by Quinn, Lucy
“Oh, jeez,” I laughed. “The water bill.”
He chuckled. “Tell me about it. I was on the board of the Gnostic Yacht Club before it closed down, where people hosed down their multimillion-dollar yachts every time they got some saltwater on them. I swear by all that’s holy, they tried to fill up the ocean so their ships would float higher. But the water bill there was one-tenth of what we use here. When it’s raining and yet Bhagwan Das has the sprinklers spraying the greens in the rain, I want to punch a wall.”
I laughed. “Okay, let’s go find Ruddy.”
We all grabbed our jackets from the mudroom and headed out the back doors, past the patio, and down the fairway of the eighteenth.
Trudi’s usual, enormous purse swung from her shoulder. Ann bobbled along in her pumps, walking on her toes to avoid stabbing her high heels into the fairway.
As soon as we stepped off the patio, the wind picked up and blew my hair around my face. The glowing stripes that had lined the fairways and lit up the holes had faded to barely visible smears in the starry night.
We pulled out our cell phones and switched on the flashlight apps. Four beams of light sliced through the light fog and painted white circles on the black fairway and thick trees lining the sides of the golf course.
“Ruddy!” I called as we walked.
Ann, beside me, did the same, as did Erick beyond her.
The night was quiet as we walked, our shoes squelching on the tightly mown grass and thick loam underneath.
I groused, “Dew is soaking right through my shoes. I can’t believe I am ruining a pair of loafers just to go find Ruddy because he stomped off.”
Beyond Ann, Erick nodded. “I’m glad I changed into my golf shoes to walk out here. This grass is so wet that it’s spongy.”
On my other side, Trudi muttered, “Bhagwan Das probably watered it as soon the glow-ball tournament finished because our water bill isn’t quite exorbitant enough this month.”
Ann grumbled about her shoes, too, but kept up with the rest of us.
Light from our dancing flashlight beams cast our faces in gray, and while we were near the clubhouse, some of the light and music from the party spilled through the windows and cast a ghostly aura over the eighteenth fairway.
As we trudged farther into the golf course, the light from the clubhouse faded away, leaving only the occasional flash from our cell phone beams to see each other.
“Ruddy?” I called out as we walked the wrong way down the eighteenth fairway, from the green to the tee box. “Hey, Ruddy! Where are you? We need you to write a check!”
I looked past Ann, watching Erick as he shined the flashlight randomly all over the course around us, at the bushes, the tops of the trees, and sometimes the sky. “I don’t know where Ruddy could have gotten himself to.”
To my left, Trudi’s flashlight beam wiggled in the night. “Ruddy! Come on! Quit sulking and get back here!”
Trudi could be direct to a fault, but the world needed people like her. Right now, we needed Ruddy to get back to the clubhouse and do his job as a financial officer of the Ways and Means committee.
Or else we needed to get someone else to do it.
Walking on a pitch-black golf course in the middle of the night seemed like a great place to broach the delicate subject of restructuring the financial permissions of the club, so I said, “You know what, guys? We need to add more people who can write checks for the club. Jacob told me that Ruddy has not been paying vendors on time, and these vendors are our friends and neighbors here in Canterbury. We are not talking about doing business with big corporations. We are talking about Jacob Hibbert, our neighbor and friend who owns the local package store, and our club owes him three months’ worth of bills. It pains me to say it because I don’t like to criticize, but maybe this just isn’t Ruddy’s wheelhouse.”
Erick said, “I’ve heard he does it in his own finances, too. He likes having the money in his accounts, no matter if he owes it to someone or not.”
“These businesses might be charging us late fees, and we can’t afford an extra ten percent or whatever just because Ruddy isn’t paying the bills every month. Maybe we should have Ruddy doing other, less time-sensitive things for the club, and maybe somebody else should take over paying the bills.”
Erick nodded. “Frank was just telling me the other day that the club hadn’t paid the purchase orders for the grass seed from the home improvement store.”
“Would Ruddy write the checks to them, too?”
“Yep. Any incidental or variable charge that would come out of the daily operating budget is his responsibility.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “When Jacob told me that he hadn’t been paid, I checked our accounts. The daily operating account has plenty of money. You guys know that we have a long-term financial problem, right?”
Ann nodded. “I’ve heard about the dues situation, but anyone could figure out that there is a problem when sixty-odd people are suddenly gone. Even Cintia joined up at Greens of Grass, and she hates riding in carts. You have to take a cart up there at Greens of Grass. I don’t know why she would join up there.”
To my other side, Trudi piped up, “Because with the discount they’re offering, it’s so much cheaper than Canterbury. I thought about joining up there for two years and then coming back.”
“Oh, I hope you wouldn’t do that.” Losing Trudi as a golf partner would have been terrible. If she had quit the club and joined at Greens of Grass, I might have had to do the same.
That chain reaction was probably why we’d lost sixty memberships so fast.
“Eh,” Trudi said. “Seemed like too much work to switch, but I would have taken you with me. I’m not joining some weird new club without you.”
I bumped her with my shoulder, a quick buddy-hug while we were out on the golf course in the dark.
“Jeez.” Ann swung her flashlight beam over the eighteenth tee box, the white light picking out the low bumps of the black, white, and red tee markers. “How far do you think Ruddy walked?”
Erick said, “If he was trying to walk off his temper tantrum, it could have been quite a way.”
I swung the beam from my phone across the space between the golf holes, looking for a man’s dark shape among the trees. The shadows bent as I moved the flashlight. As far as I could see in the beam of my cell phone, the area was empty. “I don’t know. Which way should we go?”
“I have no idea,” Ann said, shaking her head. “Ruddy! Where are you?”
Erick flashed his light over the trees. “Let’s just walk the course. At least we can say that we were methodical if we can’t find him. Are any of the other financial officers here?”
“Not that I saw,” Ann said.
Trudi strode out in the lead. “Right. Off to the seventeenth, then.”
I said to Erick, leaning behind Ann to talk to him, “But, back to the problem of writing checks in the first place.”
Erick shook his head. “Who would we nominate? We can’t have too many people writing checks. It’s not secure.”
Ann shook her head, her hair swishing around her shoulders. “I think we should keep approval power and check-writing power separate, like it is now. It’s kind of a check and balance, so to speak.” She chuckled at her joke.
My flashlight beam swung through the dark, and the tiny reflectors set into the flagpole of the seventeenth hole sparkled in the night.
A long, dark hump lay on the green near the flagpole.
Trudi asked, “What’s that?”
Ann asked, “Where?”
Erick squinted, which I could see in the glow from his cell phone screen. “Uh-oh. Is that—”
We started running.
Ann stumbled in her heels, and I caught her elbow as we ran.
Beside me, Trudi asked, “Is it him? Did he have a heart attack or something? Oh, we should have gone and looked for him sooner.”
When we reached Ruddy, our hearts already p
ounding because we were golfers, not marathon runners, we aimed our cell phone beams at him. His head was turned where he lay on the ground, so we could see his face. His eyes were open, and his mouth gaped.
A gleaming knife, its blade slicked with something dark, lay on the ground beside him.
A long, black stain spread over the velvet grass.
Oh, no.
“Ruddy, are you all right?” I stepped forward, wanting to touch him to comfort him or something, but I didn’t want to hurt him further if he were wounded. Jostling him might make him bleed more. I held my hands, fingers splayed, and felt suspended in the air.
Ann gasped, “What happened?”
Trudi scowled at Ann. “I think it’s pretty obvious.”
I asked, “Did he hurt himself? Was he that distraught over the argument with Oliver?”
Trudi pushed my hands down and shone her phone’s light over Ruddy. “It doesn’t look like the blood is coming from his wrists, as would be common if he had tried to commit suicide. There’s blood on his shirt, near his heart.”
I saw the vermillion patch on his shirt, the only spot of color in the black and gray night. “Is he dead?”
Erick walked around the green, only glancing at Ruddy with his peripheral vision before bending to peer at the knife. “It’s just a steak knife. How could a steak knife kill anyone?”
Erick extended his hand toward the knife, reaching like he might pick it up.
He did it so fast that his fingers were around the metal, his knuckles touching the ground, when Trudi yelled at him, “Don’t touch the murder weapon!”
Erick jumped back, his hands open in front of his chest. “Jeez, I didn’t think.”
I said, “Maybe he’s just hurt. Maybe he’s not dead.”
Ann said, “I’ll call 911.” Her cell phone flashlight was already off, and she was thumbing something on her phone. “Hello? There’s been an accident or something. Ruddy Agani is lying on the seventeenth green at Canterbury Golf Club, and he’s not moving.” She covered the microphone of the phone with her other hand. “They’re asking if he’s alive.”
Trudi glared at Ann. “He didn’t sit up and say hi.”
“We don’t know,” Ann told the dispatcher. She looked back up. “The ambulance is on the way. They’re asking us to check and see if we can find a pulse or if he’s breathing.”
I craned my neck, bending and peering at Ruddy’s open, unblinking, eerily still eyes.
Erick stepped backward, wincing.
“I can try to check.” Ann kneeled beside him and hesitantly reached out to touch his arm. She wedged her phone between her ear and her shoulder and, wincing, pressed her fingers against his wrist. She frowned and grabbed his wrist more firmly, even rolling his arm as she tried, but she shook her head. “I don’t feel anything.”
Trudi sighed and walked closer to him. “Everyone expects the former scientist not to be squeamish about anything.”
My BFF Trudi was small but made out of steel.
“You are a biologist,” I commented, not meaning anything by it.
She crouched beside him and craned her head, inspecting him. She plucked blue, non-latex gloves out of her purse and stretched them over her hands. “I was a cell-biology neuroscience professor. I grew cells in flasks and streaked germs on gelatin, for the most part. I didn’t dissect anything after undergrad. When a donor came in, one of the pathologists took care of them and passed the tissue samples on to me.”
“But you’ll do it?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’ll do it.” Trudi kneeled beside him, careful to avoid the darkened grass, and gingerly touched Ruddy’s neck, feeling for a pulse, and then his chest. She frowned. “I don’t feel a pulse. I don’t think he’s breathing, either.”
Ann relayed the information and tapped her phone off. “They said they’re on their way.”
Trudi said, “I could dust that knife for fingerprints.”
“You are not going to touch the murder weapon,” I told her, horribly reconciling myself to the idea of murder and that Ruddy was gone. “I won’t let you.”
She bobbled her head. “Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea, anyway.”
The night seemed darker around us, like it could have hidden anyone or even a lot of people. I aimed my flashlight beam around the green at the trees and fairways, and I stepped closer to Trudi. “Do you think they’re still around?”
Ann walked over to us, avoiding the stain and the knife. “That’s scary.”
Erick stood closer, too, and we waited until the police and paramedics arrived.
Lale Kollen, the reporter from the Canterbury Tales, rode out in the golf carts with them, practically giddy with excitement at her scoop.
The flash from Lale’s camera lit the trees and fairways like lightning striking the clubhouse.
Chapter 5
THE next morning, Saturday, Canterbury Golf Club was closed while the police investigated the crime scene on the seventeenth green.
Four police cruisers and one more car were the only ones in the empty parking lot when I pulled in, which was so odd for a weekend morning.
That week’s Ladies’ League needed overseeing, and scores needed to be tabulated and prizes assigned from the previous week, so I ended up working in my little office at Canterbury Golf Club while two Canterbury police officers and another man walked down the eighteenth fairway toward the scene of the murder.
Some people might have said that I shouldn’t have been there because I was a witness to the murder after the fact, or at least because I found Ruddy’s deceased body. However, when things needed doing, I didn’t slack off just because the evening had been a little rough. Teachers know there are always papers to grade.
Even when I had been teaching kindergarten, there were always papers scrawled in toddlerish crayon handwriting to be corrected and have a star pasted on them.
Adding up all the scores from the scrawled handwriting on the score sheets and distributing stars and stickers in the form of pro shop credit was oddly similar to grading kindergarten papers.
Trudi had won low-net on Wednesday’s match, which meant she got twenty dollars in pro shop credit for the week. I double-checked her score, just because I didn’t want anybody to think I was cheating and giving the prize to my friend, but Trudi had won it. She had improved so much at golf over the past year.
I was blathering in my own head, trying to forget about seeing Ruddy’s body lying on the seventeenth green.
Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I pushed myself away from my desk to see if the police had found any additional evidence on the golf course.
Two officers were walking down the eighteenth as I strode up the fairway, and they nodded to me as we passed.
The morning was sunny and bright, though the stiff New England spring breeze still tugged at my clothes as I walked. As I marched up the eighteenth fairway onto the golf course, three figures stood in the bright sun near the seventeenth green. I recognized all three of them because Canterbury is a small town.
The tall man standing on the left was Constable Sherwood Kane. In Canterbury, as in many New England towns, Town Constable was an elected position, not a professional position like the police chief. The town constable was often called out for investigations such as this. He represented the town’s interests as well as justice, and as with most people, he was a friend of mine. “Hello, Sherwood.”
He nodded at me and smiled, showing white teeth. “Good morning, Bee.”
On the green, a dark stain still marred the grass that was shaved close to the ground. It seemed like an astonishing amount to come out of a wound caused by a mere steak knife.
The other two people standing on the green were two police officers from the Canterbury Police Department, meaning that ten percent of the town’s police force was standing on the green at Canterbury Golf Club. The other eighteen officers must be hiding in the bushes somewhere, waiting to give traffic tickets to tourists for not coming to full
and complete stops at intersections.
I nodded to the two officers, too. “Hello, Sandy and Gregor.”
They both grinned and said in unison, “Hello, Mrs. Bee.”
Yes, I had taught them both in kindergarten, and now they were police officers because children grow up too fast.
The body of Ruddy Agani had been taken to the local hospital sometime during the night, probably while the police had been taking statements from Trudi, Ann, Erick, and me. We’d talked to the police for about an hour, racking our brains and trying to find any information that would help them. I didn’t think I’d been successful at that.
Everybody knew that Ruddy had argued with Oliver earlier.
Several people had heard me offer him my office and seen him head in that direction.
Sherwood asked, “How are you today, Bee? Are you okay?”
“I’m doing okay, Sherwood. Thank you for asking.”
Sherwood was a nice guy, tall and strong and ruggedly handsome. He was a year or two older than myself, so he certainly hadn’t been one of my kindergarten students. Trudi had been after me to say yes when he asked me out for coffee one of these days, but I was still talking to my dead husband when no one was looking. I wasn’t ready for coffee dates, even with a nice guy like Sherwood. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready.
“Would you mind if we asked you a few questions, Mrs. Bee?” Sandy asked.
It made complete sense to me that Sandy had grown up to be a police officer. She’d always been sweet and helpful in kindergarten, but she made sure that no one threw sand in the sandbox and had found it very important to make sure that all of our lines were straight when we’d walked to the music room or library. “Sure, Officer Sandy.”
Okay, that was weird. It was always weird to treat one of my former students like an adult after I had taught them to write their names and tied their soggy shoelaces.