“I don’t know what to think.” Except maybe I should take a closer look at Phreddie. But now I understood her haunted expression when she stared into the bank of flowers after the murder. She thought she’d seen the man with whom . . . if my guess was correct . . . she could still be in love. Was this why she was trying so hard to come up with suspects for Detective Molino—someone other than Mike?
“Maybe you should just add Mike’s name to the list of suspects for Detective Molino, and let him handle it,” I suggested.
“I think I owe it to Mike to talk to him first. Maybe he has some explanation about being there. Will you come with me, Andi?” she repeated.
“I don’t see why—” And then another thought occurred to me. “Are you afraid of him?”
“No, of course not!”
“Maybe you should be. If he did kill Michelle and realizes you saw him there, maybe he figures you’re a danger to him. Maybe he has in mind getting rid of you too.”
“Mike isn’t like that!”
“But you think he could have murdered Michelle.”
That was enough to make her throat move in a convulsive swallow. “I have to talk to him.” She grabbed the scratch pad with the scribbled numbers and reached for the phone.
I figured she’d set up the meeting for tomorrow. Bright daylight, public place. But she no more than put the phone down than she was slipping into shoes.
“Hey, what’re you doing?”
She peered at herself in the mirror and flicked a comb through her hair. She didn’t look as beautiful as she had after the $500 hair-and-makeup job, but she looked more alive than I’d ever seen her. “I’m going to meet Mike.”
I glanced at the Mickey Mouse clock on the wall. “You can’t go now. It’s after ten o’clock.”
In answer she grabbed a jacket from the back of a chair.
I put a hand on her arm. “Pam, I don’t think this is a good idea.” In fact, I thought it was a really lousy idea, right up there with meeting your friendly neighborhood terrorist in a dark alley. “Even if you don’t think Mike could be dangerous, you don’t know. Maybe he’s changed, different from when you knew him. You never have told me why you broke up.”
She hesitated. The jacket dropped back to the chair. “Actually, considering what he did, I’m not sure I knew him all that well even back then.” The alive glow dimmed as her flash of eagerness faded. As common sense took over, I hoped.
“Call him back and tell him you’d rather just talk over the phone,” I urged.
“No, I want to see him face to face.” She picked up the jacket again and grabbed her car keys from a hook by the door. At this point she seemed to have forgotten all about wanting me to come along.
Well, too bad, young lady, I thought as I shouldered ahead of her at the door.
Because I’m coming.
Chapter Fourteen
One thing about this, I thought as I raced to catch up with Pam after detouring through my room to grab a denim jacket, in that egg-yolk bug, wherever we were going we wouldn’t be inconspicuous.
Which brought up the next point as the electronically-controlled gate opened to let us out. “Where are we going?”
“The marina.”
“The marina?”
I’ve been to the marina numerous times when the Miss Nora is docked, and it’s a lovely place, especially on a moonlit night like tonight. Gently lapping water, friendly sounds of boats creaking and rubbing, people on deck companionably enjoying the evening, scent of steak on a barbecue grill.
But the dock would probably be deserted at this late hour, and all this Mike person had to do to get rid of whatever danger Pam posed to him was knock her in the head, shove her off into deep water, and make sure she didn’t climb out.
Except that now I’d be there too. Would I be protection . . . or just another splash?
“Why the marina?” I repeated.
“Mike and I used to go there and watch the boats and sit and talk.”
Okay, point in Mike’s favor. I couldn’t imagine Sterling ever doing something at that waste-of-time level. But a lone point in Mike’s favor wasn’t enough to cancel my suspicion this could be a dangerous trap. Was he shrewdly playing a sweet-nostalgia card to entice Pam to that particular spot?
“Look, before we get to the marina, at least fill me in on some background. Mike who, by the way?”
“Mike Andreson. We met a couple years ago when I was here for the summer. He’d attended the University of Washington for a year and a half, but his dad had a heart attack and he dropped out to keep his dad’s business from going under. He thought it would be temporary, but I don’t think his father was ever able to go back to work.”
“What kind of business?”
“Landscaping and yard care. I met him when he came to the house to do some mowing and pruning.” She smiled reminiscently, and for a moment that glow surfaced again. “I crashed my skateboard, and he picked me up as if I were some petite princess instead of a chunky geek. It took me about five minutes to fall in love. It lasted over a year, although I was away at school most of the time.”
I didn’t say anything, but I could imagine what Michelle thought of her stepdaughter taking up with hired yard help. No wonder she’d pushed Sterling Forsythe. Dr. Sterling Forsythe, actually.
Yet there was certainly something admirable about Mike Andreson sacrificing his own education to keep the business going for his father. Also something rather white-knightish about rescuing a skateboard-dumped damsel. Which, for no particular reason, reminded me of that urge I’d long had to try skateboarding. “So what caused the breakup?”
“I’d just gone back to school last year when Mike’s sister called me. She said—” Pam broke off and clutched the steering wheel as if it were trying to escape.
We were going by the site of the new fitness center now, the lightning bolt across the emblem of the world garishly lit. I fleetingly wondered how Michelle’s murder would affect the planned grand opening.
“She said Mike had been seeing another girl all the time he was going with me, and now she was pregnant. So they were getting married.”
Gaping hole in the white-knight armor.
“Did you talk to Mike about this?”
“Kathleen said Mike asked her to call because he didn’t want to talk to me. So I didn’t try to talk to him either. There really wasn’t anything to say. I didn’t feel like congratulating him on his upcoming nuptials.”
“What about this summer? Did you ever check up on him?”
“No. I was concentrating on marrying Sterling.” She hesitated, then, sounding guilty, added, “I did look in the Yellow Pages once. The business is called Andreson and Son Landscaping and Maintenance now. I guess Mike is into it permanently.”
Not surprising, with a wife and baby to support.
We were zipping through town now, varying between kissing the speed limit and crawling, as if the speed of the vehicle echoed Pam’s mixed feelings about this meeting. Going past the CyberClam Café, where Fitz and I occasionally surfed the Internet, we were down to snail-with-arthritis mode. I fervently wished Fitz and the Miss Nora were in port.
“You’ve never heard anything about Mike and the wife, then?”
“Vigland is a small town, but there are still separate worlds here. Offhand, I don’t even know anyone who knows him.”
“Maybe you should have inquired into his marital status before rushing into this meeting.”
“I don’t think it’s the kind of meeting that has anything to do with marital status.”
“No? What kind of meeting it is, then?”
“I think it must have to do with his being at the wedding. Because I did see him. I wasn’t imagining it. And he knows I saw him. I’m thinking he may ask me not to tell the police he was there. He sounded . . . edgy.”
My thought was that he might intend to take it beyond a request and make sure she couldn’t tell anything. In which case he had definite reason to be edgy.
Though I doubted he could be any more edgy than I was. I felt as if my nerves could cut a laser swath through solid steel.
“Pam, I really think we should back out on this and let Detective Molino handle it.” A sensible statement which Detective Molino would heartily approve, I’m sure.
“I’ll let you out at the corner. You can wait in Bay Burgers, and I’ll pick you up afterward.”
So much for sensibility pitted against a nineteen-year-old’s reckless stubbornness. “If there is an afterward,” I muttered ominously.
She reached over and patted my leg. “If there isn’t, you can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
Like being right would be much comfort when we’re both gurgling to the bottom of the bay, because no way was I letting her go into this alone.
A tardy thought occurred to me. “We should have brought a tape recorder so we could have a record of whatever he says.”
I expected Pam to scoff at such an amateur-detective ploy, but instead, after thinking for a minute, she said, “How about if, just before we meet him, I call Michelle’s private number on my cell phone. I’ll leave the phone on, and the machine at home will record the conversation.”
“This is something you learned at Dartmouth?”
“No, I read it in a murder mystery,” she admitted. “One in which the murder weapon was a frozen pineapple.”
My first thought was that freezing pineapple ruins it, but that probably isn’t relevant when you’re using it as a murder weapon. “But won’t the answering machine cut off after a minute or two and lose most of the conversation?”
“Michelle was paranoid about that. Someone once left her a message about a movie part, but it was cut off before the person left a number and he never called back. So she got a machine that just keeps recording until the person stops talking.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to stake my life on the intricacies of Michelle’s answering machine and the thought processes of a murder-by-pineapple mystery writer. The phone might not pick up enough of the conversation to be helpful. And even if it did, we could be dead before anyone heard it. But I supposed it was marginally better than nothing.
“Let’s do it with my phone. Mike will be paying attention to you, not me, and maybe I can sneak the cell phone in closer so it will pick up more.”
She gave me the number to Michelle’s private line, and I punched it in so all I’d have to do at the marina was hit the call button. I tucked the phone in the shirt pocket of my jacket, the best place I could think to pick up a conversation.
Then I repeated my earlier, unanswered question. I had big suspicions of Mike Andreson, but I didn’t have a why for them. “So what reason could Mike have for killing Michelle?”
“She never liked him. Although she could never see beyond his doing yard work to know what he was really like, of course. I was still going with him when she invited Sterling and his folks up to visit. She was trying to get Sterling and me together then, though I didn’t realize it until after Mike and I broke up.”
“But it wasn’t anything Michelle said or did that broke you up. You didn’t end the relationship with Mike in order to jump to Sterling. Mike ended it himself. So why kill Michelle?”
“Yeah,” Pam agreed, but it was a tentative kind of agreement. As if it were something with which logic required her to agree, but she wasn’t sold on it.
“So why do you think he could have killed her?” I persisted as she braked for a red light.
“I can’t think of any reason. But he was right back there where all the fog and stink came from. Why would he have been there—and then vanished—unless it was connected with Michelle’s murder?”
True. These were not the actions of an innocent man.
Pam pulled into the parking lot at the marina. About a dozen cars were parked at the far end, which was where people who lived on their boats, or who had gone out on the water for a few days, usually parked. I spotted Fitz’s car and his son’s SUV.
A motorcycle stood off by itself. It was newer looking, but not a high-powered biker-type model. A blue-and-white helmet hung on the handlebars. My daughter, Sarah, had briefly dated a motorcycle guy back in high school. Perhaps I was prejudiced, but after he squirreled through my big daisy flower bed, I acquired a dim view of motorcycle boyfriends.
“Mike’s?” I asked with a nod at the bike.
“I don’t know. He drove an old pickup when I knew him.”
As I’d warned her, maybe he’d changed. Or as she’d acknowledged to me, maybe she’d never really known him.
We got out of the Bug and walked down the steep steps to the dock. A night breeze jingled the lines of the sailboats. Water lapped against the wooden dock, and boats squeaked and creaked and scraped. A seal that had slipped up to spend the night on the dock grunted. The moon danced a silvery trail across the water, and snow-covered Mt. Rainier shimmered softly in the distance.
All very serene and lovely, but the whole place felt different from when I was meeting Fitz here, when the Miss Nora’s lights blazed and good scents came from something he was cooking in the galley.
Now I was more conscious of the depth and faintly murky scent of the dark water on either side of the dock, an oily iridescence in spots on the water, and lumpy shadows lurking around the boats. Plus the memory of some creepy TV movie I’d seen in which a hand rose out of the water and gripped an unsuspecting ankle. I carefully walked a straight line down the middle of the dock, primly keeping my ankles so close together that my socks swished. Would anyone even hear a couple of stray splashes if Mike dumped us?
A guy appeared out of the shadow of a boat and walked toward us.
I don’t know what we could have brought as a weapon, but I suddenly wished we had something. The Baby Ruth in my pocket felt a little short on firepower.
Chapter Fifteen
“Mike?” I whispered to Pam.
She nodded, her expression wary, and I punched the call button on the phone. I heard the machine pick up and shivered at the tinny sound of Michelle’s voice on the answering machine. A voice from the dead. Were we about to meet her killer?
He was alone, although I hadn’t really expected him to show up with a baby stroller in tow. Medium-height, with a husky build and dark hair. An angular face, not hunk-handsome but definitely no need for a paper bag over his head. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of a worn leather jacket, and his heavy motorcycle boots clomped on the wooden dock. At least he wasn’t trying to sneak up on us.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I was afraid you’d change your mind.”
I thought both he and Pam might be so caught up in seeing each other again that they’d forget my presence, but Pam had a firmer grip on the situation than that. She grabbed my arm.
“I’d like you to meet my friend, Andi McConnell,” Pam said, her voice a little louder than normal. “Andi, Mike Andreson.”
Mike looked at me uncertainly, as if wondering what I was doing here. But I realized what was going on. Pam was getting our identification down on the answering machine back at the house.
Also speaking a bit louder than normal, I said, “Thank you, Pam,” coming down heavy on the name to add to the identification. I whipped out a business card and handed it to Mike. “Andi’s Limouzeen Service. Available for all occasions.” I made my professional dip. “Your chariot awaits.”
Mike looked at the card, then at Pam. “You came in a limousine?” He sounded dumbfounded.
“No. We’re in my Bug. I asked Andi to come along. She’s been staying at the house to provide limo service for the guests.”
“The wedding guests.”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” He looked at the card again, as if he couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I doubted Mike Andreson would become a regular client, but he finally stuffed the card into a hip pocket.
“There’s still a bench out that way.” He pointed to the far end of the dock, out where the Miss Nora always tied up. Also, I was uncomfortably awa
re, where the water around the dock was deepest. I didn’t know about Pam’s swimming ability, but mine rivals that of a stale bagel.
Pam briskly led the way. At the bench, she maneuvered so I was sitting between her and Mike. I couldn’t exactly stick my chest up in Mike’s face, but I wiggled my shoulders trying to get the cell phone into a more prominent position.
“You said you had to talk to me, so here I am,” Pam said. No alive glow now, just stiff challenge. The moonlight emphasized the hard set of her expression. “Talk.”
“I hardly know where to start.”
My tart thought was that he might tell us how the wife and baby were doing, but Pam chose to skip the sarcasm so I remained silent too.
“My sister called you at school and told you I’d gotten a girlfriend pregnant, and we were getting married.”
“Sorry if I didn’t send a proper wedding or baby gift. I guess it just slipped my mind.”
Ooooh, an avalanche of sarcasm there.
“What Kathleen told me was that you called her and told her you’d met someone, and you asked her to tell me that you were sorry, but it would never work out between us. What with my being a yard-care worker and all. And please not to contact you because it would just cause problems.”
Pam’s mouth dropped open. “But that’s not true! I never, never said anything like that! I never thought anything like that. I never even talked to Kathleen except the one time she called me.”
Mike leaned forward, his voice low and intense. “And I never had another girlfriend, and I never got anyone pregnant, and I never wanted to marry anyone but you.”
His statement hung in the air like a suspended hammer.
“But your sister—?” I finally cut in doubtfully.
“Yes, my dear sister. Who heard through some friend that Michelle was throwing a fancy wedding for her stepdaughter there at the house, and mentioned it to me. And then, when she saw how hard it hit me, had an attack of conscience . . . a very tardy attack . . . and told me the truth.”
Here Comes the Ride Page 13