But she found some aspects of motorcycle riding close to terrifying. Never had she felt more insignificant and vulnerable than when an eighteen-wheeler roared by. The huge tires rolling only a few feet from her face made her head spin dizzily. Those tires also shot out road water like wet missiles. She came close to full panic when another truck driver didn’t see them and stopped barely inches behind them at a stop sign, the big truck looming over them like a panting monster. And when she looked down and saw the road zipping along bare inches under her feet, it almost seemed to be pulling her down into it.
She was relieved when Mitch eased the bike into Jo-Jo’s driveway. Maude instantly announced their presence. Jo-Jo’s car wasn’t in the driveway, but Cate went to the door. No response to her knock.
“I guess I should have called first,” she said when she walked back to Mitch and the bike. “Maybe she hasn’t moved back out here yet.”
“That’s okay. We’re in no hurry.” Mitch held out a palm. “It’s starting to sprinkle anyway. We can wait in the barn, and maybe it’ll pass over.”
He drove the motorcycle under a shed-type overhang on the barn and got a rag out of a saddlebag to wipe a few sprinkles off the seat and glossy purple finish. Cate wandered over to scratch Maude behind her big white ears.
After twenty minutes, Jo-Jo hadn’t arrived, and the rain was falling harder.
“I guess we’d better go,” Mitch said. “It doesn’t look as if it’s letting up.”
Not only not letting up, the rain was falling in a downpour now, gleefully repudiating that optimistic weather report.
“This is the sprinkle you mentioned?” Cate asked.
If Mitch heard her, she couldn’t hear his response over the hammer of rain on her helmet. A couple miles farther on, with Cate thinking these helmet faceplates really should come with windshield wipers, he pulled into a little country store. Cate followed him inside, mostly to get out of the rain. He bought a carton of big garbage bags. She watched, puzzled, as he pulled one out and used a pocket knife to cut a hole on each side and a larger hole at the top. He handed the black bag to her.
“There. Instant rain gear.”
Cate had never been a stickler for fashion, but she had always worn items that could actually qualify as clothing. “You want me to wear a garbage bag?”
He was already busy cutting on the second bag. “Suit yourself. I’m going to.”
Cate, looking at the rain outside, felt dampness already seeping through her jacket, and grimly slid her head and arms through the openings. Mitch put his on. When they went outside, he looked big and bulky and masculine. In a window of the store, Cate saw her own reflection. She looked like an overweight witch with a bad sense of fashion. Mitch easily hiked his garbage bag up to swing his leg over the bike. Cate managed not to twist, dislocate, or break anything.
They rode through onslaughts of rainwater from above, rainwater splashed sideways by passing cars, more rainwater bouncing up from below.
Finally, back at the house, Mitch steadied the bike while Cate dismounted. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m home safely.” She unfastened the helmet and slid it off her squashed hair. “I guess I should be grateful for that.”
“I’m sorry. This isn’t how I intended your first ride to be. I guess I should have waited when they said it was going to sprinkle. But I was just so eager to take you for a ride.” Behind the face plate, Mitch’s eyes looked dark and anxious.
Yes, Mitch had undoubtedly had good intentions. But what was that old saying? The road to destruction is paved with good intentions. A very wet road, in this case.
Mitch swiped a finger across her wet eyebrows. Unexpectedly he grinned. “The garbage bag is quite becoming. Black is definitely your color.”
Cate wanted to be grumpy. In spite of the garbage bag, cold rainwater dribbled down her back. Her jeans, where they’d stuck out from under the bag, clung to her legs like wet paint. She was cold as a plastic-covered Popsicle. Of all the drawbacks to being a biker babe, this was not one she had anticipated.
Yet, with Mitch grinning at her so hopefully, she couldn’t help the beginning of a smile of her own. The bike ride was a new and memorable adventure. No rut in her life with Mitch in it. And it tended to put life’s problems in perspective. Who could be too serious about life while wearing a garbage bag?
“Does this make me a full-fledged biker babe?”
“Definitely the queen of the biker babes.” He brushed back a strand of wet hair plastered to her face. “I’m hoping you’ll give the Purple Rocket and me another chance.”
“I’ll think about it.” She paused, and the smile got a little more genuine. “Yeah, I probably will.”
“And won’t this make a great story to tell our grandkids someday?”
Our grandkids.
It had a nice ring to it. She wasn’t jumping on it with joy, but she did manage to say, “Do you want to come in and warm up for a while?”
“Thanks, no. I’m going to head on home and get the bike put away. I’ll meet you at church tomorrow?”
Cate nodded. He lifted the faceplate on his helmet, leaned over, and gave her a kiss that felt warm and wonderful even with rainwater dribbling down her face.
Yeah, life could be good even in a garbage bag.
Cate showered and wrapped up in a flannel robe. With Uncle Joe and Rebecca out to a potluck dinner with friends, she had leftover fajitas for dinner, propped pillows on the bed, and settled down to read. Octavia snuggled up beside her. Her cell phone sitting on the nightstand rang without any pre-notice from the cat. She saw from the ID that it was Kim’s number. She was tempted to ignore it, but an inevitable sense of concern made her sigh and pick up the phone.
“Hi, Kim.”
“Cate, I know I probably shouldn’t call you. I know you’re unhappy with me. I know I’m probably being paranoid or something. But I just have this awful feeling. Like a big rock or something is about to crash down on me.”
Not a good feeling in a glass house. “Has something happened since I saw you this morning?”
“No. I’ve just been sitting around, thinking I should be here if Travis called.”
“Um.”
“You must think I’m the most helpless person in the world.”
“I think you have strengths and capabilities, but you’ve let your mother and Travis and even Ed convince you you’re nothing but a dumb blonde who can’t do anything on your own.”
Unexpectedly, Kim managed a laugh. “Come on, Cate. Don’t be shy. Just tell me straight out what you think.”
“Maybe that was a little blunt. But—”
“It’s okay. Thanks for being honest. I think I’ll, uh, go fix myself some tea now. Probably I’m just all nervous for nothing.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
“I’ll get dressed and come over.”
The house was all lit up when Cate arrived. Apparently Kim’s apprehension had overridden worries about paying a big electric bill. Although the house was cold inside, and Kim had been huddled in front of a small heater by the sofa rather than turning up the thermostat on the main heat. She was wearing the old plaid jacket again, plus two pairs of socks now.
“Did you and Rolf go over and get Travis’s bike?” Cate asked.
“No. I couldn’t get hold of him.”
Cate started to ask if she’d left a message for Rolf, but the cell phone in the pocket of Kim’s baggy jacket played an incongruously upbeat guitar riff. Kim looked at the ID but apparently didn’t recognize whatever was there.
She answered the call with a tentative hello. Then, after a moment, she said, “I was wondering if you’d call.”
That didn’t necessarily identify the caller as Travis, but Kim looked at her and gave a little nod that said it was him. Cate was surprised that they were allowing him to call from the jail so late on a Saturday night. It was past 9:00 already. Kim didn’t move away, but Cate, even though she was curious, felt awkward overhearing the privat
e call. She started to move over to the black-and-white seating area. Kim made a downward movement with a hand to stop her, touched a button on the phone, and a moment later Travis’s voice came out of the speaker.
“… big mistake, but I don’t know how long it will take these idiots to get it straightened out.” He sounded odd, his voice hoarse or whispery.
“How did they make this big ‘mistake’?” Kim asked. Cate heard the quotation marks around mistake. She wondered if Travis did.
“Remember my buddy Jesse? He got caught trying to sell some stolen stuff on Craigslist. When they nabbed him, he told them I’d been in on the burglary.”
“Why would he do that if you weren’t involved?”
“Oh, you know. Sometimes they give you a deal if you rat on someone else. He was already mad because I hadn’t brought a ton of pot back from Guatemala. But it’s like I already told you, I’m through with that life.”
“Jesse always was getting in trouble.”
Cate could hear Kim softening toward Travis and his I’m-a-changed-man combined with my-friend-done-me-wrong story.
“I tried to get in to see you, but they wouldn’t let me in,” Kim said. “Do you know yet when they’ll move you up to Tigard?”
“No idea. Look, can you do something for me? I need to get my bike away from the motel. No telling what might happen to it there in the parking lot. And I need my stuff out of the motel too.”
“I’ll get an employee from the vineyard to move the bike. I grabbed the key. I’ll see if I can get your things out of the motel too.”
“Great! I knew I could count on you, babe. You’re the best! There is one other thing.” Travis didn’t wait to see if Kim was agreeable to something more. “I don’t know when they’ll set bail. Probably not until—”
“Could you talk a little louder? We—I can barely hear you.”
“I can’t talk any louder,” he said, though the whisper did go up a notch in volume. “I’m on a cell phone, hiding out under a blanket on my bunk. Cell phones are illegal in here, but this guy got one smuggled in. I’m paying him a hundred bucks to use it for fifteen minutes. He wouldn’t have trusted me for the money except he was impressed when I told him who you were. He’s heard of Mr. K’s expensive restaurant.”
What Cate heard was that the cellmate was counting on Kim for that hundred bucks, though Kim didn’t seem to pick up on that.
“Won’t you be in trouble if they catch you with the phone?”
“Big trouble. But I had to talk to you, Kim. I just had to. Everything was going so good for us, and then this. I used up the one phone call they allow by calling Jesse to try to get him to tell the truth about the burglary.”
Cate felt a sudden shift in Kim’s view of Travis. They already knew the one-phone-call limit wasn’t true.
“Anyway, what I need is money to pay the bail so I can get out of here,” Travis said.
“How much will bail be?” Kim asked.
“I don’t know. It’s only a burglary charge, so probably not more than $25,000.”
“Travis, I can’t come up with—”
“You don’t have to come up with the whole amount. I think they only require 10 percent, something like that.”
“It doesn’t matter how much it is. I can’t come up with anything.”
“What do you mean, you can’t come up with anything? That old guy you married was loaded. I checked. Million-dollar house. Expensive restaurant, big vineyard, high-class lodge of some kind. Probably a boatload of stocks and bonds and cash too. Get some of it for me, babe. I need it. Now.”
“I know it looks from the outside like we were rich, but I have maybe fifty dollars in my checking account.”
“Oh, come on,” Travis scoffed. Then, as if he’d had a sudden suspicion, he said, “Is that redhead there with you? She’s filling you full of a bunch of baloney about me, isn’t she? Don’t trust her, babe. She—”
Travis broke off abruptly, and Cate’s PI intuition kicked in with the realization that he was only at that moment finally putting details together. That she was the one who had found Celeste’s body that night at the Mystic Mirage. That she was the one he’d tried to choke through the beaded curtain.
“Cate has nothing to do with this,” Kim said. “And I’m telling you the truth. I don’t have any money.”
“Borrow some.”
“I can’t! I’m already up to my ears in debt!”
“Then hock something. Sell something. I don’t care what you do. I can’t talk much longer or they’re going to bust in and catch me. Just get the money and get me out of here, or—”
Travis stopped, but the word hung there like a bomb about to explode. Or.
“Get you out of there, or what, Travis?” Kim said, her voice going unexpectedly calm. “You’ll kill me like you did my husband and my mother?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with either of their deaths. I told you that!”
“I think you did.”
“So now you’re threatening me? You’re going to sic the cops on me for murder? Do that, and I’ll just have to tell them a few things about your precious mother.” His voice had risen out of the whispery range, even if that put him in jeopardy.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, your dear mother was using a drug on her so-called patients. A very illegal drug.”
“I don’t believe you,” Kim said, but her voice faltered.
“No? Well, I know it for a fact, babe. If she couldn’t get her ‘patient’ hypnotized right away, she slipped ’em some Rohypnol. Or maybe you’ve heard it by its more common name, the date-rape drug? It put her patients out quite nicely, and they couldn’t remember a thing about what went on during that time. Then afterwards Celeste fed them any kind of wild story about their past lives that she wanted to.”
“I-I don’t believe you. You can’t know that.”
“Kim, babe, I was the one getting the Rohypnol for her, so I definitely do know. And why do you think she dropped her Portland business like a hot potato? She had a couple of those so-called patients threatening to sue over what she’d given them.”
Kim’s mouth dropped open, but forming words seemed beyond her.
“Anyway, you get me the bail money and a few thousand extra, or all this comes out. Your mother may be dead, but this will make an interesting addition to her obituary, don’t you think? ‘Well-known local meta-psychologist’ or whatever it was she called herself. Or maybe it will be, ‘Well-known hypnotist Dr. Celeste Chandler revealed as illegal drug pusher.’”
Cate could hear an ominous ring of truth in Travis’s threat. He’d do it, even if the revelation backfired and got him in more trouble. She knew Kim could hear it too.
“Did my mother give you money to get you out of our lives?” Kim demanded.
“She gave me money, all right. A nice bundle. When I told her that if she didn’t come up with it, the police would get all the facts about the magic secret to her big success with that so-called past-lives regression rubbish.”
“You blackmailed her!”
“It got me out of being married to you, and I had a nice nest egg to finance an escape too.”
“Why did you come back?”
If Travis’s disdainful attitude about their marriage hurt Kim, she wasn’t letting it show.
“Money, of course. I ran out and I need more. Those idiots down in Guatemala couldn’t grow pot any better than I could send a rocket to the moon. But Celeste got hard-nosed about it. Said she didn’t have anything to give me.”
So he killed her when she wouldn’t pay off again. And trashed her apartment for whatever he could find. What about Ed Kieferson’s murder?
“But then you looked like a pretty good bet, rich widow and all,” Travis added.
“So now you’re trying to blackmail me,” Kim said.
“I’m just telling you the facts, babe. About what’s going to happen if you don’t get me that bail money, and more, or if you try to pin so
me murder on me. But you get the money, and everything will be fine. We can start a great new life together, right there in your big glass house.” His voice softened persuasively. “We were pretty good together, babe. Things just kind of went wrong. But we can make it really good this time.”
Travis could go from telling her how glad he was to get out of their old marriage to how great a new one would be. As Kim had once said about her ex, Travis never let logic clutter up his thinking.
“Maybe I don’t care what you tell the world about my mother!”
“You care.”
Kim’s moment of silence said he was right, but her voice was a little sad when she said, “Then maybe you should have checked on the real level of my wealth before you killed her.”
Kim hit the button that ended the call. The cell phone rang again a minute later. Kim didn’t answer it, and, without listening to whatever message Travis may have left, she erased it.
22
Cate and Kim sat there in silence, the only sound the faint hum of the small refrigerator in the bar area in a corner of the room.
“Do you believe what Travis said about your mother and giving the drug to her clients?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.” Kim still sounded sad. “But it’s a good thing Ed never knew, or he’d have been mad enough to kill her himself. Someone gave his daughter that date-rape drug once. What happened while she was knocked out with it left her so disturbed and depressed that she killed herself a couple years later. It was all before I knew him, of course, but he was still really bitter about it. He said anyone who gave a woman that drug ought to be—” Kim shook her head. “Well, Ed could get pretty graphic about that.”
Jo-Jo had mentioned the daughter’s suicide but not this detail.
“Are you going to get the money for him?” Cate asked.
“I suppose I could hock something. I have some jewelry Ed gave me. And there’s lots of stuff around here that’s probably hockable.” Kim gazed around the room as if sizing up the dollar value of lamps and furniture and knickknacks. “I hocked things now and then back when Travis and I were married.”
“Do you think helping him get out is a good idea?”
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