by Laura Alden
I looked around. A hallway behind her led to what I assumed were other offices. When she got off the phone, I gestured to the nether regions. “You seem awfully busy. Isn’t anyone else here to help?”
“Don’t I wish.” She slumped a little. “Most of the programmers are at a conference. The vice president is home sick with the flu, and the only other person here is such a computer ge—” She stopped. “I mean, he’s so into his work that he’s not supposed to answer the phone.”
I looked at her approvingly. Young, but tactful. If she knew anything about children’s books, I’d have hired her myself. “Are you working a lot of hours with so many people gone?”
“Yeah. I’m supposed to be doing the books, too.” She glanced at a teetering stack of papers. “My little sister, Tara? Her birthday is next week, and all I do is work. It’s her sixteenth birthday and I wanted to help Mom make it really special.”
“Tara?” I asked. “Tara Pettigrew?”
Devon cocked her head to the side. “Do you know her?”
I knew of her. She’d been the star forward on Jenna’s hockey team when she was Jenna’s age. Though she’d been gone from the team a few years, her legend lingered on. “My daughter is goalie for the Rynwood Raiders.”
“Jenna Kennedy?” Devon’s face brightened. “She’s good.”
I beamed. Clearly, Devon was an excellent judge of talent. “And she’s only been playing hockey for a year.”
“No kidding? That’s great. If she keeps at it—” The phone rang again. “I should count all the calls,” she said, looking at the phone with loathing, “and ask for a raise.” Eyes crossed, she put the receiver to her ear. “Stull Systems.”
This was obviously not a good time to talk. I waved and slipped out.
“It’s him,” Marina said. She plopped down in my office’s company chair, squeezing her hips down between its narrow arms.
“Him who?”
“Andrew Bieber. The accountant. He’s the one who killed Sam.”
Her voice was full of excitement and certainty. The combination troubled me. “Why are you so sure?”
She leaned forward. “These.” Her face went still and she stared at me with a concentration she didn’t use on anything except rare sirloin steaks.
“Um . . .”
“Look again.” She hopped the chair closer and stared at me a second time. “Don’t you see?”
What I saw was her eyes starting to dry out from not blinking often enough.
“It’s those serial killer eyes,” she said impatiently, rubbing her eyelids. “That Andrew Bieber has them big-time.”
“Serial killers have special eyes?”
“It’s that intensity, that . . . that look. Charles Manson has them. Son of Sam has them. Jeffrey Dahmer had them.”
I held up a hand to stop her horrible litany. The last thing I needed was more things to haunt my nights. “The way he looks isn’t going to mean anything to the Dane County Sheriff’s Department. We need evidence. We need proof.”
“He has those eyes,” Marina said stubbornly.
I flashed back on my morning visit to Stull Systems. Marina felt something was wrong with Andrew Bieber, and I felt a wrongness at Stull Systems. Though I wanted to poke holes all through the serial killer eyes theory, maybe her reaction was justified at a level too visceral to be quantified.
We had two down, and we still had two to go.
“There’s something weird at Stull,” I said.
“Stull Systems?” a quiet voice asked. “You mean Eric Stull?”
Chapter 16
Marina and I turned to look at Yvonne. She was holding a book in each hand and wearing an apologetic expression. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I had a question about which of these would be better for a fourth-grade boy.”
The books she held were Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks and Snow Treasure by Marie Mc-Swigan. “Both are wonderful,” I said, perking up at the thought of a real live customer. “Who’s buying it for him?” A grandparent might be more inclined to buy Snow Treasure since it took place during World War II. A parent might lean more toward Indian, and since it was a trilogy, maybe the parent would buy all three and—
“No one,” Yvonne said. “I’m just trying to learn our stock.”
“Oh.” I deflated down to normal size. “That’s a great idea.”
“Is Stull Systems in trouble?” Yvonne looked from me to Marina and back.
“No. Well, not that I know of.”
She smiled at me, a slow quirk. “That didn’t have the ring of sincerity.”
If my cousin Bill were here, he’d confirm my conclusion: Yvonne had an excellent hooey detector. It was a term we’d come up with as children when one parent or another would claim that eating overcooked vegetables was good for us. “What a bunch of hooey,” Bill said one Thanksgiving, and thus was born the hooey detector.
Thanksgiving. The thought was suddenly depressing. The overcrowded Emmerling Thanksgiving I’d been planning for so many weeks had diminished to a simple dinner for five. I wouldn’t even have to get out the leaves for the table.
I pulled myself back to the present, where Marina was saying, “Beth? Insincere? What, pray tell, gave it away? The flag she was waving labeled ‘I’m lying through my teeth’? Or was it the neon sign over her head flashing ‘Liar’ and a big red arrow pointing at her head?”
I considered the situation. Looked at Marina. Quirked my eyebrows and tilted my head to Yvonne. “Shall we add a third to the team?”
“Hmm.” Marina focused her laserlike stare on the poor woman, who inched backward. Before she could escape, Marina gave a sharp nod. “Great minds think alike,” she said, “and somehow so do ours. Young lady, come in and shut the door.”
The door closed softly. Come to think of it, everything Yvonne did was quiet. She talked quietly, moved quietly, made only quiet noises. I wanted to ask if she’d always been like that, but was afraid I’d hear prison stories I didn’t want to hear—chicken-livered Beth—so I’d never asked.
“What do you know about Stull Systems?” Marina demanded. “Stream of consciousness here. No thinking, just talking.”
Yvonne stood there and didn’t say a word.
“Come on, woman,” Marina said. “You must know something!”
She shook her head. “Sorry. All I know is Eric Stull is president. The person I know there is Violet, the office manager.”
“Not today,” I said. “Devon Pettigrew is temping.”
“She’ll be there for a while,” Yvonne said. “Violet’s having a rough pregnancy.”
“Waitaminnut.” Marina shoved her cheeks together, mashing her face into an amorphous blob. “Is this Violet Demps you’re talking about? She can’t be having a baby—she’s almost as old as I am.”
Yvonne made a small shrug. “All I know is she’s five months pregnant.”
“How do you know all this?” Marina asked. “I didn’t know it and Violet goes to my church.”
“Well—” Yvonne stopped. “I can trust you, can’t I? To keep quiet, I mean? Nothing bad,” she said quickly. “It’s just confidential.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.” Marina drew her index finger across her chest.
I caught Yvonne’s doubtful look. “She means it,” I said. “She only pretends to be an overgrown thirteen-year-old. Inside she’s a trustworthy adult.”
“Okay.” Her thin shoulders rose and fell. “Okay. Violet is my sponsor. She’s a member of Innocent Behind Bars. Have you heard of them? They find people like me who were wrongfully imprisoned, do what they can to get us freed, then help us find our way back into a normal life.”
“Sounds like a great group,” I said.
“Oh, they are,” Yvonne said, and there was more passion in her words than in anything I’d yet heard her say. “Without them I’d be—” She pulled back from herself. “Anyway, Violet helped bring me here and has been wonderful about getting me settled.”
“So Violet,” Marina said, “knows a lot about Stull Systems.”
“She’s run the office ever since they started up.”
“Then we need to talk to her,” I said decisively. “Marina, why don’t you call and—”
Marina was shaking her head. “No can do. Remember how big my church is? I know people who know her, is all.”
“She’s not answering the phone these days anyway,” Yvonne said. “Says talking on the phone makes her queasy.”
“Oh.” Marina looked pained. “One of those pregnancies.”
“Poor woman.” I wondered what our next step would be. If she saw two strange women standing on her front porch, she’d assume we were selling something and not come to the door.
“And she’s not answering the door, either,” Yvonne said. “Too many people with magazine subscriptions and whatnot, she says.”
Marina and I looked at each other. There had to be a way; all we had to do was find it.
“I’ll take you over,” Yvonne said, “if you like.”
“You will?” Marina clasped her hands. “Really, truly, totally, completely?”
Yvonne’s shoulders hunched together a little, then relaxed. “Yes. I will.”
I studied her. “Why are you doing this? Helping us, I mean.”
“Why?” She got an owly look, round and deep and quiet. “Because I know you’re trying to right a wrong. That means a lot to me.” A flicker of a smile came and went. “But mostly because I owe everything to you two.” She looked at her feet. “If you hadn’t given me this job, if you hadn’t been my friends, I’d still be sitting in that little house all by myself, trying to convince myself that everything will turn out right.”
Marina’s mouth twisted and I knew she was trying to keep from crying. There were unshed tears in my own eyes, but they weren’t from sentiment; they were out of anger for the sheer waste.
Thanks to the Emmerling ethics handed down from generation to generation, I couldn’t stand waste. I used grocery bags multiple times and always made sure to eat leftovers. But the worst waste of all was of time. Yvonne, through no fault of her own, had been forced to throw away precious years. The idea that Claudia and her ilk wanted more of those years to be useless made me angrier than I’d been in a long time.
“Let’s go.” I stood abruptly.
“Right now?” Yvonne looked at the books still in her hands. “I’m scheduled to work until close.”
“Lois can handle things.” As if there were anything to handle.
“Hi, ho.” Marina smiled, her frame of mind taking a hard turn. “It’s the Three Musketeers. One for all and all for one!” Jumping to her feet, she stabbed an invisible foe with an imaginary sword. “Take that, yon knave!” With her foe vanquished, she leapt into a ghostly saddle, picked up her purse for reins, and off she went. “For Harry, England, and Saint George!”
Yvonne stared after her. “Is she always like this?”
“No. Sometimes she turns into Mae West.”
“I hope she’s not that loud around Violet,” Yvonne said, pulling on her coat. “She’s really not feeling very good.”
“It’ll be fine.” At least I hoped so.
Violet’s house was a lovely renovated bungalow. It was the kind of house that whispers, “Home.” It summoned images of cozy fireplaces, window seats, and a kitchen where white cabinets climbed to the ceiling. I spun the brass tab of the old-fashioned doorbell and we listened to the quivering ring.
The three of us waited, and heard nothing.
“Let me do it,” Marina said.
She elbowed around me and twisted the doorbell. Again we listened to a fading echo. I was just about to suggest going around to the back door, when Yvonne clutched at my sleeve. “What was that?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Marina said.
“Beth, did you?” Yvonne’s face was turned toward me, but her attention was focused inside the house. “It sounded like someone in pain.”
I shook my head.
“Ooooo.”
“There,” Yvonne said. “You must have heard that.”
But I already had my hand on the doorknob. “It’s locked. Let’s try the back.”
The three of us clattered down the stairs, around the side of the house, and up the back steps. I pushed to the front of the pack and banged on the back door with the side of my fist. “Hello? Violet?”
As I called, I turned the oval doorknob. Unlocked. “Hello?” I pushed the door open and we hustled into the kitchen. Looking past the gray marble countertops and tall white cabinetry, I said, “I’ll check upstairs. Marina, you look over there.” I gestured to an open archway leading to dining and living rooms. “Yvonne, through there.” I nodded at a smaller hallway.
We split like a river flowing around rocks. I clattered up the stairs and barged into a guest bedroom, study, and bathroom, searching quickly, looking carefully, wanting to hurry, wanting to be sure I didn’t miss a woman who might be lying on a floor behind a desk, curled up in a small ball. Where was she, where was she . . . ?
“Down here!” Yvonne called.
I rushed down the stairs and followed Marina through the hallway and into a half bath. There, Yvonne was crouching on black and white hexagonal tiles, her arm around Violet’s shoulders. Violet herself was kneeling on the floor, leaning over the porcelain toilet bowl and clutching the rim, heaving and gasping. She wore a loose T-shirt, loose sweatpants, and her hair was lank and stringy against her skull.
Marina and I exchanged a glance. I edged between the pedestal sink and the toilet and hunkered down. “Violet? Should I call 911?”
“No.” She gulped down air. “My doctor said . . .” Her stomach spasmed, but whatever she’d eaten was long gone. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “He said this would happen.” She clutched her burgeoning midsection. “It’ll pass . . . ooohh . . . in a minute. It always does.”
Yvonne gave me a worried look. “Shouldn’t we at least call her doctor?”
“No,” Marina and I said.
“But she’s sick!”
“Only in the morning,” Marina said.
Yvonne frowned. “It’s three thirty in the afternoon.”
“Not if you’re pregnant.”
“If . . .” Yvonne looked at Violet with a dawning understanding in her eyes. “She has morning sickness.”
“There’s nothing morning . . . ahhh . . . about it.” Violet closed her eyes. “Stupidest name ever.”
“But we have to do something!”
Marina smiled. “We can tell childbirth stories.”
“We will not,” I said. “Yvonne, stay with Violet. Marina, come with me.”
The two of us traipsed to the kitchen, where we opened drawers until we found some dishcloths. I ran cold water over two of them while Marina dug ice out of the freezer. “Quit with the childbirth stories,” I scolded. “That’s the last thing Violet wants to hear right now.”
“Just passing on what was passed on to me,” she said airily. “I couldn’t sleep for a week after my aunt Dorothy told me about—”
“Not listening.” I twisted water out of the dishcloths and opened them flat on the counter. Marina laid down a wide row of ice cubes and I wrapped them up. Icewrapped cloths were Marina’s best weapon for morning sickness recovery. If it didn’t help, she always said, at least the cold would distract you.
We went back to the bathroom. Violet had slumped to a sitting position in the corner. I crouched beside her. “This is going to feel cold, okay?” I held the cloth against her forehead.
She groaned at the chill but didn’t move away. The three of us waited, watching Violet’s face. Her misery was etched into the grooves around her mouth and the set of her chin.
Please let this help, I thought. This poor woman needs some relief. Let the ice ease her misery. Let her lean on us. Let her accept our empathy. Let her baby be strong and healthy and happy.
“Oooo.” Violet clutched the cloth with
both hands, and my muscles tensed in readiness to move aside. I did not want to be between her and the toilet. “Oooo,” she said again. “That feels good.”
Marina and Yvonne and I smiled at each other. The newly formed Three Musketeers had saved the day. Hip, hip, hooray!
“Wow.” Violet shifted the cloth around. “This feels incredibly good. I owe you guys. I’d offer you my firstborn child, but I don’t have one yet.” She patted her belly and uncovered one eye. “Hey, Yvonne.” The single eye darted at me, then Marina. “You go to my church. Marnie? No, Marina. That’s it. Like with boats.”
Her growing puzzlement was obvious. Why are these three women here? They may be saintlike in their ability to ease my pain, but why in the heck are they in my bathroom?
I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “My name is Beth Kennedy. I own the Children’s Bookshelf.”
“Oh. Sure. You hired Yvonne.” She gave a very small nod. When in the throes of morning sickness, quick movements were not a good idea. “Nice to meet you.”
A giggle tried to escape, but I caught it and sent it away. “I want to thank you,” I said, “for helping Yvonne transition back into . . . into civilian life.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled faintly. “I’ve been involved with Innocent Behind Bars for years. It was wonderful to help someone personally.”
“How wonderful?” I asked.
“Um . . .” She shifted the cloths. “Well, very, I guess. How do you mean?”
“What if Yvonne’s job was in jeopardy? What if she wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it in Rynwood? Able to make it anywhere?” I was laying it on a little thick, but sometimes exaggeration is the best way to get a point across. It was a technique I’d learned from my best friend.
Frowning, Violet looked from me to Yvonne to Marina and back around again. “What’s wrong?”
“A very vocal group is boycotting the bookstore,” I said. “Picketing. Their signs say the town won’t be safe until Sam’s killer is brought to justice. Worse, they imply that a killer works at the store. We haven’t had a customer in days.”