He grunted what I assumed to be an agreement and pulled his polo shirt over his head. As he showered I whipped up a chicken, wild rice, and mushroom casserole. It was on the table thirty minutes later when he came into the kitchen, wet-haired and subdued. After resisting my attempts at light conversation, I left him to his silence and turned my thoughts to how I was going to organize the sleeping arrangements in our two-bedroom house. Then I moved on to worrying about the upcoming festival. The storytellers would start arriving on Thursday, and though I was certain I’d anticipated every problem or potential problem, I mentally went over everything one more time, looking for breaks in the fence.
“Good dinner. Thanks,” Gabe said, standing up. “Leave the dishes, and I’ll do them tomorrow before my run. I think I’m going to watch TV in bed. You want to lock up?”
“Sure. I’ve still got my opening speech for the festival to work on. I’ll stay up until the kids come home.” I gave him a teasing smile.
His face sobered. “I guess you should give him a key. I don’t want either of us having to wait up every night just so we can lock up after him.”
“Good idea,” I said, feeling more optimistic. Though his voice sounded chilly, at least he wasn’t suggesting we lock Sam out. Of course, that still didn’t take care of the problem of Rita. There was no way I was giving her a key to my house—I’d been down that potholed road before when I first moved into this house and she’d lived with me for a few months at the urging of my family and against my better judgment. Skeeter, before he acquired the position of Rita’s next of kin, had been a surprise guest one morning when I staggered into my kitchen wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of Jack’s hunting socks. A very short T-shirt. My cousin-in-law, who bears a striking resemblance to the country singer Dwight Yoakam, saw more of me the first minute we met than Gabe saw until our wedding night.
I dug out the spare key from a kitchen drawer and set it on the coffee table. Then I settled down on the sofa, pillows propped behind my head, and picked up the file containing my half-finished speech. Television music filtered through the closed bedroom door. I could make out the cheery opening score of The Rockford Files, one of Gabe’s favorite programs. He watched the reruns on cable whenever he could, even though he’d seen all the episodes a dozen times. Their familiarity and the good-natured personality of Jim Rockford never failed to relax him.
I turned back to the blank tablet in front of me and chewed on the tip of my pencil. When it was decided we’d put on this festival, Elvia, as usual, provided me with more than enough literature on the art and practice of storytelling. Though I’d seen the occasional puppet show at San Celina’s Thursday-night farmers’ market downtown and heard various children’s-book authors read their works at Blind Harry’s Bookstore, I had never seen a professional storyteller until I accompanied Constance and Jillian to a storytelling festival in Santa Barbara eight months ago. The scope and beauty of this art form had charmed me. And like most folk art, I was again surprised at the completely separate world in which the storytellers lived and worked. Like quilters and wood-carvers and weavers and dozens of other folk artists, the storytelling community had its own kings and queens, rivalries and intrigues, magazines and conventions, rules and traditions.
That was something that constantly amazed me about people—how they formed little universes around a common interest. As a museum curator and not an actual participant in any of the arts I presented to the public, I often felt like an outsider, albeit a welcome one. I sometimes envied the artist’s all-consuming obsession. But despite my lack of esprit de corps with the artists, I appreciated the glimpse into mini-societies closed to most people.
I looked over the notes I’d gleaned from the four books Elvia found for me and one I’d borrowed from the library. I had decided to open my welcome speech with a short history of storytelling and my own personal definition of the art.
Storytelling is a form of oral artistry whose sole purpose is to preserve and communicate ideas, images, experiences, and emotions common to all people.
Oral artistry. I liked the sound of that. Painting a picture with the spoken word.
We are all characters in the stories of our individual lives, making choices and living with the results of those choices. Consciously and unconsciously we pattern those choices after someone we admire and want to be like, and often that someone is first shown to us in a story.
I thought about the many people who’d read or told stories to me throughout my life—public school teachers, Sunday school teachers, aunts and uncles, my father and Dove. Much of who I am was formed by the stories passed on to me or, as storytellers liked to emphasize, through me. Because, as many of them pointed out, stories were a living thing and like an unplayed symphony, useless until heard.
I picked up my pencil and added, Telling a story is a way of moving closer to another human being. It is a sharing of the heart and soul and intellect. It says you and I, we’re alike in this one particular thing.
I had started making notes on how during the Middle Ages troubadours and minstrels were often the only means of relaying information from one community to another when the front door opened. A gust of cool evening air rushed into the living room, bringing Rita and Sam with it. Heads close together, they laughed loudly at a shared joke.
“Hey, you guys,” I said, putting a finger over my lips. If Gabe had fallen asleep, the last thing I wanted was him waking up to the happy sounds of his capricious son and my cousin Rita.
“Sorry,” Sam said, grinning at me and untangling Rita’s arm from his. “So, madrastra, is mi padre safely locked away, or should I sleep with one eye open tonight?” A loud giggle erupted from Rita. I shot her a fierce look.
I tightened my lips, irritated for the first time at his care-free manner. Didn’t he understand how upset his father was?
“I need to get to bed,” I said. “We need to discuss the sleeping arrangements because there is only one guest room.”
“It’s got a queen-size bed,” Sam piped up, his dark eyes dancing.
“Which only one of you will occupy. Rita, you can sleep in the guest room, and I’ll make up the sofa for Sam.”
“Why does she get the bed?” Sam whined. “I was here first.”
“Because I said so.” There was a very good reason for my decision. Though I didn’t relish the idea of Gabe having to walk past his sleeping son on his way to work the next morning, I had lived with Rita and knew what sort of Frederick’s of Hollywood outfits she slept in. I gave Rita a stern look. “It’s too late to go into it now, but tomorrow we’re going to talk.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, rolling her eyes. She blew a kiss to Sam. “See you tomorrow, surfer boy.” He gave her a goofy smile.
After everyone was situated, I took a shower, standing under the stream until the water ran cool. Gabe lay asleep on the bed in front of the flickering television set. An old Laverne & Shirley was playing. I gently pried the controller out of his hand and clicked it off.
“I was watching that,” he mumbled, his eyes still closed.
“You hate Laverne & Shirley,” I said, pulling off my thick cotton-velour robe and crawling under the sheets next to him. His body was already warm with sleep, and I cuddled up next to him.
“I like Lenny and Squiggy,” he said, pulling me closer and nuzzling my neck. “I love the smell of you fresh from the shower.”
“Gabe,” I protested in a harsh whisper.
“What?” He ran a hand down my thigh.
“It’s late.”
He glanced at the bedside clock radio. “It’s only eleven o’clock.”
“I’m tired.” He nibbled on my neck, and I gave a soft laugh.
He rolled over on top of me. “Relax, I’ll do all the work.”
I pushed on his chest, still laughing. “There are people in the house.”
He looked down at me with smoky blue eyes and smiled slowly. “Then, querida,” he said, his voice dropping down to a faint whispe
r, “we must be very . . .” He brushed his lips lightly across mine, his hands busy elsewhere. “Very ...” He kissed me harder, knowing just the right maneuvers to melt my last ounce of resolve. “Quiet.”
“You know way too much about me,” I said as he pulled my T-shirt over my head.
Afterward, as I rested my head on his chest, my mind drowsily traveling from one irrelevant subject to another, he brought up our houseguests.
“So what’s your cousin’s sob story?” he asked, his fingers catching in my tangled hair.
I opened my eyes and studied the small cleft in his chin. “I have no idea. I haven’t had the opportunity to ask, but I bet I know the answer. My guess is she caught old Skeeter fertilizing a stray heifer or two. I don’t know what she was thinking, hooking up with a rodeo bum like him.”
He chuckled and rubbed his face in my hair, inhaling deeply. “Let me see now, Skeeter is the one who’s seen you naked, right?”
I sat up and smacked him with my feather pillow. “I was wearing a T-shirt. And that’s an incident I’d just as soon forget, thank you very much.”
“I think I deserve equal ocular access to his wife,” he teased.
“Like they say, Friday, don’t wish for something. You might get it.”
“Intriguing thought.”
“Just don’t think about it too much.” Knowing this was as good a mood as I was likely to see him in for the next few days, I said, “We need to talk about Sam.”
He frowned and, avoiding my eyes, punched his pillow into shape. “Nothing to talk about. He can stay a couple of days then move on.”
“He’s your son. How can you—”
“I’m perfectly aware of who he is, and since you don’t know anything about my son, I’d prefer you let me handle it.”
“Well, excuse me for caring.” I shoved my pillow back in place and turned away from him.
“Querida,” he said, his voice tired. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. I just need to handle this my way. It’s more complicated than it looks. Can you try and understand that?”
I turned over on my back and stared at the ceiling. He leaned over and started kissing me softly along my hairline. “Sweetheart, please—”
“What did they find out down at the lab?” I asked, changing the subject.
He sat up and leaned against the pine headboard, staring at the blank television screen across the room. “The autopsy didn’t give us any surprises. She was strangled with some kind of rope and dumped in the lake. She’d been dead approximately eight to ten hours, which means she was killed the night before around eleven o’clock or so. Other than that, there are no leads yet.”
I pulled our quilt over my shoulders and shivered. “Who told Nick?” It hit me right then that I’d never called or gone by. Sam’s sudden appearance, the fight among the storytellers, then Rita’s arrival had pushed everyone’s problems but my own clear out of my head. I kicked myself mentally and promised myself that I’d go see him first thing tomorrow.
“Jim. The guy was upset, as you can imagine, but he was able to answer Jim’s questions pretty coherently and he voluntarily gave us a key to her apartment.”
“Did you find anything that might give a clue to her killer?”
He shrugged. “I dropped by when the detective team I assigned to her case was going through her things. It’s hard to say. We weren’t surprised to find that someone had been there before us. The place was a mess. There’s nothing worse than searching a place that’s already been trashed. We took her computer down to the station, but all her floppy disks were missing. Someone obviously thought there was something on them that might point to their identity. That’s my guess anyway.”
“She made her own puppets,” I said, sadness weighting my heart. “They were beautiful. I wonder what will happen to them.”
“That’s up to her heir, which appears to be her brother.”
“So you have no leads at all?”
“Not unless she’s got a million-dollar insurance policy and her brother is the beneficiary.”
“Nick would never kill Nora! They were very close.”
Gabe reached over and gave my head a condescending pat.
“He wouldn’t,” I repeated stubbornly, though with less conviction. The longer I was exposed to police work, the less sure I was becoming of my fellow human beings’ basic goodness. But I steadfastly refused to become as cynical as Gabe. Someone in this relationship needed a positive outlook.
“Come here,” Gabe said, pulling me over and tucking me under his arm. “Our bed is not the place I want to discuss my work. Tell me how the meeting with the storytellers went.”
“It was almost a free-for-all when I arrived.” I nuzzled my cheek on his chest hair.
“Why?”
I told him about the argument between Roy and Ash. “I think there’s more history to that fight than the comment about Zar’s stud fees.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, knowing Ash’s reputation, it occurred to me that he might have had a fling at one time with Grace. She and Roy have broke up a few times in the last year, and Grace has enough of a vindictive streak to do something like that if for no other reason than to irritate Roy.”
“Refresh my memory. Grace is . . . ?”
“The woman Roy is living with now. She owns the stables off Laguna Valley Road. You know, behind the redwood Methodist church. It’s where I’ve been riding the last couple of months.”
“I take it Roy and Nora’s divorce wasn’t an amicable parting.”
“Not by any stretch of the imagination. Nora divorced him because he was cheating on her with Grace while their eight-year-old son was dying. You really can’t blame her. That is pretty low.”
“So for revenge, Nora was holding up the divorce proceedings because of the property settlement of some horse.”
“Zar’s more than just some horse. Grace says he’s worth twenty-five thousand dollars. Maybe more.”
Gabe whistled under his breath. “People have been killed for less.”
I scratched his stomach lightly. “I just can’t picture it, though. Roy might be a hothead, but he’d held off this long, and Grace told me last week he and Nora were getting close to an agreement. That’s why they were advertising Zar’s services in the paper. She said they had agreed to split the stud fees until the final details of ownership were worked out.”
“So what about this Ash? With a name like that, it is a good thing he was never a cop.”
“It’s short for Ashley. Ashley Stanhill. He owns that new restaurant on the corner of Alvarez and Elm, near the Art Center. Eudora’s Front Porch. He’s from Mississippi. He’s got a gorgeous accent and that kind of cockiness that a woman wants to hate, but somehow just can’t ’cause it’s so incredibly blatant. He seduces women simply by being so audacious.”
“Oh, really?”
I pulled on his chest hair. “Not me, you jerk. Other women.”
“Ow,” he said, grabbing my hand and pressing it to his chest. “You’re really into inflicting pain today. So, tell me more about the environmental guy you mentioned this afternoon. The political one.”
“Peter Grant. I’ve known him since I was a kid. We were in 4-H together. His parents owned one of the biggest almond orchards in the state. They sold it and moved to San Francisco and he stayed. He’s one of those guys who’s never gotten married, lives for his hobbies and his causes.”
“Which are?”
“In a nutshell? Mountain climbing, scuba diving, zero growth, owls, redwoods and wolves, and whatever new animal or cause is the current political poster child. He’s president of the GreenLand Conservancy.”
“The group that’s trying to buy up land around San Celina and make a permanent greenbelt? I understand to a degree what they want. I’d hate to see San Celina turn into another Orange County.”
“Yeah, but the problem always comes back to private ownership. It’s real easy for people like Peter to say the land sho
uldn’t be owned when it’s not his land being legislated. I wonder how generous he’d be if his parents still owned that almond orchard. If ag people and environmentalists don’t find a way to work together somehow, the ranchers and farmers will have to sell out to whoever can buy the land just to pay their inheritance or income taxes. And developers are the only people with that kind of money. I just wish he’d realize we all have the same goals, keeping San Celina from turning into one big suburb.”
“It’s a volatile situation, no doubt about it, but so far both sides have just flung words. So, who else was there?”
“Jillian Sinclair.”
“Constance Sinclair’s niece.”
“Right. And there was Evangeline Boudreaux and Dolores Ayala.”
“Did they know Nora well?”
“Well, Jillian was her boss at the library. I think Dolores and Nora were passing acquaintances. Nora and Evangeline have left together quite a few times, so I assume they’d struck up a friendship. Evangeline’s the type that everyone confides in, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Nora was telling her all the juicy details about her and Roy’s divorce.”
“That’s everyone who was there?”
“Well, D-Daddy was on the grounds, but not actually at the meeting.”
Gabe slid down and tucked the quilt around us, signaling he wanted to go to sleep. I poked him in the side. “Wait a minute, I think I’ve just been had.”
Without opening his eyes, he gave a lazy smile. “And if I wasn’t so tired, I’d have you again.”
“I thought you didn’t want to bring your job to our bed. That was a low-level interrogation, Friday.”
“Now, you’re always wanting to help me with my investigations. It would be even more helpful if you would write all these people’s names down so I can give them to my detectives. Anything else you want to add about any of them? You probably have a better handle on the relationships among these people than my detectives could get.”
“Me? You’re actually consulting me on a case? Someone call the newspapers. Someone call the television stations. Someone call the pope. A miracle has occurred in San Celina. Gabriel Ortiz is actually asking his wife if she has an opinion about a case. Why, it’s unbelievable. It’s—”
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