by Sue Henry
She knocked long and loudly, several times, before opening the door with her key. We stepped inside, leaving the door open behind us.
The curtains, I could see, were drawn, both those in front and those that covered the patio door. With them closed, the room was fairly dim and full of shadows, but light enough to see that it was empty—completely empty—of everything that belonged to Shirley.
Ann reached for a switch near the door and turned on the ceiling light. There were empty spaces on the walls where Shirley’s pictures had been, and a pile of what looked like Ann’s needlework mottoes lay on the dinette table, as if she had intended to rehang them.
We moved to the back of the apartment and Ann opened the curtains there, allowing light in from outside. The sliding door to the patio was unlocked and open four or five inches, though the screen was shut.
The kitchen countertops were bare, as were the shelves in the cupboards over them.
Ann opened the refrigerator and found it and the freezer compartment similarly empty.
“She’s moved out,” Ann said. “But she’ll probably come back for her security deposit.”
“And the extra month’s rent,” I reminded her. But my thoughts were elsewhere.
Walking back into the living room, I paused beside the desk in the alcove. It was bare of laptop computer, books, journal, notepad—everything. On the wall over it the small bulletin board remained, but it was empty of the calendar and list of phone numbers, which reminded me that I had copied that list and put it in the pocket of the skirt I had been wearing that day, where it probably still was.
My uneasy feeling was growing as we examined the place. How could Shirley have found another place to live between the time she vanished from my motor home and noon, when Ann said she had returned from the grocery and noticed that she was gone? Could she have moved out everything she owned in that short amount of time?
“Let’s take a look at the bedroom and bath,” I suggested, heading in that direction.
Off the living room there was a hallway with bedroom on one side, bathroom on the other, and a door at the end.
“Does that door lead into the garage?” I asked, half noticing that there was an odd hint of something slightly, unpleasantly metallic in the air, but focused on the door.
“Yes.”
Passing the rooms to either side, I went directly along the hall and opened it.
A switch beside the door gave us light to see that a green sedan took up a large part of the space available in the small garage. Its doors and trunk were open and the interiors of both had been piled full of possessions that Shirley had moved out of the apartment. Everything was now in total confusion, tossed out onto the floor of the garage in a tangle of clothing, pots, pans, books, linens, costume jewelry, cosmetics, and other items. Suitcases had been emptied and thrown after their contents, boxes upended and pawed through, objects scattered without regard to their condition—a bottle of lotion had, for instance, broken upon hitting the cement floor and soaked what appeared to be a blue silk jacket. A small box lay next to what had been its contents—the things I had seen on Shirley’s desk. But I noticed that neither the journal nor the laptop computer was there.
Still on the backseat of the car were her pictures, carefully cushioned with blankets and towels she had spread between them. I looked through them quickly and found that the abstract I had noticed on the living room wall was not among them—odd.
Moving out had obviously been her aim, but the open car doors and destruction of her possessions made it clear that she must have been interrupted—or gone mad—before completing the job.
Ann stood staring into the garage, her mouth open in surprise.
“But . . .” She turned to me. “Where is she, then?”
Where indeed? I was now more than uneasy.
Going back along the hallway, I glanced hurriedly into the bedroom and saw only a pile of clothes on hangers that had been taken from the open closet and tossed haphazardly on a bed stripped of linen and pillows. Bedside tables stood with drawers gaping open and empty. A small suitcase had been emptied of lingerie by the door. Other than that the room was empty.
Swinging around, I crossed the hall and opened the bathroom door, heart in my throat, ignoring the hand Ann laid on my arm.
She was trying to say something, but I had no idea what, nor did I care. What did register was her gasp as she peered over my shoulder into the brightness from the one light in the place that had been left on.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh God!”
Shirley’s nude body lay supine, just beneath the surface in the tub full of crimson water, arms at her sides, legs straight, heels resting on either side of the faucet at the end of the tub as if, weakening from loss of the blood that had poured from the deep slashes on her arms, she had allowed herself to pass out and slip limply to her position under the water as she bled. Though her blood had made the water slightly opaque I could see that her eyes were open and staring. Her hair, now anything but blond, floated softly around her head. She was very clearly dead and had been in the water a long time.
Ann made a retching sound behind me.
“Don’t throw up in here,” I told her sharply. “Take it to the kitchen sink.”
She disappeared abruptly, hand over her mouth.
I stepped in to take a closer look without touching anything and saw that the toilet seat was closed and a towel had been laid on it within reach of a bather. Strange for a suicide, which was what this appeared to be, to provide for drying herself later—habit, perhaps.
There was nothing else I could see that was out of place or that told a variant story. Only a medical examiner would be able to tell if she had died the way it appeared, but I noticed a mark on one of her ankles that looked as if it might have been a bruise.
I went back down the hall and into the living area of the place, expecting to find Ann, but it was empty. Across the living room was the door that I had assumed on my earlier visit was a closet. Now it stood wide open—revealing a passage between the two units of the duplex.
I remembered Shirley saying, I think she comes in sometimes when I’m not here. So this was how Ann had gained access to Shirley’s part of the building. She was an odd bird indeed.
Letting it go, I went through, found Ann’s phone, and dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, I asked for Herrera specifically and told her why.
“Is it a medical emergency?” she asked.
“Not now. The woman has clearly been dead for hours.”
She told me they would send the necessary people immediately and that Herrera would be contacted as well.
I hung up the phone and sat down on one of Ann’s doily-covered chairs to wait for the arrival of the police.
It wasn’t until much later that I remembered I had intended to visit Alan Medina at his gallery and find out, if I could, why he had been following Shirley the day before in the plaza.
SEVENTEEN
THERE ARE SINS OF OMISSION THAT WE COMMIT SIMPLY by not paying attention, or by shrugging off involvement. I had been relieved to have Shirley gone when she disappeared so abruptly the previous day, hadn’t I? Though I think my reaction was somewhat defensible, I felt guilty about it nonetheless. It was one of those lemons life hands you, justifiable or not.
As we waited for Herrera, I wished that after my conversation with Shirley that evening in the motor home I hadn’t suggested that we leave solutions to her problems until the next day. Tired as she had been, I might have learned something useful had we explored possibilities. I also remembered the niggling uneasiness I had felt about her story, which might have been resolved in further conversation. It was too late now. I would probably never know what it was that had bothered me.
Ann had splashed some water on her pale face and gone to lie down until we had help. She had said little, but muttered to herself as she left the room, “I should have known she’d show up. I shouldn’t have . . .” The rest was unintelligible as she
went through the door.
Glancing across the room, I noticed in particular one of her needlework mottoes on the opposite wall: THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY. She’d certainly hit the mark with that one.
It must have been another slow day for Taos law enforcement, for it wasn’t long until, with siren, a police car and a paramedic van pulled up in the street out front and the occupants came hurrying in. Clearly the dispatcher had not trusted my analysis of the condition of the deceased or, more probably, it was standard operating procedure.
Officer Herrera arrived shortly after the paramedics had examined Shirley’s body, declared her dead, and left the scene as it was for investigators and a medical examiner, necessary for a case of unattended death. A younger officer had talked first to Ann, recording what she could give him. She was so shaken that for once she seemed completely forthcoming, telling him what she had seen and heard of Shirley before going to the grocery the day before. She included the fact that we had gone looking for Shirley and why, referencing the previous carbon monoxide incident. He was just turning to me when Herrera showed up, took the report, and assumed responsibility for my interview.
“Could we go outside for this?” I asked him, feeling a need for air and to check on Stretch, who had now been in the car for well over an hour.
He agreed and we walked out in time to see that several neighbors were outside their houses, watching and wondering what was going on.
Stretch was fine, but I carried him with me and went with Herrera to sit in his patrol car with the windows down while I told him about coming to see Ann and finding Shirley’s body. Stretch curled up in my lap, content to be held, and gave Herrera’s hand a friendly lick when the officer reached to give his ears a rub.
“So the dead woman is the friend you said had stayed overnight with you night before last?” the officer asked and made a note when I nodded. “Tell me everything you can about her—and about finding her.”
“Well, first, she was not a friend but an acquaintance,” I began, and explained how I had met Shirley and why I had invited her to stay with me.
“So she tried to commit suicide two days ago?”
“That’s the way it seemed, though she strongly denied it.”
I went back to what Shirley had told me in the Winnebago—everything I knew about her divorce, her relationship with Anthony Cole, and the subsequent theft of her money.
“And she cleared out while you were away, leaving nothing to explain why? That’s odd, isn’t it?”
I agreed and told him about catching sight of her later in the plaza and the man who had been following her.
“Alan Medina? Interesting,” he commented thoughtfully.
“Why?”
“He’s on my radar—has a record,” he said in answer to my questioning look.
There were a few moments of silence while he considered what I had told him, then glanced across at me, frowning.
“About this Anthony Cole person,” he said. “You say he borrowed a hundred thousand dollars from her—cashed her check and disappeared? That’s a lot of money for anyone to loan to someone she hadn’t known long.”
“She thought she knew him pretty well, I guess—they were evidently intimate. But that’s just what she told me. From her story he seems to have been very slick about it and I’d guess it’s probably not the first time.”
“Can you describe him for me?”
I had to shake my head. “He was long gone before I even knew he existed. You should ask Ann Barnes—she met him more than once.”
“I’ll do that.”
“The whole thing—her divorce and then the theft—may have been reasons she could have wanted to die.”
He thought for a moment or two, once again frowning, then seemed to make a decision and looked up at me again.
“I’m considering that,” he said slowly. “It appears that when her first attempt was interrupted by Mrs. Barnes, she stayed with you, then slipped out at the first opportunity and came back here to try again—and succeeded the second time. People often stick to their first choice of method in killing themselves, but maybe she didn’t want the landlady to hear the car running and stop her again.”
“But why would she pack up her things as if she was moving out, stop in the middle, trash it all, and slit her wrists?” I asked.
“That’s an interesting question,” he agreed. “And, just between you and me, there’s another thing or two that make me wonder. There’s a head injury—one of her pupils is blown. Either she fell in the tub—unlikely from the position of her body—or was hit with something. And there are a couple of bruises that make it look as if someone grabbed her hard by the ankles and yanked her under the water. We’ll have to see if she has water in her lungs to tell if she drowned before she bled out.”
“I noticed a mark on her ankle, but I assumed she probably lost consciousness and slid down under the water.”
“She may have. But it’s an unusual position—legs extended, feet on the far edge of the tub. I’d have expected her to have been sitting in the water and her knees to have bent as she slid down, which would have raised them above the water, but not her feet.”
I was surprised that he was being so forthcoming about Shirley’s death, but it soon became clearer when he paused for a moment, turned to face me directly, and asked the question he had been leading up to.
“Tell me, Ms. McNabb, what do you think of Ann Barnes?”
I knew what he was asking, but it didn’t seem likely to me.
“She’s the one who heard the car running and called for help night before last, when it would have been easy enough to leave it alone,” I told him. “I think she’s a lonely older woman, a confirmed busybody and a snoop—you noticed, I suppose, the door between the two units? But she lost her cookies when we found Shirley. I had to send her off to the kitchen or she would have added to the condition of the bathroom.”
“Good thinking.” Herrera grinned. “It wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s not something I’d encourage. On the other hand, I’ve known killers to have weak stomachs at their own handiwork.”
An unmarked car drove up and parked, and a woman got out with a case in her hand.
“That’s the ME,” Herrera said. “Got to go. You’re going to be around for a few days, right? I’ll get back to you.”
We both climbed out and he followed the woman up the walk to the duplex, giving me a wave before he disappeared.
I drove away feeling drained, a dozen questions competing for attention in my mind. I tend to hold on tight to my reactions in an emergency and to maintain a certain level of practicality when there is a need for it. You have to think straight in order to take care of what has to be done, whatever that is. But once again alone, in the wake of what had been a shock to my system, as it would be to almost anyone’s, I felt cold and a little sick to my stomach. I couldn’t blame Ann for throwing up. What we had discovered was anything but pleasant.
There was a deep sadness that I couldn’t have prevented Shirley’s death somehow. Had she killed herself? Or, as Herrera had intimated, could someone else have been responsible for her death? I felt again a sense of guilt at not wanting to be involved and realized that part of it was a natural reaction to the death of my friend Sarah, who had been murdered the previous fall. Following my suspicions and poking into the backgrounds of the people and circumstances that had surrounded her death had eventually created a threat to my life before the person responsible had been apprehended. I knew that the inclination to distance myself from this fatality was partly due to lingering reaction to that one. This was easier because Shirley had been a stranger, not a part of most of my life, as Sarah had been—close as a sister. Even so, if someone had murdered Shirley, there were enough similarities in the situations to make my hands leave clammy prints on the wheel of the car and my breathing a little more labored than normal.
I needed to step away from it, and I did. Instead of going, as I had planned, to see
what I could learn from Alan Medina, I went straight home and took an extended shower, then had a nap—another way of coping with stress—and took a long, slow walk with Stretch.
It helped, but I could still feel the tension lying in wait for me in the form of questions. As we passed the campground office I caught the scent of honeysuckle from somewhere in the surrounding garden and thoughts of Sarah sprang immediately to mind because she had loved it so. Wondering if someone would have similar encounters with things associated with Shirley, I thought of her ex-husband. He would be the one likely to have comparable mentally recorded history—to be caught by the small, unexpected things and moments.
That brought to mind the numbers and e-mail addresses I had copied from the bulletin board above her desk. Could one of them belong to Ken as she had called him? Would Herrera make the same connection? Had she kept her married name, or taken back her maiden one? It was something Herrera would find out from going through her belongings for identification that would probably be found in her purse. Somewhere among her things should also be the list I had copied and her journal, which I had left unread. He should be alerted to look for them.
Back in the Winnebago, I went to the closet and found that list in the pocket of the skirt I had been wearing the day Pat and I had picked up Shirley at the hospital. Among the initials on it was a K.M., with what appeared to be a phone number. Ken Morgan? Possibly—even probably, I thought, and was tempted to try it.
But what would I say if he answered in person? Notifying the man of the death of his ex-wife was not my responsibility; that should be done by someone in authority, not a passing acquaintance without the particulars of her demise. A postmortem would be required for this unattended death and it would be the better part of a week before the reports came in from the medical examiner in Albuquerque, where Herrera had told me all autopsies in the state were done, at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine’s facility.