Born To Die

by Lisa Jackson

  His large family collected here each and every third Thursday in November, at his sister’s home, and he was expected to show, which he always did. He feigned interest in all their petty little problems, even played with his nieces and nephews, deflected any questions about his personal life and the women he dated.

  Because he knew they didn’t care. In fact, they didn’t trust him. He was, and always would be, the outsider. No matter how hard he tried to fit into their close-knit group.

  He brushed his lips across his sister’s cheek as he handed her a bottle of expensive wine that both she and her husband fawned over. He swung his niece off her chubby legs and heard her giggle in delight. He, after all, was the “fun” uncle. He even went to the trouble of going outside and trudging through the snow to view his nephew’s snowman and snow fort, from which the niece, of course, was forbidden.

  Inside he was charming, even suffering through one of his sister’s guided tours of what they were “doing” to the house this year—a complete gutting and remodeling of the guest bathroom in the south wing.

  “God help us that it gets done before Christmas. Lord, is that only five weeks away?” his sister said, looking around at the gaping holes where sinks and a toilet had once stood. Tile and grout had been displaced; the mirror, still hanging, was cracked in one corner. She sighed heavily. “I guess I’ll have to get on that builder!”

  “It’s going to be great,” he answered, forcing enthusiasm.

  “I hope so. Then you can stay with us! You’ll have your own suite, and the kids would love it.” Her eyes darkened just a shade with the lie. “I’d love it, too.” Her hand touched his arm then, lingering just a bit too long. She retracted it quickly when her husband walked in, his voice booming, “Welcome to our nightmare. The continuing nightmare.”

  They made their way downstairs, and shaking off his sister and her oaf of a husband, he saw that the music continued to play, the wineglasses were always refilled, that his father was never out of the conversation. Of course, he was in charge of carving the turkey, even deigning to wear one of his brother-in-law’s stupid man aprons.

  Throughout the meal at the seemingly mile-long table, he smiled and laughed, dodging the most pointed of their prying questions. Over the top of his wineglass he winked at his cousin, and she quickly averted her gaze, one that had been drawn to him throughout the evening, and blushed.

  His sister, of course, had seen the exchange, and her lips had pursed in abject disapproval.

  All of his family had speculated about his love life, and he’d given them just enough information to keep them satisfied, but it was a game, really, watching them offer help to set him up with different women.

  As if he needed their charity.

  This year the banter had started when his sister announced that her best friend was going through a messy divorce. The woman’s attributes were pretty, good figure, decent job, no kids. Might even end up with several hundred thou, if her husband, the snake, didn’t screw her over.

  Then there was one of his brothers’ old high-school girlfriends, rumored to be back in town and newly single. His mother had made note. However, his father had pointed out, the woman they were all so sure was “the one” did have three girls, the oldest already in her teens.

  But what about that woman he used to work with, oh, what’s-her-name? You know the one. A lawyer, wasn’t she? And good-looking, too. Smart as a whip.

  Such a shame his job took him so far away so often.

  He needed to settle down, his father reminded him. Was the old man afraid? Did he suspect?

  Maybe next year his schedule would slow down, and he could spend more time here....

  He let the conversation swirl around him, smiling affably, talking about the upcoming holidays and how they would all spend Christmas together, though it was getting more and more difficult.

  His sister pulled him aside when he helped clear the plates, and she worried aloud about their father’s health. Who knew if the old man would make it to next Thanksgiving? Every day he was still alive and ambulatory was a blessing, didn’t he know?

  Next year, well, she couldn’t think that far ahead.

  Of course not. Who knew what new construction project would come between then and now?

  But five to one the old man, hearty and hale, would outlive all his progeny. And that was saying something.

  He stayed to watch his father finish a last scotch, then load himself and his wife into their waiting SUV, a Cadillac complete with driver. He shook his father’s hand and found the old man’s handshake as firm as ever.

  “Say something to Mother,” his sister insisted, and lying through his teeth, he told the old bat that she looked “radiant,” and that he couldn’t wait until they all got together again at Christmas.

  The second they were driving away, through a falling screen of snow, his thoughts turned toward the future. He managed a round of quick good-byes, and then, saying he had to get home because he had an early flight in the morning, he half jogged to his car.

  Only when the rambling lake house disappeared from his rearview mirror did he let down his mask and unhinge his jaw from the insipid smile he’d pinned there for the past five hours. He rubbed at the scar hidden beneath his sideburn and let his thoughts darken.

  He didn’t have time for holidays or nonsense.

  The radio was playing some insipid Christmas carol, and he snapped it off, his eyes trained on the road ahead and the twin beams of his headlights cutting through the storm. The miles rolled too slowly under his tires.

  He couldn’t waste any time.

  He had too much to do.

  The ingrates that were his family just didn’t know it. Couldn’t. Not ever.

  CHAPTER 13

  “ So that’s it,” Alvarez said as she and Slatkin and an assistant, Ashley Tang, packed up the contents from Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment and carried the bags to the waiting van from the state crime lab. The evidence had been photographed, bagged and tagged, then initialed before they hauled the bags along the path broken in the snow to the crime lab van.

  Mikhail Slatkin, not yet thirty, was tall and rawboned, with a keen intelligence and guarded demeanor, and was physically the diametric opposite of the woman who worked with him. Petite and Asian, Tang was a woman who, Alvarez guessed, barely tipped the scales at a hundred pounds even in boots and insulated ski suit. Rumored to have graduated from Stanford before she was twenty-one, Tang, at twenty-eight, was sharp and intense, qualities Alvarez understood only too well.

  Together they’d gone through the unit, gathering evidence that might have been overlooked before anyone realized that the victim had been poisoned, most likely, in Alvarez’s opinion, murdered, though she didn’t quite understand how the homicide had taken place.

  True, there were traces of poison in the woman’s system, but she’d died from the result of wounds from her fall. Had she been delirious and taken a fateful misstep, or had the killer been nearby and, rather than wait for the poison levels in her body to become deadly, given her a little push?

  Slatkin unlocked the white van with its shadow of grime where someone had scrawled “WASH ME.”

  “I’ll need this ASAP,” Alvarez said as Slatkin arranged the evidence bags to his liking in the back of the van.

  Slatkin slammed the back door closed. “Big surprise.”

  Tang, her breath fogging in the frigid air as she climbed into the passenger side of the van, assured Alvarez, “We’ll be on it.”

  Alvarez made her way to her Jeep just as a blue older model Plymouth rolled into a covered spot and a woman, somewhere in her upper seventies, climbed out. She was bundled in an oversized coat. The second her booted feet hit the cement under her covered parking area, a wildly enthusiastic dachshund in a ridiculous red sweater that matched his owner’s scarf and hat hopped from the car to twirl on his leash. Barking madly, wrapping the leash around his owner’s legs, the dog took one look at Alvarez and stopped dead in its tracks.
Dark eyes assessed the newcomer with undisguised suspicion. “That’s a good boy, Kaiser,” the woman cooed as she opened the trunk and hoisted a sack of groceries from within.

  Kaiser growled at Alvarez, and his owner, looking over the tops of her glasses, chuckled. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s all bark and no bite.” Slamming the trunk closed, she whistled softly. “Come along, Kaiser.”

  “Excuse me, do you live here?”

  “Yes. One-C.” She nodded toward her unit, right next door to Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment.

  “You’re neighbors with Jocelyn Wallis.”

  Her lips drew into a sad frown, and her eyebrows slammed together above the dark rims of her lenses. “Yes. Poor thing. I heard about what happened to her, on the news. I was out of town, you know, visiting Frannie. God, she’s an awful cook. She’s my sister and I love her, but do you think she ever cracks a cookbook or looks up a recipe online? No. Just roasts a turkey the same old way she always does and cooks it until it’s dry as the Sahara, but not her stuffing. Lord, how do you cook a dry turkey and still end up with wet, slimy dressing?” Then, as if she realized she’d been rambling, she said, “It’s too bad about Jocelyn, really. She was a nice enough girl, well, woman, just a little . . .” As if she thought better of what she had intended to say, she lifted her shoulders, tugged on the leash, and half dragged Kaiser toward her front door.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” Alvarez pulled out her badge and introduced herself. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you about Ms. Wallis.” The truth was that few of her neighbors had been interviewed as her death had been deemed an accident.

  “Surely,” the woman said after studying Alvarez’s badge. “I’m Lois Emmerson. . . . But, please come inside, where it’s warm.” Shifting her groceries to her other arm, she walked to the front door of the unit abutting Jocelyn Wallis’s and let Alvarez into an apartment that was neat and tidy.

  After setting the sack on a counter that separated the kitchen from the living area, she unsnapped Kaiser’s leash, hung it up, and took off her coat, gloves, scarf, and hat. Beneath the outer layer was a red sweater with white dots ... just like the dog’s.

  “You knit,” Alvarez observed.

  “Voraciously! Never met a skein of mohair that I didn’t love!” The dog’s nose was at the crack of the pantry door, so she gave him half a doggy biscuit and said, “I’ll put on some tea.”

  Alvarez tried to decline, but it was of no use. Lois Emmerson declared they both needed to be “warmed up,” and it became increasingly evident that the older woman, as she heated water in the microwave, was lonely. Single. No children. Just Kaiser for company and the poor excuse of a cook, Frannie, as family. It appeared as if she wanted to talk, so Alvarez took off her coat and tossed it on an empty bar stool.

  “You were saying that there was something about Jocelyn Wallis that bothered you.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” The microwave dinged, and Lois was on it like a flea on a dog, quickly sliding the glass measuring pitcher out of the microwave. Deftly, as if she’d done it a million times, she began pouring steaming water from the pitcher into twin porcelain cups that bore the stains of countless uses. She plopped a used tea bag into her cup, then asked, “Orange pekoe or English breakfast?”

  “Pekoe,” Alvarez said, just to keep the conversation flowing. She was standing in the dining area, the kitchen counter separating them, and watched as Lois found some loose tea and dropped a spoonful into the second cup.

  Once the tea was steeping, Lois slid that cup across the Formica.

  Alvarez reminded, “You said, ‘She was a nice enough girl, or woman, really, just a little . . . ,’ and then you didn’t finish. What were you going to say?”

  “Oh. Well.” As if she were suddenly lost in thought, Lois dunked her tea bag several times, then let it steep. “Jocelyn was complicated, not that I knew her all that well.” She pinched the last drops of tea out of the tiny wet bag, then tossed it into the trash. Immediately Kaiser stuck his long nose into the open container. “Out of there, mister! You know better!”

  Tail between his legs, the doxie scurried out of the kitchen. A step behind him, Lois walked into the dining area and waved Alvarez into one of the antique chairs.

  “What do you mean, ‘complicated’?”

  “Maybe that’s the wrong word.” Blowing across her cup, Lois settled onto a well-worn cushion in one of the chairs. She rested her elbows on the table. “Jocelyn was young and . . . not really wild, more like enthusiastic and so anxious to fall in love. She’d already been married, y’know. Not once, but twice, and what was she? Thirty-four?” Disapproval etched the lines near the corners of Lois’s mouth.

  “Thirty-five,” Alvarez said. “It’s not uncommon these days to be married several times by that age.”

  “Oh, I know. I know, and I’m not judging her.” Shaking her head emphatically, she added, “But it seemed to me that she was looking for a man. Really looking hard. Had dated online, I think, and then there was the father of one of her students, and she just was getting a little desperate.” She tasted her tea. “Again, in my opinion.”

  “A lot of men visit her?”

  Lois was sipping, but she lifted her free hand and waggled it, as if she didn’t really know the answer. Maybe yes. Maybe no.

  “There were some that I saw around here. But I’m not a snoop, so I wouldn’t really know. There was the rancher who was a father to one of her students. I think I mentioned him. Trask or Trevor or . . . Tall. Good-looking.”

  “Trace O’Halleran.”

  “That’s the one. But that relationship was a while ago.” She pursed her lips as she remembered. “I think she was very disappointed about that one. Her biological clock was really ticking.”

  “Had she been dating anyone recently?”

  “No one I could name. But there were a couple, I think. One man, tall and looked kind of like a bodybuilder, carried himself that way, you know, erect, stiff-shouldered. Drove a dark truck, I think. I only remember because Kaiser, the little stinker, lifted his leg on the truck’s front tire. A Michelin. I remember.”

  “Local plates?”

  “Oh . . . I have no idea.” She was shaking her head. “The second Kaiser did his thing, I hurried into the house.”

  “Do you remember what kind of truck?” Alvarez asked. This was probably nothing, but they didn’t have a lot to go on.

  “No . . . but it was large, not one of those smaller ones.”

  “Domestic?”

  She shrugged. “All I remember is that it was dark. Black or blue or gray and was fairly new, I think, no dents, and had really nice tires.” She smothered a little bit of a smile, as if her dog were such a naughty, but clever little beast.

  “But you didn’t get a look at the man’s face.”

  “No.”

  “What about his ethnic background or race? White? Black? Hispanic?”

  “White . . . I think. Can’t be sure.”

  So much for identifying the mystery man.

  “He was here often?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just noticed his truck a couple of times. Only saw him once, walking up to the door, and I was behind him, with Kaiser.” Offering a feeble smile, she said, “Sorry.”

  “You said there was a second one?”

  “Oh . . . maybe. Maybe not.” Lois thought it over. “Might’ve been just the one with the dark truck.”

  Alvarez asked a few more questions but got no more information. Ms. Emmerson knew little about Jocelyn’s friends, though she thought most of her social life was through people she worked with at Evergreen Elementary. She had heard of a sister living somewhere out of state and parents maybe; the two women had essentially met at the mailbox or the common area or the parking lot when Jocelyn was jogging and Lois was walking Kaiser. The information Lois had gleaned had been in bits and pieces.

  Alvarez learned what she could, which wasn’t much more, then drained the remaining tea from her cup. She
was standing, intent on ending the impromptu visit, when Lois looked up at her expectantly.

  “Mind if I read the leaves?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The tea leaves in your cup. That’s why I gave you loose leaves, so I could read them.”

  “You do that?” Alvarez couldn’t believe it. Since moving to Grizzly Falls, she’d met Ivor Hicks, who swore he’d been abducted and probed by aliens, and Grace Perchant, the woman who believed she spoke to ghosts and saw the future, and now this ... woman, who looked like an ex-librarian, was going to read the dregs of her hot beverage?

  “Of course I can.”

  “Have at it,” she offered, but Lois had already stood and rounded the table so that she could peer into the cup. She turned it upside down on a napkin so that the final drips of tea were removed from the cup; then she righted the porcelain again and studied what remained inside.

  “Oh, my . . . hmmm . . .”

  Alvarez wasn’t going to rise to the so obvious bait.

  “This is interesting,” Lois went on and, when Alvarez didn’t respond, said, “It looks like you’re in for a change ... work-related, maybe? Or ... maybe not. Certainly a love interest. There’s a heart in your near future, but . . .” She frowned.

  Don’t ask! However, the words tumbled out of her mouth. “But what?”

  “There’s danger, too ... evil.” She pointed to a squiggle of small leaves on the rim of the cup. “This is the present, and here, the heart, a little further into the future . . .” One of her graying eyebrows lifted. “A new boyfriend?”

  “I doubt it.” Alvarez pulled her coat from the bar stool.

  “I take it you’re a nonbeliever.”

  “Depends upon what you’re asking me to believe in.” She was just shrugging into the coat’s sleeves when Kaiser, who had been lying beneath the table, scrambled to his feet. Barking madly, he raced to the sliding door, where he stood on his hind legs and began clawing at the glass while growling and barking and working himself into a frenzy.