Where the Bones are Buried

by Jeanne Matthews

  “Me, too.” She took a last quick sip of the martini and burrowed into her coat.

  “Don’t you want to see the certificate of authenticity of the katsinam?”

  “Some other time.” She didn’t bother to say thanks or good-bye. She left him holding the tab for the martini and hoofed it.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Could there be an alternative explanation for the change of costume on such a chilly night? If she could talk with Thor, he’d help her to work out the sense of it. Maybe what he’d learned from Lohendorf tonight would help to clarify things.

  The drizzle had turned to rain. The Golf’s wipers were beating like a funeral drum and condensation on the inside of the windshield made it hard to see. She futzed with the climate control and wiped the glass directly in front of her with a tissue.

  At a red light, she pulled out her phone to check her voicemail, but before she could peck in her password, the light changed and the driver in the car behind laid on his horn. Why hadn’t Thor called? Either he was buying Lohendorf a lot of beers or he had news that he was in no hurry to relay. News that the IRS had picked out the penitentiary where she would be doing time. News that Hess had plopped her mother back in the soup.

  She tossed the phone into the passenger seat and drove on, exhausted and strangely queasy. One in the morning. Was she reading the time right? She would have to file a missing person report if K.D. hadn’t skylarked home by now. More hassle. More conflict. More distraction. No wonder she couldn’t penetrate the fog.

  Fingers of bright light fell across the wet street like pick-up sticks. She felt dizzy. Those few sips of vodka had hit her like a bus. She slowed and moved into the right lane. Too far. The Golf’s right front tire sideswiped the curb. She jerked the wheel left. Horns blared and shrieked.

  Sweet Jesus!

  Everything looked smeared and filmy, but she couldn’t stop in the middle of the street. Traffic zoomed past on both sides. She had to stay in the flow. She was almost home. Had to turn soon. Had to get into the left lane. She strained her eyes. Was this her street? The yellow light ahead had a bleary halo. She accelerated and swerved left. Things were just coming into focus when a swell of nausea rolled over her. She clapped a hand to her mouth, lost control, and the Golf jumped the curb. The seatbelt grabbed and she barely got it off in time.

  She opened the door, leaned out, and retched. She was sick for a long time. When she was done, she lay her head back against the headrest and drifted away into the darkness.

  ***

  Somebody opened the car door and tapped her cheeks. “Dinah, are you hurt?”

  “Thor.”

  “Is anything broken? Can you stand up?”

  “Mm. Little wobbly.”

  He helped her out of the car and she realized that she had actually made it all the way to Niederwallstrasse. The car sat jacked at an angle within sight of her lavender garage, its right front tire flatted on top of the curb and its emergency lights blinking.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Since I was two.”

  “Good. Then let’s walk.” He put his arm under hers and semi-carried, semi-dragged her. “What happened?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Did somebody try to run you off the road again?”

  “No. I felt sick and blacked out. I still feel a little woozy, but I think I’m okay.” That martini had really walloped her. Was it possible that Farber had slipped her a Mickey? Or one of those date rape drugs? She normally had a good head for spirits and she certainly hadn’t drunk enough to make her sick. “What time’s it?”

  “A little after one.”

  “Then I wasn’t out long.”

  “Did you hit your head?”

  “No.”

  “Say something that persuades me not to take you straight to the hospital.”

  “I think I’m okay, Thor. Really.”

  “Did you have too much to drink? Are you lit?”

  “If I’m lit, I didn’t do the lighting. Somebody served me a bad martini.” She balked. “I forgot my phone and my purse in the car.”

  “I’ll get them when I go back to move the car.”

  “Better do it now. The Smith & Wesson’s in my purse.”

  She felt the muscles in his arm knot and braced herself for a bawling out, but he curbed it and they turned back. He propped her against the street sign and reached inside the car for the phone and purse. He put the phone in his pocket, slung the purse over one shoulder, hooked one of her arms around his neck, and continued walking her toward the apartment.

  He said, “Talk to me.”

  “I’m too tired. You talk to me. How did you find me?”

  “I was turning the corner on my way home and saw the car half-blocking the street. You scared me.”

  “I scared myself. Note to self. Never drive after a martini.”

  “Did anyone I know happen to share this martini with you?”

  “I’ll tell you the whole story in the morning. Right now, we have to find K.D. If she’s not back, will you call Geert at the club to see if she’s there?”

  “She’s probably asleep in the sleeping bag.” He opened the security door and helped her up the stairs to the apartment.

  Jack hadn’t budged from his berth on the sofa. Margaret sat in the armchair in the corner. She looked up from a book as they came in. “One of you will want to go get K.D. She was picked up a few hours ago along with a group of animal rights protesters and thrown in the pokey for trying to liberate a bear from a bear pit in Köllnischer Park.”

  Dinah’s capacity for surprises had maxed out. “A live bear?”

  Thor looked as close to exasperation as Dinah had ever seen him. “I’ll take care of K.D.” He went over to the cuckoo and toggled a switch on the underside of the house. “No more noise from that squawker. Drink some water and rest. Keep an eye on her, Margaret. Use your judgment. If she gets sick again or starts to sound delirious, call an ambulance.”

  “Will do.” Margaret handed him a piece of paper. “Here’s the address of the jail.”

  “I’d better hurry before streets start being closed off for the start of the marathon.” He gave Dinah a last, concerned look, set her purse down on the foyer table, and left.

  “You don’t look sick to me.” Margaret felt her forehead. “You don’t have a fever and your color’s good.”

  “I feel much better. I think the man I went to meet drugged me, but I got it out of my system. I’m going to wash my face and brush my teeth and zonk out for a few hours. I’ll need all my powers to deal with K.D. in the morning.”

  “You can have the bed, Dinah. I’ve slept on the floor before. I’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks, Margaret, but I’d rather be with Thor.”

  “So would I, but I don’t think he’d enjoy himself as much as I would.”

  Dinah laughed and headed off to the bathroom. When she came out, she felt revived. Whatever Farber had put in her drink must have metabolized quickly. She couldn’t think why he would have drugged her, especially if he thought that her boyfriend was only a few feet away. Had he meant to kill her, but she hadn’t drunk enough of the cocktail? He surely must know that she had already shared her suspicions about his gallery with the police, so what was the point?

  And bears? Bears. Weary as she was, her brain wouldn’t shut down and now, incredibly, she felt ravenous. She went to the kitchen to forage for a snack.

  Margaret sat at the table with her book and a bowl of leftover Stroganoff.

  “You’d better not eat that, Margaret. In retrospect, maybe it was the beef that made me sick.”

  “I’ll chance it. It’s delicious. You’re a pretty good cook.”

  “I like to cook when I have time.” She took a wedge of Cambozola out of the fridge and warmed it in the microwave. “Since I quit smoking, I�
�m hungry all the time, especially these last few days. It’s the stress. Geert calls it Kummerspeck. The literal translation is grief bacon.”

  Margaret stuck a forkful of Stroganoff into her mouth and gave her a speculative once-over. “When was the last time you had a visit from your Aunt Flo?”

  “What?”

  “The curse, honey. When was your last period?”

  Dinah’s thoughts unspooled. Dear God, had the patch failed? It was beyond comprehension. She grabbed the calendar off the wall, dropped into a chair, and did her best to deny the evidence in front of her eyes. “How could this have happened?”

  “In the usual way, I suspect.” The microwave beeped and Margaret took out the Cambozola and handed Dinah a knife and a box of crackers. “Accidents happen.”

  “To teenagers. Not to anyone my age. Not to anybody with half a brain.”

  “Getting yourself knocked up isn’t the worst thing in life. Babies can bring a lot of happiness. It’s usually fifteen or twenty years before they break your heart.”

  Dinah put her head down on the table and whimpered.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  It was after ten when she woke up—alone in the big bed in the bedroom, if a woman in her condition could be considered “alone.” She could no longer laugh off her symptoms as some psychosomatic reaction to stress. She was well and truly pregnant, bushwhacked by Fate and the effing transdermal contraceptive patch. If the bathroom was occupied, she thought she might take the Smith & Wesson and shoot her way in.

  After a dismal quarter hour communing with the toilet bowl, she clumped into the kitchen, infuriated with herself. She rinsed out the sludge of overcooked coffee still in the pot and made fresh. While it was brewing, she canvassed the apartment to see who was in. No Jack. No Thor. No Margaret. Just K.D., innocently asleep on the air mattress in the office with Aphrodite curled against her back. Dinah rubbed her temples. In her arrogance, she had expected to be ragging on K.D. for getting pregnant. The turnabout served her right. The repercussions from liberating a bear seemed simple in comparison.

  She went back to the bedroom to find something to wear. If she took this pregnancy to the end, none of the clothes in her closet would be wearable for a long time. Big if. Big dilemma. She deferred the decision to another day and squeezed into her skinniest jeans. Carpe diem.

  Margaret’s suitcase was still lying open next to the bed. She should write a letter to the manufacturer describing how it had survived a grenade attack. Maybe the company would feature Margaret and her hard-sided Pullman in an ad and she could earn a bit of money. Dinah lifted up one side of the case to look at the singed exterior. Something thunked. She pushed aside a roll of shirts and tees to reveal a Taurus .22 with gold accents and a rosewood grip, the gun that had been stolen from Swan’s room.

  Carefully, she took it out and just as she’d been taught, turned it to the side, pulled back the slide, and looked into the ejection chamber. Loaded. When did that happen? Swan had said it wasn’t loaded when she went to the tower to meet Pohl. Another lie to assimilate, but who was the liar? She carried the pistol back to the kitchen, poured herself a mug of coffee, and sat down to cogitate. How had Margaret come into possession of Swan’s gun and why?

  K.D. scuffed into the room and launched her defense. “Before you jump all salty on me, I hope you know that keeping a bear penned up in a tiny pit is cruel and inhumane.”

  Dinah knew that the bear was the symbol of Berlin. There were hundreds of painted Buddy Bears in public squares all over the city. This was the first she’d heard of a live bear outside of the zoo. “What were you planning to do with this bear after you freed it? Bring it home with you? Because in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re oversubscribed for beds.”

  “Hahaha. How do you expect me to tell you stuff if you don’t take it seriously?”

  “Okay, K.D. Seriously, what was the plan?”

  “Dolf and his Bear Alliance friends were going to walk her through the park as a kind of protest. They are positively heroic for trying to free her. They just want Schnute to live out her old age in a natural sanctuary. Anybody who watches her even for a minute can see that she’s totally depressed after so many years in captivity. Her daughter Maxi died last month and she’s all alone with nothing but a few old barrels and tires to look at. When Dolf broke open her pen, she followed him out like a lamb.”

  Dinah cut to the chase. “And then the cops came and you and the bear people followed them to the station like lambs. How much did it cost Thor to spring you?”

  “It wasn’t a big fine and I’ll pay him back. I’ll get a job. Or I can do stuff for you. I’ll stay with Jack when you need me to.” The defense rested. She helped herself to a cup of coffee, took her phone out of her pocket, and began texting her friends.

  Dinah’s circuits were overloaded with matters of life and death. She couldn’t get too worked up about Schnute. The coffee tasted brackish and she got up and grubbed through the pantry for a box of tea.

  “Whoa!” K.D.’s eyes zeroed in on the gun. “That’s creepy. Hey, you didn’t—?”

  “No. To whatever you were thinking.”

  “You shouldn’t have a sexy little toy like this lying around with Jack in the house.” She picked it up and fondled it.

  “Put it down, K.D. Now.”

  “I’m not the child, you know.”

  Dinah wasn’t so sure. “Have you talked with your mother since you got here?”

  “Why would I? She doesn’t care where I am as long as I’m out of her hair.”

  “We all have our faults, K.D. You should lighten up on your mom. Try to see things from her perspective and be a little less judgmental.”

  “Like you are with Swan?”

  “Our mother problems aren’t comparable.”

  “Why’s that? They’re both narcissistic nits.”

  Dinah’s phone plinked. She hadn’t noticed, but Thor had plugged it into the recharger for her. She looked at the name on the caller ID. Swan. She blew out a breath.

  “What?” demanded K.D.

  “Private call. Do you mind?”

  She rolled her eyes and scuffed out, back to her texting.

  Dinah dipped a teabag up and down in a cup of hot water. “Hi, Mom. How are you this morning?”

  “Couldn’t be better. Klaus took me to the most fabulous restaurant last night. You simply wouldn’t believe the chandeliers. The menu was thick as a Sears catalog. Good gracious, everything you could imagine and all of it simply out of this world. And that rude Mr. Amsel never came back to bother me. I’m still at the Adlon.”

  “That’s good.” Dinah went deep into her reservoir of tolerance and asked in a non-judgmental voice, “Did you know that Reiner Hess was also staying at the Adlon?”

  “Reiner here? You don’t say!”

  “Don’t lie to me,” she snapped, tolerance depleted that fast. “Was that another of your secrets?”

  “You sound like you’re spoilin’ for a fight, baby. Is something wrong between you and Thor?”

  “Something’s wrong between you and me and has been. Don’t lie and don’t stonewall, Mom. I’m past the fairy tale stage now.”

  “I didn’t know Reiner was here, Dinah.”

  “That’s thin.”

  “It’s true. It sounds like Mr. Amsel uses his hotel like a private guest house.”

  Dinah couldn’t argue with that.

  “I’d like to talk to Reiner,” said Swan. “What’s his room number?”

  “He traded his hotel room for a jail cell. Margaret ratted him out to Inspector Lohendorf and he was arrested last night. Incidentally, did Margaret know you had moved to the Adlon?”

  “I told her where I was going when I went back to the Wunderbar to pack up my things after she threw me out. That afternoon after we’d been to the morgue and seen Polly.”

 
; Dinah rethought the timing. “But you knew the gun was missing before our lunch that day. When did you notice it was gone?”

  “The night of the murder. I put it in the drawer and went down to the bar for a bourbon to steady my nerves. I decided I should hide the gun in a better place, but when I went back to the room, it was gone. It was almost like I’d dreamt it.”

  “Are you sure Reiner never visited you in your room at the Adlon?”

  “Not when I was here. After what you told me about Margaret and Reiner, nothing would surprise me.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to hear all of your news at our family dinner tonight, but listen here, baby. That thing you asked Klaus to find out for you, the whatchamacallit. I had to call you while it was fresh in my mind. Wait now. He wrote it down for me on this napkin. T-o-t-s, gosh his writing is teensy. T-o-t-s-c-h-l-a-g, is that it?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “Well, there’s more to it than that. Are you ready? Fahrzeug Totschlag. I’ll spell it. F-a-h-r-z-e—”

  “Just tell me what it means in English, Mom.”

  “Vehicular homicide. It was a terrible car accident at Nür-burg-ring, which Klaus says is a famous racetrack southwest of Berlin. They call it the ‘green hell,’ the green on account of all the greenery it winds through, and the hell on account of the curves—a hundred of them in thirteen miles. They hold lots of races there during the year, but they also let tourists drive the course on certain days.”

  Dinah felt a pang of premonition and regret. “What happened?”

  “I was coming to it. In April, two-thousand-and-three, Alwin Pohl was driving the track drunk in the middle of the day. He spun out and skidded broadside into another tourist’s car. Polly wasn’t injured, but the driver of the other car was badly hurt and his wife was killed.”

  “Did Klaus get the name of the dead woman?”

  “Sabine Eichen. Poor thing. The accident report Klaus read to me says a piece of flying metal came through the windshield and took the top of her head clean off.”