Die Job

by Lila Dare

  Althea frowned at the truck. “That’s not Loretta’s.”

  As we walked to the front door and Althea knocked, I got a tingly feeling between my shoulder blades. I glanced around. The blinds of the trailer behind us flickered and I knew someone was watching us. Suddenly, I was glad Althea had elected to come with me.

  The door swung open and a black woman in yellow medical scrubs printed with teddy bears stared at us. A silver nametag said, “Loretta Farber, RN.” She might have been pretty, but a sallow cast to her skin testified to exhaustion, and a world-weary look in her eyes made me think not much would surprise her. She could’ve been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty-five. She kept her face impassive as she gazed through the screen at us. “Yes?”

  “You going to invite us in, Loretta?” Althea asked.

  Loretta’s face brightened with recognition, taking ten years off her age, and she pushed the screen door open. “Althea Jenkins! What in the world are you doing here?” She gave me a curious look.

  We stepped into a kitchen with a small dinette and two chairs and cabinets painted red to match the curtains. A faint odor of bacon lingered in the air. Althea introduced us, adding, “We just want to talk to Lonnie. Is he here?”

  “Now, why would you be wanting my Lonnie, Althea?” Loretta asked, crossing her arms over her chest. Wariness settled again on her features.

  “I wanted to talk to him about what he might have seen at Rothmere,” I said. “The night Braden McCullers got hurt.”

  “He didn’t see anything,” she said flatly.

  “We’re not here to get Lonnie in trouble,” Althea said. “But since he was there that night, we thought—”

  “Well, you thought wrong. Lonnie’s not above playing a prank or two—the cops told me about the fireworks and I grounded him for that—but he wouldn’t deliberately hurt someone. Deep down, he’s a good kid. He’s had a tough time of it since his dad ran off—my brother Leroy always was about as useless as teats on a boar hog—but he’s getting good grades now and might have a shot at a football scholarship that would get him a college education. He could get away from—” She gestured to the trailer and its surroundings.

  “He’ll be the starting wide receiver now that Braden’s gone, won’t he? That will get him more visibility with the college scouts.”

  I was mostly thinking aloud, but I knew I’d said the wrong thing when Loretta leaned toward me and poked a finger at my chest. “Don’t go there, girl. You do not want to imply that my nephew killed Braden McCullers so he could have his spot on the football team. I have a half a mind—”

  A scraping noise, followed by a thud, cut her off. The trailer shifted slightly. Loretta looked down the narrow hall and then stepped to the window as an engine roared to life. Althea and I joined her at the window, craning our necks to look over her shoulders in time to see the red pickup peel out of the lot, kicking up a rooster tail of sand, gravel, and leaves. It took me half a second to realize Lonnie had exited through a window and taken off rather than talk to us. Not the way we do hospitality in the South.

  “C’mon.” Althea grabbed my hand and dragged me out the door. “Good to see you, Loretta,” she called over her shoulder as we piled into the car.

  “You’re not planning to—” I began as she gunned the old LTD and took off with my door still open. I slammed it shut and groped for my seat belt, shutting my eyes as we rocketed down the narrow lane.

  “Which way did he go?” she asked as we approached the T intersection.

  I looked both ways and spotted a red blur just about out of sight. “Right.” Bracing myself, I said a quick prayer when it became apparent Althea wasn’t even going to stop at the intersection. The force of the turn threw me against the door and the LTD’s rear end swung halfway across the center line, but no one hit us as she stomped on the accelerator.

  “No one bugs out like that unless he’s got something to hide,” Althea said. “And I aim to find out what it is.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “WE COULD’VE ASKED FOR HIS CELL PHONE NUMBER,” I said, flinching as we passed a bicyclist and sent him wavering onto the shoulder. He gave us the finger and I couldn’t blame him. I watched as the speedometer topped sixty and headed for seventy. We were on a two-lane road with a speed limit of forty-five, and I couldn’t decide whether to close my eyes and let disaster take me by surprise, or keep them open and see it coming.

  “There he is!” Althea pointed, and the car swerved into the path of a semitruck in the oncoming lane.

  “Both hands on the wheel!” I yelped, gripping the dashboard.

  She slewed the car into our lane at the last second and shot me an amused look. “I’ve been driving since before you were born, Grace Ann, and nothing terrible’s happened yet. Have faith.”

  Althea’s guardian angel must be nearly dead from exhaustion if it’d been keeping her out of accidents for almost fifty years. I hoped mine would pick up the slack. After a couple of minutes, it looked like we were gaining on Lonnie, mainly because he didn’t seem to know we were following him and was tooling along at a reasonable—safe—pace, unlike us. The old LTD might not have been much to look at, but the engine purred like a satisfied tiger as we cruised along at eighty, Althea hunched over the wheel. I loosed my fingers from their grip on the dash and let the blood tingle back into them.

  “What are you going to do when we catch up to him?” I asked. “We can’t just run him off the road.”

  Big mistake. Althea was incapable of talking without looking at the person she’s conversing with. She swiveled her head now to say, “Why not?” The car drifted right and bumped along the shoulder for a moment before she swung it back onto the asphalt.

  “His truck’s bigger than this dinosaur,” I said, patting the LTD’s dash.

  “Hm. You might be right about that. I wouldn’t want my baby to get dinged up.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “You can write him a note and we’ll hold it up to the window. There’s a notepad and a pen—or maybe you’ll have to use a lipstick—in my handbag.”

  She started to rifle through her purse, but I stopped her with a screech as the car aimed itself at a telephone pole. “Watch the road. I’ll get it.” With trembling fingers, I found the notepad and a black pen and wrote “PLEASE PULL OVER.” Looking at it, I felt fairly stupid and wondered what the heck we were doing out here, chasing down a teenager in a pickup truck who might or might not know anything about Braden’s death. As Dillon would surely tell me, this was the police’s job. Maybe, I thought with a glimmer of hope, Dillon wouldn’t have to know.

  Lonnie’s truck, now only a quarter mile ahead of us, seemed to slow. “Is he—? Yes,” I said, “he’s turning left.”

  “I’ve got eyes in my head, don’t I?” Althea said, clicking on the blinker. She braked and waited for an RV to trundle by in the oncoming lane, slowed by the Ski-Doos on a trailer behind it.

  “Uh-oh.” Lonnie’s truck had not only slowed, it had come to a stop beside a green metal mailbox, facing back the way we’d come. And Lonnie had gotten out. All six foot four, two hundred pounds of him. He stood with feet spread wide, leather jacket flapping open, looking like a pillar of muscle in jeans that outlined his quads and with the wind flattening his tee shirt against ridged abs. For a moment, I thought he should abandon the whole football thing and consider trying to make it as a Men’s Health model. He’d have to work on his expression, though; sultry sold more magazines than surly. Or was that fear on his face? Before I could make up my mind, I saw the gun. It was big and silver and he gripped it in his right hand, half hidden behind his thigh.

  “Go, go, go,” I yelled at Althea. “He’s got a gun.” Reaching my left foot over, I pressed down on her foot where it was letting off the accelerator.

  “Wha—?” Althea’s head whipped to the left. I leaned over to grab the wheel as the tires spun and we lurched toward Lonnie. His eyes widened and he stumbled back when it looked like we were going to plow into him. Then, I cu
t the wheel and steered us back into our own lane, losing sight of Lonnie as I concentrated on getting us out of there.

  Half a mile down the road, Althea recovered enough to push me aside and take over the driving. “I cannot believe Loretta Farber lets that boy have a gun,” she said. “I’m going to have to give her a piece of my mind.”

  I doubted Lonnie had consulted his aunt on the gun purchase. “I think we need to have a word with the police,” I said.

  We rode in silence, working our way west on rural roads until we reached I-95 and Althea merged onto the northbound ramp so we could return to St. Elizabeth without having to cross paths with Lonnie Farber again. The sight of Lonnie with a gun had jolted me so badly that riding on the freeway with Althea at the wheel didn’t even faze me now. When the St. Elizabeth exit came into view, Althea said airily, “I don’t think we need to mention any of this to Vi, do you?”

  The thought of my mom’s reaction to our car chase and almost confrontation with a gun-wielding teenager made me shudder. “Absolutely not!”

  Althea dropped me at my apartment, both of us tacitly agreeing that it might be best to avoid Mom until we’d had a chance to calm down a bit. I watched Althea speed away before tottering into my apartment. I put off calling Dillon while I made myself an early dinner—grilled cheese sandwich—and drank a big glass of milk at my dinette. Hoping to distract myself from the image of Lonnie on the roadside holding a gun, I pulled some papers from the Rothmere box and scanned them, careful not to drip cheese on the brittle pages.

  20 October 1831

  Dear Quentin,

  Oh, my love, I wish you were here. I am prey to such fears! I have had conversation with Matilda, the maid who found my father, and I am afraid he did not die of natural causes. Matilda spoke of vomit on the landing. I will tell you all when next I see you, but I am afraid that my brother, so burdened with his debts, may have had a hand in my father’s death. How it pains me to write such words! And I must admit that I have even had doubts about my mother. Mr. Angus Carlisle has been much about the plantation, visiting with my mother and helping her with estate issues, she says. I cannot like the way he looks at her, nor, if I am honest, the way she looks at him. Come soon, my dearest Quentin. I long for you more with each day that passes.

  Your perturbed Clarissa

  I checked the date and saw that this letter preceded the one from Quentin I’d read earlier. I was dying to know what Matilda had told Clarissa that convinced her her father was murdered. For the briefest of seconds, I thought that if Avaline van Tassel really had a link to the spirits, she could get Cyril to tell us what happened. I brushed the foolish thought away as the phone rang. I grabbed it up.

  “Hey, sweetheart, what’s this I hear about you playing lifeguard in the Atlantic in the middle of a hurricane? I couldn’t believe the story when it came across the wire.”

  Marty. I smiled involuntarily. “How did you—” I remembered the reporter. “Just a little morning swim,” I said. “Swimming is excellent exercise, you know.”

  “Hm.” The words “venti” and “cappuccino” filtered through the phone. “I was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. Silence fell. “So, where are you—Timbuktu? Kiev?”

  “Nothing so exotic.” He laughed. “Albuquerque. I’m probably stuck here for the next two or three days, though. My source needs some coaxing. You could evacuate here . . . I can pretty well guarantee the hurricane won’t reach Santa Fe. It’s so brown here I’m convinced they haven’t had rain since Nixon resigned.”

  “I wish I could,” I said wistfully. “But I can’t desert Mom. And this thing with Braden—”

  “How’s that going?” Marty asked. The chink of coins reached me and Marty said, “Thanks,” in a muffled voice, presumably to the barista.

  I filled him in. “It’s not your fault, you know,” he said when I finished.

  His comment surprised me. “What?”

  “You’re trying to ID the killer because you think you were somehow responsible for the kid getting killed. He died in the hospital, Grace, with dozens of medical professionals around. You’re—”

  “If I hadn’t let him get pushed down the stairs, he wouldn’t have been in the hospital,” I said, my voice near tears. No one else had guessed how much I blamed myself for Braden’s death, not even Mom or Vonda. “I should have—”

  “You were one of four adults responsible for—What? Twenty, twenty-two kids spread across a mansion the size of Mount Vernon? And—”

  “It’s not that big. And that’s not the point.”

  “It is,” Marty insisted. I could hear him more clearly and thought he might have moved outside. For a moment I let myself imagine the stark blue of the New Mexico sky, unmuddied by clouds and humidity. “It’s—Oh, damn. There’s the senator. Look, Grace, I’ll call you tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”

  I didn’t know if he heard my “Thank you,” as he hung up. I was truly grateful to him for trying to absolve me, even thought I couldn’t accept the absolution.

  My hand was still on the phone when it rang again. It was Lucy Mortimer, demanding the return of the box of documents so that Avaline van Tassel could use them for her TV project. “She’s in my office right now,” Lucy said, “and has agreed to review the documents right here since I was reluctant to have her keep them in a hotel room. So, if you could bring them by—”

  “I’ll have them there within the hour.” I hung up, scooped up the box, and headed to a copy center on the far side of Bedford Square from Violetta’s. I might have to give up the box, but I wasn’t willing to let go of my “relationship” with Clarissa, so I tamped down the guilty feeling that told me Lucy would have a conniption fit if she knew I was making copies, and told the clerk what I needed. He gave me the fob for a machine and a quick tutorial. There was no way I could copy everything, and the ledgers and old sales receipts held little interest for me, so I fished out anything that looked like a letter and pressed it gently on the platen to copy it. In all, I had only fifteen pages when I finished, including the letters I’d already read. The thin stack seemed a pitiful legacy of the family’s life, and I wondered if other correspondence existed elsewhere.

  Arriving at Rothmere, I was astonished by the number of cars in the parking lot. With Hurricane Horatio off the coast, I’d figured the tourists would be sight-seeing in places where they were less likely to get drenched . . . say, South Dakota. But at least six cars and a couple of minivans sat in the small lot when I pulled up. The reason for the crowd became apparent when I pushed through the oak doors, box under one arm, and nearly tripped over a thick cable snaking through the foyer and up the stairs. A thin man with receding hair and glasses looked up at a burlier man on the landing with a large camera on his shoulder. “I don’t like the angle,” the cameraman complained. “That chandelier spoils the shot.”

  They must be filming The Spirit Whisperer. Avaline wasted no time, I’d give her that. The two men ignored me completely as I stepped over their cables and wound my way back to Lucy’s office. Inside, I found not only Lucy and Avaline, but also Agent John Dillon. He leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, a watchful look on his face. A slanting sunbeam touched his profile and turned his eyes marine blue. My gaze dropped to his firm mouth as Lucy bustled forward and took the box, saying huffily, “Finally!”

  “Thank you, Grace,” Avaline said, sending a gracious smile my way. “I was just telling John here how excited I am to be interviewing Cyril. I expect he’ll have a fascinating story to tell.”

  John? I raised my brows at him. He smiled but kept his eyes on Avaline, who was leaning forward in such a way that he couldn’t avoid the view of her robust cleavage offered by the white blouse unbuttoned to approximately her navel. Okay, only the top two buttons were undone, but they were enough.

  “And I can’t wait to get John on camera. I’m sure he’ll be very photogenic. Just look at his bone structure!”

  We al
l stared at Dillon and I thought he flushed under our scrutiny.

  “You weren’t even here when Braden fell,” I said, sounding more accusatory than I wanted.

  “I’m not doing an interview,” Dillon said, and I felt a rush of relief. I remembered his hostility toward the press from an earlier case and thought Avaline van Tassel might not find it so easy to get him on camera.

  “I’m trying to persuade him to give us background on the investigation,” Avaline said. “The fact that the police can’t pinpoint a suspect makes it that much more likely that Cyril pushed Braden.”

  “So you think Cyril dressed up like a werewolf and smothered Braden at the hospital when pushing him off the landing didn’t do the trick?”

  Avaline was unperturbed by the hint of skepticism in my tone. “Spirits have been known to travel some distance from where they died, especially when the emotional impetus is significant enough. I interviewed a spirit—a woman—in Montana who journeyed more than a hundred miles in 1912 to be with her daughter who had gotten trapped in a well. And perhaps the nurse, startled by Cyril’s presence, was . . . less than accurate in her description of what she saw in that hospital room. I’m interviewing her, too.”

  Dillon pushed off the desk he was leaning against and said, “Look, I’ve got a couple of questions for Dr. Mortimer so if you could excuse us . . .”

  His firm tone dislodged even the smug Avaline from her perch on Lucy’s desk. Lucy looked startled and a bit nervous but said, “Of course, Agent Dillon. Not that I saw what happened, but I’ll be happy to answer your questions.” Her hands fluttered to the cameo at her throat and she blinked rapidly.

  Dillon’s gaze settled on me, and he said, “If you could wait until I’m done here, Miss Terhune, I’ve got a couple of questions for you, too.”

  I couldn’t tell from his tone if he’d heard about Althea’s and my car chase so I said, “Sure,” as casually as I could and followed Avaline into the hall. A short man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and highlighted hair gelled into short points hurried up to her. A Vandyke beard quivered as he talked. “Ava, darling, what do you think about doing the show live?”