Dying for Dominoes

by Jane Elzey

  It surprised Rian when the detective nodded. It thrilled her, too, but she kept the elation from showing. Sometimes stating the obvious helped avoid what wasn’t.

  The woman shuffled the papers, stacked them back into the file, then pulled out a photograph of Zack Carlisle dead. It struck Rian as cheap, a sandbag attempt to pluck tears from a dry creek bed. She hated Zack Carlisle. She wished he’d disappear—just as Zelda wanted him to. She wasn’t sad about his death, but she would share none of this with the detective. Or with anyone. These were feelings she would keep to herself.

  “Did you see Zack Carlisle the day he was killed?” the detective asked.

  Rian dabbed at the corner of her eye at a fake tear. “I did not.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At home. On my farm.”

  “Can anyone vouch for that?”

  “Just the chickens in the yard,” she said. “I live alone.”

  * * *

  Genna tapped her fingers on the tabletop in the empty room. The rhythm was a comfort somehow. She squirmed in her seat then crossed and uncrossed her legs. She chewed and spat out an entire pack of gum, as gauche as that was. She cleaned out her purse and left the crumpled tissues and gum wrappers in a neat pile on the corner of the desk.

  She had been waiting for more than forty minutes. It was more than an hour since her last cigarette, and she was ready to bite someone’s head off and serve it up for lunch.

  She knew they were watching her from somewhere behind the scenes and that her impatience might be misunderstood.

  She thought about lighting a cigarette anyway when the door opened and a man about her age walked in. He was short for a man by her way of thinking. He was overweight, balding, and dressed in beige. Terrible color for a man of any age. He introduced himself as one of the Hot Springs detectives on the case of Zack Carlisle’s death.

  He threw down a picture of her car before she could gauge his temperament and seductively plan her moves, so she knew matters were headed from bad to worse. The photo was of her car entering the Bennfield Hotel garage.

  “Oh for crying out loud,” she mumbled.

  The image was a black-and-white and grainy as old leather, but Genna recognized her 1983 Mercedes 300D. In color, the Mercedes was a perfect shade of red. Amy had tried to nickname it “Big Apple” after her favorite OPI nail polish color, but she had put the kibosh on that.

  “Your friends say you hit a deer on your way to Hot Springs that night.” He pounced at the photo with a pudgy finger. “We know that’s a lie. There’s no damage showing in this photo, time stamped at 5:15 p.m.”

  He grinned like the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll’s strange land, and Genna saw the gray, coffee-stained teeth of someone who didn’t have a good relationship with a dentist. She ran her tongue over her own white pearls that were indeed semi-precious. She had the dentist bill to prove it.

  He swung the chair around and straddled the hard, gray seat. “So did you hit a deer on the way to Hot Springs or on the way back to Bluff Springs?” His voice boomed in the sparse room. Genna could smell coffee and cigarettes on his breath. It made her jones for a smoke even more.

  “Why, yes I did, Detective,” she said sweetly, fighting fire with peach blossom honey. “My friends have the event confused. After all, they weren’t there. It happened after I left the hotel.”

  “Damn convenient,” he barked.

  “For whom, may I ask? Certainly not for me or the deer.”

  “Don’t play smart with me, Ms. Gregory. The law doesn’t appreciate a smart-mouth no matter how pretty they may be.”

  Genna winced.

  “Let me get this straight. You hit a deer on the way home, and now your car is sitting in your driveway as pretty as can be. No dents, no nothing. What was so important about getting it fixed in such short order? What was so critical that it couldn’t wait a few more days?”

  Genna blew her breath audibly through her nose. She sounded like a horse about to stomp over the finish line in fourth place. She pawed at the desktop with her manicured fingertips.

  “Well, if you must know,” she said, speaking as if to a petulant child, “I have a significant engagement in Little Rock with a senator next week. I needed it repaired quickly.”

  “You could have rented a car,” he said.

  Genna didn’t respond. She wasn’t about to be baited by his point of view.

  “Funny though,” he said, his voice now calm, his words slowed to a drawl, “we can’t find any records for the repair. Nobody in town seems to know a thing about it. Not a single body shop in the area claims to have worked on a red 1983 Mercedes four-door.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “So, you have a fairy godmother or something? Somebody who waves a magic wand and turns your busted carriage back into a princess ride?”

  “I prefer queen to princess,” Genna said snidely under her breath, knowing her attitude might engage a consequence. “Here’s what I can do,” she said bravely, a new tactic in mind. “I don’t recall the name of the establishment because he’s a friend of a friend, a shade tree mechanic who lives out somewhere deep in the hollers. If you let me out for a brief break, I’ll get his name and number, and you can go ask him yourself.”

  She wasn’t confident she could cover her words. Rian would never give up the name and whereabouts of her friend’s garage, and she didn’t remember a fraction of the twists and turns they took to get there. But if she didn’t get to a cigarette in the next thirty seconds, she was going to die trying.

  She perched a perfectly drawn eyebrow at the detective. “Agreed?”

  The detective threw his head back and laughed, shaking the girth at his belt. Suddenly he leaned forward and smacked the table with his fist.

  “There’s an awful lot of tomfoolery going on with you ladies,” he said, his face threatening as it turned an angry shade of purple. “None of your stories seem to match up. Why don’t you just tell me what happened that night? Maybe Zelda Carlisle was behind the wheel of your Mercedes with a little too much alcohol and pent-up anger? Maybe she just meant to bump him to give him a little scare.”

  Genna pursed her lips. “That’s not at all what happened,” she said hotly. “I never saw Zack. Zelda and I were at the lobby bar together until I left. Until then, I never left Zelda’s side. Not for one single minute.”

  “Not even to smoke? Hey, I’m a smoker, too. I know what that feels like.”

  “We went out to the portico but Zelda came with me. They had just painted the concrete floor, and they had part of it roped off so we couldn’t sit down. I smoked, and Zelda paced. Then we went back inside.”

  The detective nodded, and a cumbersome silence fell over the room.

  “I need to tell you, Genna Gregory, that we’ve been doing our homework since this . . . accident. Frankly, we’re starting to think this was no ordinary hit-and-run. We’ve been asking ourselves how it is that all of you had reason to be in Hot Springs that night.”

  Before Genna could utter a word in her defense, he formed a fist with one hand.

  “Boom!” he shouted and smacked his fist in his hand. Genna jumped in her seat. “Then you’re not in Hot Springs and Carlisle’s dead.

  “And then boom! A deer jumps out in front of you and crumples your grill right where a man’s knees would be. Coincidence?” He shook his head slowly. “Hard for me to believe.”

  He wiped his hand across his forehead now blistered with sweat. “Around here, we call that opportunity. And now with Zack Carlisle gone, you get a nice little chunk of cabbage to add to your bank account.” He grinned. “We call that motive.

  “And boom,” he said, this time not so loud. His fist was silent on the table. “Your car is free of any evidence that could connect you or your Mercedes to the crime. And that,” he said, rising from his chair, “is a well-laid plan of murder.”


  Genna’s eyes widened in surprise and then turned to flint. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, jumping up from her chair. She pointed a thin, brightly manicured finger at his face and hissed, “You won’t slog me down some sociopathic-trodden path, you overblown frog. Zack Carlisle brought this down on himself, and you’re not going to back us into a corner. Not while I’m around.” Genna spun around and grabbed her purse then bustled toward the door, long legs striding with indignation.

  “I guess we are done here, Ms. Gregory,” he said to her back, a furtive smile playing on his lips as she swung the door open. “Stay in touch, won’t you?”

  * * *

  Zelda shivered. She was colder than she could remember ever being, even colder than when she fell into a pond and was hauled out through the shards of sharp gray ice. She was lucky that day. Her family was nearby when she fell through a soft spot on the pond’s surface—they heard the crack of ice and her call for help.

  Her fingers felt numb beneath her thighs, where she held them to still the trembling as much as to keep them warm. Startled, she opened her eyes. She was all alone in this gray place. The detective was gone, and she was lying on a cot, a green wool blanket covering her bare arms and legs.

  The timbre of voices leached through the walls, and she could hear the rise and fall of emotion, the hum of other noises, too. Although unable to discern the words or the people who spoke them, she could imagine who they were. She could imagine what they were talking about.

  Zelda and Zack. And what they thought she had done to him.

  Pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders, she struggled to piece it together. She remembered being led to a room and left shivering for a while before a big, balding man introduced himself as a Hot Springs detective and sat down. Heavy eyebrows arched like two dark caterpillars balanced above his eyes, as if ready to roll off at any moment. He had little hair anywhere else on his head, and the contrast was amusing. She had stifled a smile.

  He opened a file to recap the details, which she had given in Hot Springs the morning after Zack’s death. He read from the folder without emotion like a court reporter reading testimony back to the jury. But she didn’t need to be reminded. She remembered that day clearly.

  The police had driven her to the morgue where she identified her husband. Even as she nodded her response, the gray, lifeless body didn’t look like the Zack Carlisle she knew. He looked like a mannequin made up for Halloween. Funny what comes to mind in such circumstances, she had thought at the time.

  While she was standing beside the body, her father’s voice rushed to her mind like a warm embrace.

  Hey Z, what did the dead raccoon say in his will? Leave it to Beaver!

  His hearty laugh filled her memory, a genuine guffaw that followed a joke even after telling the same one a dozen times. And then, standing by the man who had once been her husband, Zelda smiled. She glanced up at the policeman beside her, but it was too late. He had seen her smile.

  “Do you still stand by your statement?” The detective in front of her had pointed a stubby finger at the page. He had stopped reading and glared at her over the rims of his glasses as if he were studying a caged animal. She had felt like one.

  “I do.” The words made her ache. Those were the very words that got her into more trouble than anything else.

  I do.

  After three marriages that ended in divorce messier than a spring tornado, she had sworn there would be no more. Zack would be her final “till death do us part.” How cruel those words seemed to her now.

  “Once upon a time . . .” the detective said as if he were starting a children’s story, “this looked like an accidental hit-and-run, a quirky accident without much rhyme or reason. But when no one came forward to confess—which they usually do when their conscience keeps them up at night––we started to look at this from a different angle. And then we saw a few things that didn’t match up.”

  Staring at him, straining to listen, she had struggled to stay above the noise in her head.

  “Mr. Carlisle—your late husband—was walking on the left side of the parking garage toward the stairs when he was struck down. That means whoever hit him swerved out of their lane to strike him.”

  She wanted to cover her ears.

  “He was carrying a couple of bags. One held an expensive bottle of champagne. I guess he thought he was going to be celebrating. Maybe he turned around when he heard a car racing up behind him. Maybe he loosened his grip on the other bags and tightened his grip on the champagne. Maybe he pulled the bag to his chest the way a running back would hug the ball.”

  Why did he tell her this? The ache rose from her belly. Her ears filled with a soft, whining hum.

  “It could be that he recognized the person bearing down on him. Maybe he thought it was a joke, a prank that would end with the bumper inches from his knees. But it didn’t happen that way, did it?

  “No,” he had answered himself as the hum in her ears grew louder. “No, indeed. And that’s how an accidental hit-and-run becomes a homicide. Nothing else explains the tire marks at the start of the skid, where the driver punched the gas before she hit her target. That’s no accident. And no stranger would run a man down that way,” the detective said pointedly.

  “This was rage,” he added quietly. The hum in her ears reached a deafening pitch. “This was the rage of a wife who wanted her husband dead.”

  Wanted her husband dead. It was all she heard before the room went dark.

  Zelda shifted under the blankets, remembering. She heard the door open, heavy steps drawing close, and then the balding head appeared over her, his charcoal breath once again fouling the air.

  “Wh-what happened?” she murmured.

  “You fainted right out of your chair.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Amy sat at the long library table and let her eyes sweep over the room, taking in the details and mentally making a list of chores yet to do. With the doors to both the Cardboard Cottage & Company and Tiddlywinks soon to be repaired, she hoped their idyllic world also would soon return. Genna had persuaded a stained glass artist she knew to put the project on the top of her list. In the artist’s capable hands, the glass would be matched as near perfect as possible. The door would be pricey, but she trusted her insurance would cover the cost.

  The Cardboard Cottage as a whole was still closed, including the bakery, going on more than two weeks now. She was riddled with angst about the money not coming in, but she agreed with Genna and Rian that the shops should stay closed out of deference to Zelda and the circumstance that surrounded her.

  Even so, she wanted to keep working at it, even if behind the scenes. She couldn’t just lock up and leave it. Order was being restored. What could be saved from the trash bin was patched and put back on the shelf. Estate sales notices were piling up on her calendar, and so was her excitement to shop them. Hunting treasures at sales and auctions was exciting.

  Insurance would cover everything, minus her deductible. Even a loss-of-income check was on its way, and it was more than enough to cover the mortgage payment. Thank goodness she had listened to the advice of her insurance agent. The policeman’s wife had been right about that, too. You can never have too much insurance.

  She walked to the back of the shop and opened a door that led to a large storage room. Musty, stale air greeted her, and she propped the door open to let in a little breeze. Along with getting Tiddlywinks back on its feet, she had decided to put any leftover proceeds from the insurance payment toward the creation of an escape room. It would be a perfect match for Tiddlywinks, and escape rooms were gaining in popularity in tourist towns.

  She paced the floor, counting her steps. It was about twelve feet square, just the right size for a small group of players. Lock, Stock, and Barrel was one of the names pinging her interest. She liked the way that sounded. Rock, Paper, Scissors was
a contender, too. Both had appeal, but she hadn’t decided on which name to use, if either. If it wasn’t for what was going on around them, she would be giddy with the possibilities that lay before her.

  She wasn’t proud to admit it, even to herself, but she felt more grief about the demise of the games she lost than she felt for the demise of her friend’s husband.

  The antique Sulphide marbles stolen from the locked curio case had not resurfaced. She hadn’t really expected them to be recovered, although she was a bit surprised they hadn’t been found in Zack’s pocket. The police didn’t yet have any leads about the break-in, and there was never any evidence to point the finger at Zack. Not that it mattered. Not now. But the timing of the break-in was too coincidental, too close to Zack’s outburst for her to draw any other conclusion. Was she being unkind to think he wrecked her shop as revenge? Probably. Zack had been angry because she defended Zelda. Because she always took Zelda’s side. Because she thought Zelda could do far better than him, and he knew she felt that way.

  But of all the things to steal from the shop, the old marbles were the least valuable. If he wanted something to pawn for money, there were other items in the case that fit that bill better. He wouldn’t have known their worth, so she could only surmise he smashed the glass and grabbed the first thing he could.

  The whole incident bothered her though. Even if the marbles were precious, they didn’t seem worth the effort. The damage to the shop didn’t fit the theft. And the theft didn’t fit the damage to the shop. It was a puzzle all its own.

  Amy walked back through the shop, turned off the lights, and pulled the plywood closed where it hung on the hinges Ben had added, along with a padlock and clasp. She glanced at the darkened bakery window as she passed under the eaves. The Sorry, No Crumpets Today sign hung lopsided from a string in the window. She missed the smells of cinnamon and yeast. She missed Sammie’s Irish tea and cream. She missed Sammie. She hoped she would take this time for an overdue vacation, and more, she hoped she would return when their shops were ready to reopen. There was a chance Sammie might choose to move on.