the vineyard. He said they were planning to redo the whole vineyard and plant a different kind of grape. So I guess Ed just didn’t like how Rolf was running the vineyard.”
Rolf wasn’t eliminated from Cate’s suspicions, but he’d dropped down on her list. And she had one more question, maybe the most important question of all. “What does Travis look like?”
“Oh, tall. About six-two. Dark brown hair, brown eyes. He used to weigh about 210, but I don’t know what he might be now.”
The words could describe a lot of men, but one vision in particular jumped into Cate’s mind.
A big, dark-haired, biker guy stalking into the Mystic Mirage as Cate barreled out.
“Does he have tattoos?”
“Oh yeah.” Kim unexpectedly shuddered. “A big one of a dragon on his back that he got before we were married. And vines twined around hearts and skulls on his arms. I hated them all.”
Another vision. A tattooed arm reaching for Cate’s throat. Were there hearts and skulls on it? There was something in those swirls she’d seen. If she could just see the arm clearly … “Do Travis and Rolf Wildrider look a lot alike?”
“Travis and Rolf?” Kim sounded surprised at the connection. She reflectively glanced up at the blue sky above the shades. “I guess, in a way they do. They’re both big and dark-haired. But Rolf is, you know, kind of lean and lanky. Travis went in for a lot of body-building stuff, so he’s really muscular. He’s good-looking in a boyish kind of way, but Rolf has those smoldery good looks. They aren’t guys you’d mistake for each other.”
Except Cate was almost certain she had.
17
“Would you excuse me a minute?” Kim said. “I need to put on something warmer. I’m so cold.”
Cate had never removed her jacket and now she realized why. It was cold in here. Was Kim more aware of expenses these days? Or simply forgetting about such mundane matters as turning up the thermostat? She disappeared around a solid wall at the far end of the room and returned wearing an oversized plaid jacket that looked as if it also may have been Ed’s.
“Can you think of anyone other than Travis whom your mother might have planned to discuss with me?” Cate asked after Kim sat down and tucked her feet under her.
“Maybe Ed’s ex-wife. Mom said she was greedy enough to do almost anything. S
he thought all along that the woman had killed Ed.” Small, thoughtful pause as if Kim had accepted that assessment earlier but was reconsidering it now that Travis had resurfaced.
“I’ve met the former wife,” Cate said carefully. “From what I saw, the breakup with Ed really devastated her for a while. She’s a nice person, actually. Very creative at making those life-sized dolls, like the one she made of you. She certainly didn’t strike me as dangerous.”
Kim wiggled her toe through the hole in the sock. “Mom could put her own spin on things,” she admitted. “But she always had my best interests at heart,” she added almost fiercely.
“Have arrangements been made for her services yet?”
“No. I just haven’t been able to decide what to do. Her body will go to a funeral home after the autopsy.” She broke off as if the word conjured images she couldn’t cope with. “Maybe it’s already there. I don’t know whether she should be buried here, or up in Portland where her parents are, or what.”
Kim lifted the pillow and stared at it, as if she might find answers in the purple velvet. “I don’t know why she didn’t leave instructions.” For the first time she sounded on the verge of resentment toward her mother.
“I’m sure you’ll make the right decisions.”
Kim gave a small, bleak smile. “If I do, it’ll be the first time.”
It was such a downbeat attitude, but no doubt understandable, given Kim’s recent losses of both her husband and the mother on whom she’d been so dependent. Yet Cate suspected neither of them had ever done anything to help her develop the self-esteem or self-confidence she so badly needed now that she was alone. Cate wasn’t sure she wanted to do this, wasn’t sure she should do this, but she took a deep breath and said, “If there’s anything I can do to help—”
Kim suddenly sat up straighter on the sofa. “You know, there is something we could do! Mom didn’t keep a real day planner, but she wrote appointments and notes on a calendar in her apartment. Maybe she wrote something about an appointment with you and what it was about.”
“Have the police been in her apartment?”
“Not that I know of. They’re taking the Mystic Mirage apart like they’re looking for lost atoms, but they’ve never said anything about the apartment. If you’d like, we could go over and look at her calendar. I haven’t been there since Mom’s … passing.” She stumbled over the euphemism, as if she couldn’t say “death” or “murder.”
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