by Susan Dunlap
“I’ll try not to do it again. I’ve run the nightmare about Cousin John diving through the wave and breaking his neck so many times since the crash that it’s beginning not to terrify me. Well, not as much as it did.”
He squeezed my hand. “You were very lucky. It could have been a lot worse.”
“I know. Murakawa laid out the possibilities, graphically.” It was not a topic I wanted to pursue. “What’s the plant on the floor, the one with flowers?”
As he turned toward the wall, I could see his face relaxing. “The one the size of a Christmas tree? Someone has a lot of faith in your recovery if he thinks you’ll be able to lug out something that size.” He pushed himself up and walked over to it. “Rhododendron, the tag says. Do you want me to read the card?”
“It can only be from one person, but go ahead, read.”
“ ‘Get well soon. We’ll put your bush in the northwest corner of the yard. Don’t worry about being bored while you recover. You can help me plan the rest as soon as you get home.’ It’s signed ‘Charles Kepple.’ Wait, there’s more. ‘P.S.—The redwood burls are the right touch.’ ” Howard turned the card over. “ ‘I’m thinking of extending the path across the yard. It could end at the rhododendron. I can have the trees hauled over and cut them during the day when the neighbors won’t kick up such a fuss and …’ ” Howard grinned. “He ran out of room.”
“Oy, and I thought I was sick before. And Murakawa said I’d be home at least a couple weeks.”
Howard laughed.
“Howard, I know this man. He won’t stop with one path. He’ll cover the entire yard in burls.”
Howard laughed harder.
“Then he’ll think about a deck, maybe two. It’s a big yard. Two decks with two or three levels each, with flower boxes and a grape arbor over one, or both. Howard, the chain saw will never be still.”
Howard tried to control himself.
“The neighbors will be screaming. The beat officer will be there so often he’ll think it’s Wally’s. Howard, I can’t live like that.”
His control gave way. A laugh burst out.
“A little lapse of bedside manner, here?” I demanded.
“You’re right,” he said struggling to control himself. “What can I do for the sick lady?”
“You serious?”
“Of course.” He looked serious.
“Okay, it’s a big favor.”
“I’m a big guy. And a nice one!” he added with a grin.
“We’ll see how nice. Since you’re not using your room at your house now, will you store my stuff there? I don’t have much, if you don’t count the newspapers and catalogs. And those you can throw out. Or maybe Nancy’d like the Sporting Dog. It’s not one I’m likely to use.”
“Sure. Consider it hauled.” But he looked uncomfortable. “What about you?”
“I’m going to call Mr. Kepple, tell him that I’ll be convalescing on the beach and that he can keep the burls in my flat. I guarantee you, by the time you take him this rhododendron, he’ll have every inch of my flat filled with burls and saws and bags and boxes and hoses and mowers and blowers and …”
He held up a hand. “I get the idea. You don’t mind, do you, if I put some of your stuff in the attic?”
“No, but it should all go in your room.”
“Not if I have to sleep there.”
Before the accident, I might have asked him to explain that. I might have said that things between him and Nancy would look better when he got some sleep. But a glimpse of mortality doesn’t always make one a better person. I said, “The attic’s fine.”
Howard leaned forward, taking both my hands in his. “Now that we’re through discussing what I’ll do for you, let’s talk about what you’ll give me if I don’t tell anyone about Herman Ott’s daffodils.”
A Biography of Susan Dunlap
Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.
Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.
One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book, Karma (1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.
After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published Pious Deception, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.
Dunlap concluded the Smith series with Cop Out (1997). In 2006 she published A Single Eye, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is No Footprints (2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.
In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.
Dunlap and her father at the beach, probably Coney Island. ”“My happiest vacations were at the beach,” says Dunlap, “here, at the Jersey shore, at Jones Beach, and two glorious winter weeks in Florida.”
Dunlap’s grammar school graduation from Stewart School on Long Island, New York.
In 1968, Dunlap arrived in San Francisco; this photo was taken by her husband-to-be atop one of the city’s many hills. Dunlap recalls, “It’s winter; I’m wearing a T-shirt; I’m ecstatic!”
Dunlap’s dog Seumas at eight weeks old. “We’d had him two weeks and he was already in charge, happily biting my hand (see my grimace),” she says. “He lived for sixteen good, well-tended years.”
Dunlap started practicing yoga in 1969 and received her instructor certification in 1981, after a three-week intensive course in India with B. K. S. Iyengar. Here she demonstrates the uttanasa pose (the basic standing forward bend) for her students.
Seumas and Dunlap in 1988: “He was an old guy by this time, who had better things to do than be a photo prop. I think his expression says it all.”
Dunlap relished West Coast life. “This is what someone who grew up in the snow of the East Coast dreams of . . . the California life!”
For her fiftieth birthday, Dunlap and a group of close writer friends went to Santa Cruz for the weekend. Seated above from left to right: Marilyn Wallace, Marcia Muller, Dunlap, and Shelley Singer. Seated on the floor: Judith Gruber (pen name Gillian Roberts), Linda Grant, and Lia Matera.
The Sisters-in-Crime presidents and former presidents—known as the Goddesses—always gather for a picture at conventions. One year, Dunlap had to miss the gathering. Her friends, knowing how much she wanted to be there, photoshopped her into the image.
Dunlap’s last typewriter, before she happily switched to writing on a computer. “Plotting is one of the aspects of writing I really like—everything’s new, all gates open, all roads wide,” she says. “But it involves a great deal of data with connections that are not always linear. On paper or white board or with notes taped on corkboard—I tried them all—it was cumbersome. Using the computer was magic.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1987 by Susan Dunlap
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-5365-6
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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