by Mary Daheim
As they were all leaving, Judith cornered Mike, dragging him into the parlor. “I want a progress report,” she demanded. “What are you and Kristin doing to solve your problems?”
Mike shrugged. “She’s going home to stay with her folks on their wheat ranch for a while. She’s leaving Saturday. The boys and I’ll go back to the ranger station Sunday.”
“That’s not progress,” Judith noted.
“Yes, it is,” Mike replied. “She feels claustrophobic up at the summit. She needs to get back to her roots to think.”
Judith didn’t comment on Kristin’s needs. “I would expect the children to miss her,” she said.
Mike grinned. “They’re having a ball. This is all one big holiday to them. Tomorrow we’re going to the aquarium and then to do the rides at the civic center. Not to mention that Uncle Al spoils them rotten. You know how he is with kids.”
“Yes.” Not having children of his own, Al Grover doted on his various nieces and nephews. “But,” Judith went on, “I’ll bet Mac and Joe-Joe will miss their mother when you get back to the ranger station.”
Mike’s expression turned glum. “Probably. We all will.”
“Then,” Judith said, putting her hands on her son’s shoulders, “you’d better think very hard about what the rest of your life is going to be like. Not to mention the boys’. I’ve seldom seen the yo-yo effect on children do them much good.”
Mike looked puzzled. “Yo-yo?”
Judith nodded. “Pulling them back and forth. A weekend with Dad, a workweek with Mom, summers and other school breaks up for grabs. And by the way, your father and I are too old—and too busy—to be babysitters.”
“That’s harsh.” Mike sounded resentful.
“No, it’s not. Oh, I’m not talking about the occasional day or overnight,” Judith explained. “I mean having to help raise them. Children are supposed to be brought up by their parents, not their grandparents. It’s called a family.”
“It’s not a family when there’s conflict,” Mike declared. “It’s a war zone.”
Judith kissed her son’s cheek. “Then make peace.”
Mike’s mood was still gloomy when he left. Judith felt both sad and frustrated. She understood that it was impossible to read what was in another person’s mind and heart, even when that person was her own child. But Mike didn’t know everything about Judith. It was strange, she thought, how once having left the nest, children seemed to think that their parents had no life without them. Mike probably never thought much about what running a B & B required or considered the physical pain Judith still suffered. Mothers were always mothers to their children. One role fits all, Judith thought as she finished cleaning up from dinner.
She wondered what Mike would think if he knew his mother had been suspected of murdering a milkman who wasn’t a milkman.
Not much, Judith realized, as long as a rump roast was on the dinner table.
Joe called that night around nine. Progress was being made on the insurance case, and the company hoped to have the lawsuit dismissed. He expected to be home late Saturday. Judith evaded his questions about what was happening at Hillside Manor. She didn’t dare tell him about the police investigation, and there was no need to burden him with her distress over Mike and Kristin. He was already upset about the breakup. Judith wouldn’t distract him further. Joe had to focus on the business at hand.
At eleven, she tuned into KINE-TV, watching her old acquaintance, Mavis Lean-Brodie, deliver the news. Neither she nor her new coanchor, John Shinn, mentioned the murder. It seemed to be a slow news night. A lengthy feature on the upcoming first day of summer provided some lovely photography of sunlit beaches, verdant parks, and gurgling mountain streams. The reporter, a handsome young man named Adam Blake, made it sound as if there hadn’t been a moment of bad weather since the first of June. Apparently, he’d been spending too much time inside the studio.
At the broadcast’s conclusion, Judith switched off the TV and tried to go to sleep. She tossed and turned for almost an hour. When she finally drifted off, she dreamed of tennis balls flying back and forth over a steel net. The balls had faces. They belonged to Mac and Joe-Joe.
A division of labor?” Renie asked in a sleepy voice when Judith suggested they split up the next morning. “Okay, I’ll do the newspaper thing. You call on Anna French at Nordquist’s. We can rendezvous at one o’-clock for lunch at the Crab House.”
“When I woke up,” Judith said into the phone, “it dawned on me that if we can’t get inside the Blands’ house, the next best thing is talking to the other family members. At least we know where Anna works. Let’s hope she can lead us to the others.”
“Right.” Renie yawned. “Ah. The digitalclock on my oven just turned to ten-oh-one. I think my brain’s in gear. I suddenly remembered that Garth Doyle called me last night.”
“About what? SuperGerm?”
“No,” Renie replied. “Garth takes a walk every day, around noon. Yesterday he saw the yellow tape around the Moonfleet house. He called me to ask if I knew about it. I feigned innocence. He asked a couple of neighbors what was going on, but all they could tell him was that the police had been there just a few minutes before he came by.”
“Did you still pretend to be ignorant?” Judith inquired.
“I didn’t have to try too hard,” Renie admitted. “But Garth said when he saw the crime-scene tape, he tried to remember if he’d noticed anything unusual in the neighborhood the previous day. He’d taken a different route, so he hadn’t passed by the Blands’ house. But around the corner on the west side—the opposite of the end of the alley where you parked your car—he noticed a Dairyland truck pulled in at the curb down the block. Bear in mind that Garth is a very visual person. As far as he could tell, there was no one in the truck and the engine had been turned off.”
Judith considered Renie’s words. “So what you’re saying is that the phony milkman was somewhere else, probably up to no good.”
“That’s right,” Renie agreed.
“Like, for example,” Judith said slowly, “being murdered.”
NINE
JUDITH REMEMBERED TO fix Gertrude’s lunch before leaving. Although Phyliss was on duty, it would never do to have the cleaning woman deliver a meal to Judith’s mother. Indeed, Judith kept the two women as far apart as possible, as if there were a Maginot Line between the house and the toolshed. They always ended up in a shouting match over religion, with Phyliss threatening to quit and Gertrude informing her she was already fired.
Arriving at Nordquist’s, Judith asked the concierge where she might find Anna French. The smiling, impeccably garbed young woman behind the desk asked if she had an appointment.
“Yes,” Judith lied. “For eleven-fifteen. It’s about the fall sportswear line. We have a problem.”
The concierge looked alarmed. “Nordquist’s can’t have problems. Go right up.”
The corporate offices were on the top floor; the buyers’ section took up at least a third of the space. Upon meeting the receptionist, Judith expressed indignation when her name wasn’t found in Anna’s appointment book.
“New York won’t be happy,” she declared. “I’m sure Ms. French is as anxious to salvage our account as we are.”
The receptionist, who was also chic and attractive, momentarily looked put-upon, but quickly resurrected her smile. “I’ll show you in at once,” she said, and led Judith to the designer-sportswear buyer’s door.
Anna French’s office was small and crowded with catalogs, fabric samples, and designer sketches. When Judith came through the door, Anna was on her hands and knees, sorting microfiber swatches. She looked up in surprise.
“Excuse me,” Anna said, “who are you?”
“I’m a fraud,” Judith replied. “My name’s Judith Flynn. I don’t want to waste your time or mine. The man who was killed at your parents’ home was put in the trunk of my car. I need your help.”
Frowning, Anna got up, brushing off her straig
ht black skirt and adjusting the collar of her pale yellow silk blouse. “Is this a joke?”
“No,” Judith responded. “Far from it. As you must know, the police think that the man named Frank Purvis was killed on your family’s property.”
Anna French sat on the edge of her desk, which was piled high with more catalogs and sketches. She didn’t offer Judith a seat.
“I don’t see how I could possibly help you,” she declared. “That man certainly wasn’t murdered by my elderly parents or my feeble aunt. How the body managed to get into your trunk seems to be your problem, not ours. In fact, why was your car parked on my parents’ grounds in the first place?”
Briefly, Judith studied Anna. She was fortyish, dark, rail thin, and of medium height, with striking features so artfully enhanced that she could have been a mannequin. But unlike a dress dummy, she moved with grace and confidence.
“Wait a minute,” Anna said before Judith could speak. “Are you one of the women who came by the house yesterday with some tall tale about writing a magazine article?”
Obviously, Lynette had related the cousins’ visit to her sister-in-law. Judith felt trapped. “Yes,” she finally confessed just before inspiration struck. “I’m FATSO.”
“What?” Anna was taken aback. “You don’t look very fat to me. You’re tall. You can carry a few extra pounds. I can’t. You’d look particularly good in Max Mara or Donna Karan or—” She clamped her lips shut. The fashion maven in Anna had momentarily taken over. “What the hell are you talking about?”
As much as Judith hated referring to her semi-celebrity, she explained about the Web site and her work as an amateur sleuth. “So you can’t blame me for wanting to find out as much as I can about the circumstances of this Purvis’s death. I’m implicated. I have to try to figure out what happened. And you can’t blame my cousin for being intrigued by your parents’ house. It’s certainly an anomaly.”
“Perhaps.” Anna was frowning again. “But I don’t know what to tell you. My parents have never been social. When Dad came back from the war, he was a wreck. Mom was always shy. They preferred their own company.”
“Didn’t your father have to work?” Judith asked.
Anna shook her head. “He had a disability pension from the army. We lived frugally.” She glanced down at her expensive black pumps. “I guess that’s why I went into fashion. I was always the worst-dressed girl in my class.”
“My family didn’t have any money, either,” Judith confided. “I had to wear my cousin Renie’s hand-me-downs. They were pretty worn out by the time I got them, because they’d been passed on to her by our cousin Sue. The only nice clothes I owned were sewn by our grandmother. But she used the same pattern for all the granddaughters, so we all dressed alike, except sometimes she’d change the fabric colors.”
Anna’s expression softened. “I had a weight problem when I was young. I’ve spent my entire adult life counting calories.”
“Who hasn’t?” Judith responded. “I weighed over two hundred pounds in high school.”
“At least you were tall,” Anna noted. “I looked like a basketball.”
Relieved that a bond seemed to have been created, Judith steered the conversation back on course. “Growing up can be so difficult. I was an only child. That can be very isolating. Did your family ever have company?” It would have been impossible to feel isolated in the Grover clan. There were always visitors when she was a child—relatives, friends, neighbors. Grandma Grover had laughed about it, saying she felt as if she were running a hotel. It had only seemed natural for Judith to turn the family home into a hostelry.
“Not really,” Anna replied. “A knock on the door caused anxiety with my parents. Sometimes it was the Fuller Brush man or the insurance agent making his monthly collection or somebody with a petition.”
“You had no other family nearby?”
Anna shook her head. “Only Aunt Sally. She came to live with us before I was born. Dad was from Kansas. He never went back after the war.” Sliding gracefully off the desk, she pointed to the piles of fabric on the floor. “Look, I’m sorry I can’t help you. I’m under the gun right now. I leave next week on a buying trip to Milan.”
“I’d like to explain myself to your sister-in-law,” Judith said. “Where does Lynette work?”
“The phone company,” Anna replied. “She’s just a couple of blocks away in the Qwiver corporate headquarters. She might have gone to lunch by now.”
Judith thanked Anna for her time. The words were acknowledged with a brief nod. Anna was again fingering fabrics, completely wrapped up in her work. It struck Judith as odd that Anna seemed undisturbed about a man being murdered on the grounds of her old family home.
It was ten minutes until noon when Judith reached the head offices of Qwiver. Maybe she could catch Lynette Bland before she went to lunch. The building had strict security. Judith went up to the desk in the lobby and asked after Ms. Bland.
“I don’t have an appointment,” she admitted. “Just tell her I’m here about the milkman.”
The buxom uniformed woman behind the desk gave her a curious look, but picked up the phone. Judith’s message was relayed. The response at the other end was brief.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said as she hung up the phone. “Ms. Bland can’t see you. She’s tied up in meetings all day.”
Judith thanked the woman and walked out of the building. But she lingered by one of the pillars, keeping her eyes on the entrances. Lynette was avoiding her, Judith was sure of that. A steady stream of employees exited the building as Judith’s watch registered exactly noon. She found it difficult to keep track of all four double doors. The seconds and then the minutes ticked by. The exodus began to dwindle. Maybe Lynette really was in a meeting that would go past the lunch hour.
But at twelve-oh-six, Judith spotted her prey. Lynette Bland was wearing a different linen suit, white, with a mauve blouse showing at the collar of her jacket.
Lynette walked briskly past her. She was headed for the south corner. Judith forced herself to keep up, though maintaining a six-foot distance. They both made the light; Lynette continued south for another block before turning the corner by a florist’s shop. Two doors down, she entered a crowded café. By the time Judith came in the door, Lynette was sitting down at a table for two where a man wearing what looked like expensive designer sunglasses was studying the menu.
“Drat!” Judith breathed. There were no vacant tables and a line had already formed. Lynette and her companion exchanged a few words, but seemed more interested in the menus than in each other.
The hostess inquired after Judith’s needs. “I’m waiting for someone,” she said in response. “There’s no rush.”
Judith wondered if the man was Luke Bland, Lynette’s husband. He was the right age, late forties, with graying brown hair. Average size, Judith guessed. It was hard to tell, since he was seated. The navy sport coat, white shirt, and tie indicated he was a professional. When he put the menu aside, he picked up a thick binder from under the table and began studying it. Lynette spoke to him, but he merely shrugged. After their order was taken, she stared across the busy room with unseeing eyes. Luke—assuming it was Luke—made notations in the binder.
Judith felt she was wasting her time. She could approach the couple and explain herself, but there was no room for her to sit down. Standing up would make it awkward to apologize for the fabrication of writing a magazine article or for explaining about the body in her trunk. Judith surrendered and left the café.
Inspiration struck as she walked by the florist on the corner. If she couldn’t explain, she could still apologize. She couldn’t take time to have something made. A striking arrangement of yellow gladioli, bells of Ireland, and baby’s breath caught her eye.
“How much?” she asked the curly-haired young woman behind the counter.
“Forty-five dollars, plus tax and delivery.”
“I’ll deliver it myself,” Judith said, trying not to shudd
er at the price. “I’m taking it just down the street to Qwiver Towers.”
Judith reached the phone-company lobby by twelve-thirty. The buxom security guard had been replaced by a dark-skinned youth who couldn’t have been more than twenty.
“I want to take this bouquet to Lynette Bland,” Judith said, offering the guard her most ingratiating smile. “It’s a surprise.”
The youth looked uncertain. “We can deliver it for you.”
Judith shook her head. “I just saw Lynette at lunch. I want to have it on her desk when she gets back, and I haven’t had time yet to write the note.”
Apparently, Judith didn’t look like a terrorist or an industrial spy. The young man shrugged. “You know where her office is?”
“No,” Judith said. “We’re social friends, not business associates.”
The guard checked his directory. “She’s in fiber optics, fifteen twenty-two.”
“Thanks,” Judith said, and hurried to catch an elevator that was about to go up.
There was no receptionist in the area and the only employee Judith saw was a woman absorbed in eating lunch at her desk in a nearby cubicle. Judith walked past several offices until she found the one with Lynette’s nameplate beside the door.
Lynette’s office was as spartan as her sister-in-law’s was cluttered. A watercolor of the Grand Canyon hung on one wall; her framed MBA from the University was displayed on another. A single file folder sat in the middle of her desk. A couple of pens, an in-and an out-basket, a telephone, a company directory, and a day calendar were the only other items. There was plenty of room for the floral arrangement. Judith hastily scribbled on the notecard provided by the florist:
Lynette—Sorry I missed you. This is my peace offering. I have something very important to tell you. Please call me.
Judith added her name and phone number. Glancing at the day calendar, she saw that Lynette did indeed have a meeting at one, but it was to be held at another of the phone company’s buildings, some six blocks away. There was no point in waiting.