If It's Not One Thing, It's a Murder

by Liz Wolfe

“That must be the police.” She hurried back inside.

  Edward patted my hand. “Bobbi Jo is making too big a deal of this. I’m sure we’ll get it all cleared up now that the police are here.” Before I could ask another question, Bobbi Jo returned with two men following her.

  “Edward, this is Detective Madison and Detective Spiner,” Bobbi Jo said.

  Edward rose and shook hands with both of them, introduced them to Sean and me, and offered them coffee, which they both refused.

  “We have a few questions we’d like to ask,” Detective Spiner said. “Your car was broken into the night before last, Mr. Melrose?” Edward nodded and the detective continued. “The police report lists a laptop as the only item missing from the car.”

  “That would be my fault,” Sean said.

  “Your fault?” Detective Madison asked.

  “Yes, I had just picked up the gun from the repair shop earlier that day. I left the gun in the car and forgot to tell Mr. Melrose that it was there.”

  “I see.” Spiner made a note. “And you have a receipt from the repair shop?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where were you between nine and eleven last night?” Spiner asked. Edward, Bobbi Jo and Sean all started talking at the same time. Spiner held his hand up. “One at a time, please.”

  “I was at the office,” Sean offered.

  “My wife and I were at home all evening,” Edward said. “I had two phone calls from people who can confirm that.”

  “Any phone calls that would confirm your presence, Mrs. Melrose?”

  “No. Not that I can remember.”

  “Detective, I just told you that my wife was with me all evening.” Edward’s voice was soft but his eyes flared with anger.

  “Yes, sir,” Detective Madison said and frowned at his partner. “Detective Spiner was asking because of the personal connection your wife had to the victim.”

  “Personal connection?” Bobbi Jo asked. “How?”

  “The victim was Natalie Turner.” When Bobbi Jo still looked blank, Madison continued. “She was the girlfriend of David Pearson.”

  “Oh, my gawd, that’s terrible!” Bobbi Jo turned to Edward. “David is my personal trainer.”

  “I remember, dear.” Edward took Bobbi Jo’s hand and held it. “Detective, I see your concern here since the victim was vaguely connected to my wife and because my wife’s gun was the murder weapon, but I can assure you it’s nothing more than a sad coincidence.”

  “David Pearson is a frequent visitor here, isn’t he?” Spiner asked.

  “Yes, David comes over two or three mornings a week.”

  “Usually when your husband is at the office?” Spiner smirked and shook his head.

  Edward stood up. “Are you implying something, Detective?”

  Spiner shrugged. “Just asking questions.”

  “I think we’re done here,” Detective Madison said. “I’m sorry we interrupted your day. Thank you for your time.”

  “I’ll show you out.” Sean stood and led the detectives back through the house.

  “That son of a bitch!” Bobbi Jo stood up and Edward put his arm around her shoulder.

  “Pay him no mind, dear.”

  “He insinuated there was something going on between me and David.”

  “He was just fishing for something,” Edward said.

  “I need to call David. I want to know how he’s doing.” Bobbi Jo walked inside to make her phone call.

  “Skye, thank you so much for coming over. I need to get back to the office and I’d appreciate it if you’d stay here with Bobbi Jo for a while.”

  “Of course, Edward.”

  When Edward and Sean left, I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of iced tea. I’d just sat down on the patio when Bobbi Jo came out.

  “He’s just torn up about it. Said he wasn’t going to be able to work for a while.”

  “Poor guy. Did you ever meet his girlfriend?”

  “No. He talked about her sometimes. Sounded like they were really in love.” Bobbi Jo sat down and rested her elbows on the table. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  I just stared at her.

  “Oooooh. What happened last night?”

  The doorbell chimed again, preventing me from answering. Bobbi Jo jumped up. “If those detectives are back again, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind about their damn questions.” She went inside and came back a minute later with our friend Lily in tow.

  “I thought you were going to rip my head off when you answered the door,” Lily said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just in a snit about those detectives.”

  Our friend Lily was the poster child for the earth-mother-goddess thing. Her clothing tastes ran to loose gauze pants and full skirts topped with a brightly patterned dashiki; her dark blonde hair was usually woven into a braid that hung almost to her waist. But the most striking thing about Lily was her self-confidence. You could tell that Lily was perfectly happy with herself, but without a trace of arrogance. I wondered if I would attain that level of self-confidence by the time I reached fifty. I certainly hoped so.

  “What detectives?” Lily asked, wrapping me in a warm, cinnamon-scented hug.

  Bobbi Jo and I told Lily about the murder and her connection via the gun and her association with David.

  “Dear Goddess, that’s terrible,” Lily said.

  “I don’t even want to think about it anymore. Edward told me if they come back that I shouldn’t talk to them without our lawyer.”

  “That’s good advice,” Lily said. “I hope you plan to take it.”

  “Are you suggesting I’d do otherwise?” Bobbi Jo asked.

  “Well, you’ve been known to fly off the handle.”

  “I have not!”

  “Not to mention your harebrained ideas,” Lily added.

  “Yeah, not to mention those,” I said, thinking about my previous evening.

  “What?” Bobbi Jo asked. “Oh, Skye! Last night! What happened?

  “Something happened last night? Besides the murder?” Lily asked.

  “It’s nothing, Lily.” I wasn’t really keen on sharing my disastrous attempt at seduction with Lily even if she was one of my best friends.

  “You mean it didn’t work?” Bobbi Jo asked, her eyes clouded with concern for me.

  “What didn’t work?” Lily was beginning to sound a little exasperated.

  I gave up. I’d never kept anything from Lily and I knew I’d end up telling her the whole story eventually.

  “Craig is a cross-dresser.” I told Lily about the lingerie and his confession and my attempt to be a supportive wife.

  Lily nodded. Nothing ever flustered that woman. “And how did that work out?”

  “It didn’t. Nothing happened.”

  Bobbi Jo frowned. “What? What do you mean nothing happened? Craig didn’t like the panties?”

  “He didn’t like anything. The panties. The fact that I’d bought them. The French maid outfit. Nothing.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense. From my experience with a cross-dresser, he should have been ecstatic.”

  “Your experience?” Lily asked.

  “Bobbi Jo was holding out on us,” I said. “Seems her first husband was a cross-dresser and they had incredibly hot sex when he wore panties.”

  “Oh. And you were thinking the same thing would happen with Craig?”

  “That was the plan. But it failed. Or I failed.”

  “I don’t understand it. He can’t be a cross-dresser,” Bobbi Jo said.

  “But he said the lingerie was his,” Lily said.

  “Obviously it wasn’t. I should have known because it wasn’t nearly big enough for him.”

  “So, you think there’s another woman?” Lily asked.

  “I don’t know what to think. But he won’t talk about it. He just keeps telling me that there is no other woman and for me to trust him. Although after last night I’m not sure he’s talking to me at al
l.”

  “Well, how are you supposed to trust him when he won’t tell you anything?” Bobbi Jo asked. “What are you going to do now?”

  “What can I do?”

  “You can find out what’s up with him, that’s what. Obviously there’s something that he’s not telling you and you have no choice but to find out what it is.”

  “I have to agree with her,” Lily agreed. “After all, it’s affecting you and your marriage.”

  “I’m not going to spy on him,” I said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Lily explained. “You need to find a way to get him to open up and talk to you.”

  “Craig? Talk about this? That will take a miracle.” I’d spent a lot of years trying to get Craig to talk about his feelings. But, other than surface emotions, nothing. When I’d ask him how he felt about something, I usually got a grunt or possibly an admission that he’d never thought about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t talk. We talked about current events, television shows, movies, books, people. He just didn’t talk about feelings.

  “You have to try,” Lily insisted. “And if he won’t talk, then you’ll just have to take matters into your own hands. Normally, I don’t approve of prying into someone’s secrets, but in this case, I think it’s called for.”

  “I’ll get him to talk to me and we’ll work this out. It’ll be fine.” I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, but I didn’t want to talk about it any longer.

  “I’ve got to go open the shop,” Lily said. Lily owned The Goddess Chalice, a New Age shop on Hawthorne Street.

  “I really want to go see David. Skye, will you come with me?” Bobbi Jo asked.

  “Sure.” It beat going home and confronting last night’s failure.

  An hour later, we pulled up to David’s house laden with a gift basket of fruit, cheese, and wine. David answered the door in a pair of cutoff sweatpants and no shirt. He looked like he’d been crying. He also looked like he could have been on the cover of Muscle Man magazine. Or GQ if he cleaned up. Tanned legs bulged with muscles I didn’t know existed and led to a six-packed torso topped with impressive pecs. A thatch of sandy hair fell across his brilliant blue eyes. I was sure if he smiled his full lips would reveal even, blindingly white teeth. It was almost too much perfection to look at directly at him. Bobbi Jo introduced us and David invited us into the house.

  “Sorry about the mess.” David closed a pizza box on the coffee table and picked up a stack of body-building magazines from the sofa.

  “How are you, David?” Bobbi Jo asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t really believe this whole thing.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I can’t stop thinking that it’s all my fault.”

  “Oh, no, darlin’. You can’t do that to yourself.” Bobbi Jo patted David’s shoulder and handed him a tissue from an almost empty box.

  “It is, though. All because I didn’t feel like going to work last night.”

  “Now, you can’t start thinking that every little thing you did or didn’t do led to this,” Bobbi Jo said.

  “It did. I’d pulled a muscle in my groin and Nat insisted on taking my shift at the gym. I was scheduled to work from two until closing last night. If I’d been the one getting into the car, she’d still be alive.”

  “You can’t know that, David.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about her. She was everything to me. We’d been together for three years, but it was like falling in love every day.” Bobbi Jo patted his shoulder.

  “Is that a picture of you and Nat?” I asked, pointing to an eight-by-ten framed photo next to the pizza box.

  David picked up the picture. “We were on vacation at Yellowstone. She loved that Ironman hoodie. Wore it everywhere. People used to think we were twins when I wore mine. And we were twins. Soul twins.”

  In the photo, David wore a T-shirt and had an arm around Nat. She looked like an Olympic athlete. Tall and muscular with short blond hair and sparkling green eyes. They looked incredibly happy together. It certainly put my problems into perspective. Craig and I had issues but we could work through them.

  I woke up in the guest bedroom again. Following Lily’s advice to get Craig to talk about whatever was going on with him, I’d tried everything. I’d asked him every question I could think of. But instead of opening up to me, he’d gotten angry and refused to talk about anything. After accusing me of not trusting him, he’d stormed off to our bedroom. No way was I going to sleep in the same bed with him after that. I lay in bed, reluctant to get up even though it was almost eight. Craig would have left for the office an hour earlier—without his usual breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. That’d show him.

  The phone rang and I looked at the caller ID. Bobbi Jo. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone, but I was concerned about her after the visit from the cops yesterday. I picked up the phone and mumbled a hoarse greeting.

  “Edward,” she gasped between sobs.

  “What? Is he okay?” Actually, Edward wasn’t okay on the best of days. At sixty-two, he had already suffered several strokes and two heart attacks.

  “I’m at Mercy Hospital,” Bobbi Jo said. “He had another stroke and he’s in a coma.”

  “Oh, sweetie, hang on. I’ll be down as soon as I can get there.”

  “Hurry, Skye.”

  “Half an hour,” I assured her. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  I wrote Craig a quick note and stuck it on the refrigerator. Grooming consisted of brushing my teeth and pulling on jeans and a T-shirt. Ten minutes later I was in the Escape with the headset to my cell phone haphazardly placed over my unkempt hair. A glance in the rearview mirror told me that I should have taken a few more minutes to slather some foundation on my face. I punched a speed dial number on my cell phone. Lily would want to know, and Bobbi Jo would need all the support from her friends that she could get.

  “Lily? Skye. Bobbi Jo’s at the hospital with Edward.”

  “Holy Goddess! How bad is it?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s in a coma. I’m on my way over there now. Can you come?”

  “Of course. Mercy Hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “At least he’ll get the best care there. I’ll be along as soon as I can get Jasmine to fill in for me at the shop.”

  I punched the end button and threw the headset to the passenger seat. I’d always thought something like this was coming, even though Bobbi Jo seemed determine to ignore the possibility. Edward had been in poor health for some time. Diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems. Bobbi Jo had married him when she was only twenty-six. Now, she faced the very real possibility of being a young widow.

  I parked my Ford Escape, hoofed across the parking lot at a fast clip, and skidded to a stop at the receptionist’s desk. Mercy Hospital’s reception area boasted plush purple carpet; a curved, pink-veined marble counter; and a receptionist who should have been a supermodel. I smoothed the wrinkles in my T-shirt and ran a hand through my hair, wincing when I lost a few strands to the prongs in my wedding ring set.

  “I’m here to see Bobbi Jo Melrose. Her husband is in intensive care.” I waited while the receptionist typed in the name.

  “Mrs. Melrose is probably in the ICU visitor lounge if she isn’t with her husband. That’s on the seventh floor.”

  I thanked her and took the elevator to the ICU floor and saw a sign for the visitor lounge. Bobbi Jo sat on the edge of a sofa with a paper cup of coffee on the table in front of her. She looked like hell. Her hair was mussed, and there were dark circles under her eyes. She wore a baggy pair of sweatpants and a faded T-shirt. She looked up when I came in, then rose and let me envelop her in a hug.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Five or six hours, I guess. Dr. Marcus has been with him for a few hours now.”

  “You should have called me.”

  “Well, at first, it was just so confusing. Edward and I were in bed, and su
ddenly he collapsed and I didn’t know what was happening.”

  I poured a cup of water from the dispenser and handed it to her. She took a couple of sips and set it down.

  “I finally realized he was having a stroke or a heart attack and called 911.” Bobbi Jo brushed fresh tears from her eyes. “By the time I could have called you, it was so late, I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “Oh, sweetie, you know you can wake me up anytime.” I wrapped my arms around her again and let her cry for a few minutes. “How’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the worst part of it. He’s had strokes before, but he’s never gone into a coma. Our family doctor is with him and he’s called in a bunch of specialists. I told him to get the best. I don’t care if it takes every penny we have. I can’t lose him, Skye.”

  Just then Dr. Marcus appeared in the doorway. Bobbi Jo jumped up. “How is he? Is he all right? Can I see him now?”

  “Not just yet. We have him stabilized and now we need to run some tests.”

  “Is he still in a coma?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so. We’ll have a better idea of his condition after all the tests are done. But for now, the best thing you can do is get some rest yourself.”

  “I’ll take her home,” I said.

  “No. I want to be here in case he wakes up.” She shook her head. “When. When he wakes up.” Then she started crying again.

  “You can’t do anything right now, Bobbi Jo. The tests will take some time. Go home and get some rest so you’ll be able to see him when he wakes up.” Dr. Marcus handed her a small bottle of pills. “These will help you sleep, and I’ll call you at home as soon as we know anything.”

  I called Lily, told her to meet us at Bobbi Jo’s house, and hustled Bobbi Jo into the Escape. She’d finally stopped crying. Now she just stared blankly out the window. Again, I was reminded that my problems weren’t the worst thing in the world. Craig and I might be having a rough patch right now, but at least he wasn’t in the hospital. In a coma.

  I’d just gotten Bobbi Jo settled on the sofa and given her one of the pills when the doorbell chimed.

  “How’s she doing?” Lily asked softly when I opened Bobbi Jo’s front door.

  “Not good. Edward’s still in a coma, and they’re running tests.”