The rain, which had only threatened earlier, was now coming down in earnest. And the wind had not let up. I was cold and wet by the time I’d made it across the parking lot to the entrance. Just inside the door was a window display featuring slim, smooth-skinned bodies in bikinis. Never mind that I hadn’t looked that good even at twenty, and that I wouldn’t now be caught dead in anything other than a sturdy one piece, the image of sunshine and warmth was unbelievably tantalizing—and unmercifully taunting. Who was responsible for thinking up these displays anyway? And why couldn’t they stick to hawking meaningful merchandise like umbrellas and galoshes.
I wound my way to the bedding department, then through the displays of posh designer sheets, cases, and matching everything else. I didn’t even allow myself to slow down as I passed. I’d once taken a peek at those price tags and been sure that the printer had misplaced the decimal. It hadn’t.
On the sale table in the back comer I found a perfectly serviceable blue and white striped comforter and a set of pillow shams which almost matched. Unfortunately, on my way there I’d spotted a fuchsia and lavender print which I liked a whole lot more. Question was, did I like it thirty dollars more?
I was trying to evaluate that question, which is something you really can’t do with much precision, when Susie Sullivan, now Lambert, called to me from across the aisle. Her arms were laden with a whole boudoir-set from Ralph Lauren. Color coordinated pillows were already waiting for her in a pile by the cash register.
“Have you seen this newest collection?” she gushed. “Every design is exquisite. I’ve had the hardest time choosing.”
Susie has recently remarried, for the third time. I know she redid the whole house before the wedding, but given the way she drools over her new husband, it didn’t surprise me to learn they’d already worn out the sheets.
She set her load by the register, handed the saleswoman her charge card and moseyed over. “You won’t be happy with this fabric,” she said, fingering the stripe. “It’s much too stiff.”
“Well, the price isn’t.”
She smiled weakly, acknowledging my attempt at humor without applauding it. “It’s not really your style anyway, Kate.”
“It’s for Libby Sterling. She’s staying with me until things get sorted out.”
“How’s she holding up?”
“Hard to tell. She’s not about to let anyone see her pain, that’s for sure.”
“Teen-age girls,” Susie said dramatically, “they are impossible to deal with under the best of circumstances.” Susie dealt with her two by sending them to an eastern boarding school during the year and sailing camp for the summer. Her son, who was a classmate of Anna’s, got the nanny treatment instead.
“It was really good of you to take her in,” Susie added, as an afterthought.
“What’s sad is that Libby feels totally rejected. The way she sees it, Mona didn’t care enough about her to stay alive. Didn’t care enough even to leave a suicide note.”
“Mmm.” Susie held out her left hand and studied her newest diamond, a rock so big I thought she might have trouble lifting her arm. “That’s basically what happened though.”
“Maybe not. Sharon has a theory Mona might have been killed.”
“You mean, murdered?”
I nodded.
“Goodness, what makes her think that?”
I explained, then waited for Susie to dismiss the idea as absurd.
Instead, she drew her brows together in thought. “Well, it certainly makes sense,” she announced after a moment.
“It does?”
“Mona called me Saturday.”
“What did she want? Was she upset?”
Susie shook her head. “She left a message on our machine. Early evening some time. Stephen and I were away for the weekend and didn’t get back until late Sunday. There was a whole string of messages. I went through them rather quickly so I can’t remember exactly what she said, but the gist of it was that she wanted to reschedule our Monday afternoon tennis game. Apparently something unexpected had come up and she couldn’t make it.”
“Did she say what?”
“No. It was a quick message. I hardly paid any attention at all. But it’s been bothering me since, trying to remember what she said. It doesn’t make sense that she’d call to reschedule if she was planning on killing herself an hour or two later.”
I had to agree, it didn’t.
“So, do they have any leads?” Susie asked.
“If by ‘they’ you mean the police, the answer is no. They’ don’t even buy into the murder theory.” Because Michael was part of the “they” and I didn’t want to sound critical or disloyal, I took a moment to explain the official position. “From their point of view, suicide’s a logical conclusion.”
“Hmmm,” she said, laconically. “I wonder.”
“Mary Nell’s convinced that Gary’s upcoming wedding sent her into depression.”
Susie laughed. “Hardly.” The sales clerk motioned and Susie started for the register. “I wouldn’t expect Mary Nell to understand, but some of us weather divorce just fine. And I certainly don’t think Mona went off the deep end over Bambi. As I recall, they even had lunch together a couple of months ago.”
“Mona and Bambi?”
Like politics, divorce makes for strange bedfellows, but I was still surprised. Never in a million years would I have imagined Mona and Bambi sharing the same room, much less a table. What could they possibly have found to talk about?
Chapter 12
In the end I decided on the lavender print, then went all out and bought a dust ruffle and pillow shams as well. I threw in a heathery cotton area rug to cover the bare spot in the carpeting and a couple of inexpensive, decorative pillows in matching shades. After leaving the mall, I stopped by the hardware store and bought a can of paint for the dresser, an ugly brown thing Andy and I had picked up at a garage sale soon after we were married. We’d had plans to paint it then, but as was typical of so much of our life together, the good intentions had remained fallow.
I made it to school just as Mrs. Craig was leading the children down to the pick-up spot at the far comer of the playground.
“Was that man here again today?” I asked Anna. “The one who gave you the Tootsie Rolls?”
She shook her head and started to hand me her backpack. Anna would do well with a cortege of personal servants to anticipate her every need. Instead, she has to make do with a mother.
“What am I,” I asked, glancing at the backpack, “your own private sky hook?”
By way of an answer, Anna grabbed my hand and gave me one of her silly, winning smiles. I carried the backpack.
“Where are we going?” she asked, as I led the way to the office.
“I want to have a word with Mrs. Sommer about that man who was at school yesterday.”
Mrs. Sommer ran a tight ship so I figured the man was either tied into the arson investigation or one of the auxiliary teachers the school sometimes brought in for special classes. But I wasn’t taking any chances. It seemed that nearly every news report I’d encountered lately had something to say about an abduction or molestation. And only last month a ten-year-old girl in a nearby town had disappeared while riding her bike to school. No place was safe anymore, not even the relatively sheltered neighborhoods of the suburbs.
Mrs. Sommer shook her head when I told her about the man named Oscar who’d been giving away candy. “No, we didn’t know,” she said, her brow furrowed, “and that’s not the way we would handle a special inquiry like arson in any case.”
She turned to Anna. “Did this man talk to lots of children?”
A shrug.
“More than just you?”
Anna nodded. “He had a whole bag of Tootsie Rolls to give away.”
“He gave them to anyone who wanted one?”
Anna nodded again.
“All kindergartners, or were there older children, too?”
Anna had that look o
n her face, like Tootsie Roll or not, she was beginning to wish she’d never mentioned the episode in the first place. “Mostly kids in kindergarten,” she said, kicking the carpet with her toe.
“Just girls, or boys too?”
“Girls mostly.”
“What did this man look like?” Mrs. Sommer asked. An anxious tone had crept into her voice.
Anna’s foot grew still and she puckered up her face in thought. “A fairy,” she said at last.
“A what?” My face grew red with embarrassment. Walnut Hills wasn’t exactly a hotbed of liberalism, but we were close enough to San Francisco that words like “fairy” and “faggot” were rarely used, in public at any rate. And they certainly weren’t part of my vocabulary. I looked at Mrs. Sommer with an expression that I hoped said something like, where do kids come up with these things?
Mrs. Sommer, with over thirty years experience in elementary education, understood what Anna meant. “Kind of like an elf?” she asked.
“Except he wasn’t tiny like that. He was tall.” Anna thought for a moment. “Tall and shiny.”
“Shiny?” Apparently even Mrs. Sommer had trouble with that one.
Anna nodded. “But not silvery.”
“I see. What kind of things did you talk about?” Mrs. Sommer asked, apparently having decided the description route was going nowhere fast.
“Nothing much,” Anna said.
“Can you remember anything he said?”
“He just asked us our names, and about our families and stuff.” Anna shot me one of her it’s-all-your-fault looks and went back to shuffling her feet against the carpet. “He was just being nice,” she muttered. “He didn’t have to share his candy, you know.”
Mrs. Sommer patted Anna’s hand. “It’s just that we like to know what’s going on out on the playground. If you see him again, will you come tell me?”
Anna nodded.
“Right away. It would be such a big help to me if you could do that.”
By the time we left, Anna was sufficiently pleased at the prospect of helping Mrs. Sommer that she forgot about being irritated with me. And being a firm believer in the efficacy of sleeping dogs, I decided to skip a second lecture about talking to strangers.
Libby didn’t roll in until almost five, which had given me a chance to spruce up the room a bit. I remade the bed with the new cover, spread out the area rug and removed the pile of junk from the closet floor. I didn’t get around to repainting the chest, of course, but I did move a framed Boulanger print from my bedroom to Libby’s, and then picked a bouquet of iris for the night- stand. It wouldn’t have made Architectural Digest, or even one of those women’s magazines that feature low-cost decorating tips, but I thought it was pretty nice. And a vast improvement over the room Libby had left that morning.
Not that any of it would make up for the fact that she’d lost a mother. Or begin to make her forget, even for a moment.
She let herself in with the key I’d given her, nodded in my direction, then went straight to her room and shut the door. Half an hour later she was still in there. I got together a snack of cookies and milk, then switched the milk for a Pepsi, and knocked on the door.
“What?”
“Can I come in? I brought you some cookies.”
Libby mumbled something which I took to mean I could enter.
She was lying on the bed, arms crossed over her chest, staring at the ceiling. “I’m not hungry,” she said, without so much as a glance at the plate.
“You don’t have to eat them.”
Silence.
“Is there something else you’d rather have? An apple maybe, or some toast?”
She sat up abruptly and gestured to the room. “You didn’t have to do this, you know.” Her tone was flat, but I thought I caught a flicker of something in her expression.
“I wanted to,” I said, touching her arm.
She yanked it away. “It’s not like I need special treatment or anything. And I don’t need you to go feeling sorry for me either.”
“I’ve been meaning to do something with this room ever since Andy moved out. I just never got around to it before.” I sat on the bed, wanting to hug her tightly and make everything right. If only it could be that easy. “How was school today?” I asked instead.
She shrugged and stared silently at the wall dead ahead.
“I hope you didn’t feel I was forcing you to go. Going back for the first time after. . . after something like this, it’s got to be hard.”
Libby kept her eyes focused on the wall and said nothing.
“Were the other kids... um, understanding?”
“What’s there to understand?”
“I guess I mean, did they treat you okay?”
“You think they were going to point their fingers and laugh out loud?”
The tone of her voice bothered me more than her words, but I didn’t know where to go with it. We sat in silence while Libby glared at the wall and I wracked my brain for inspiration. “There are counselors who specialize in helping people deal with grief,” I told her finally. “It might help if you talked to one of them.”
She raised her chin and regarded me coolly. “I don’t need a shrink.”
“I wasn’t talking about a psychiatrist necessarily. And it’s no reflection on you. The death of someone you love, it’s a pretty terrible thing for anyone.”
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t. But it hardly made sense to sit there and argue the point with her. I made a mental note to call the school, maybe someone there could help. “Think about it, okay? And let me know if you change your mind.”
“I won’t,” she said, turning back to address the wall.
I started to leave, then thought of something. “Does the name Laurie McNevitt mean anything to you?”
“No, why?”
“She left a message on your mother’s answering machine.”
Libby shrugged. “I didn’t keep up with my mom’s friends.”
It wasn’t the most opportune time or place, but since I’d started down this particular road I thought I might as well finish. “How about men your mom was seeing. Any names come to mind?”
“I told you, I wasn’t interested in her friends.”
“Was she seeing anyone in particular?”
Another shrug.
“She spent the weekend in Mendocino not too long ago. She go with someone?”
“Probably.” Libby snorted. “She spent enough time choosing what she was going to wear. Plus she had a facial and a body wrap right before she left. But at least she spared me the Do as I say and not as I do lecture.”
I returned to the bed and sat down next to her. “I know that as much as anything else right now, you’re angry with your mom. That’s normal. As are the jumble of other emotions you’re feeling. But she loved you, Libby. We used to talk about mothers and daughters, and I know for a fact that you were the most important thing in her life.”
“Yeah? Well I guess it wasn’t enough, was it?”
The hurt in her voice made my own throat ache. I thought about telling her that Mona’s death might not have been a suicide. Was it fair to raise that prospect without more proof? Would it do anything but confuse Libby further?
Before I had a chance to respond, she reached for her backpack and started pulling out binder and books, effectively cutting off further discussion. “I’ve got to get started on my homework.”
“Libby, I—”
“Please, I’ve got a ton of work here.”
I hesitated, then stood. “Tomorrow is the memorial service. Is there anything in particular you’d like to have included?”
“Whatever you and Sharon want It doesn’t matter to me, I’m not going.”
She opened a book and sprawled out on the bed facing away from me. My heart ached for her but I could think of nothing more to do. I closed the door quietly and reminded myself that time is a great healer.
<><><>
I waited until
later that evening to tell Libby about the break-in, knowing that it would be somehow added to the list of wrongs for which Mona was responsible. I debated telling her at all since her mood had improved slightly by dinnertime. She’d offered to set the table, and then shown remarkable patience when Anna insisted on helping. Although Libby hadn’t talked during the meal unless prompted, she made an effort to be attentive. She’d even laughed at Anna’s description of the yard teacher, Ms. Wright, nicknamed Ms. Wrong, who never got anyone’s name straight, confused the fire drill with the lunch bell and the pizza line with the hot dog line, and couldn’t see well enough to know whether the kids she benched actually ended up there.
When Anna went off to get her bath, I related the story of the break-in to Libby. She listened impassively, eyes fixed on the jagged crack in the linoleum.
“It’s hard to tell what was taken,” I said. “None of the obviously valuable stuff is missing.”
“What valuable stuff?” Libby asked bitterly. “She let my father have it all.”
It was true that Gary had taken the bulk of household furnishings, but that was because Mona hadn’t wanted them. “I think your mother wanted a fresh start,” I explained. “Something that was uniquely hers.”
Libby pushed back her chair and stood. “She might have asked me what I thought. It was supposed to be my home, too.”
The phone rang just then, and Libby stalked off toward her room. I considered following, then thought better of it.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” Sharon asked, responding no doubt to the frustration in my tone.
“Not at all. Libby and I were just having a riotous and uplifting conversation about familial love.” I drew in a breath. “I feel so bad for her and I don’t know what to do.”
“Just be there for her,” Sharon said, repeating the advice I’d given her days earlier. “I don’t know there’s much else we can do. Look, I’m at one of George’s client dinners so I can’t talk long, but I have some interesting news.”
I waited, knowing she would continue without prompting on my part.
“After I left you this afternoon, I started going over the stuff I’d picked up at the bank. What’s interesting is that Mona withdrew three thousand dollars Saturday morning, in cash.”
Murder Among Friends (The Kate Austen Mystery Series) Page 9