Stella, even in her semibleary state, knew right away that Chrissy had rolled out the last few details merely as an obfuscation of the first. “Got in late, huh,” she said. “That mystery man a yours again?”
“What makes you say that? Maybe I went over to Tiffany’s to play cards. Or worked on the quilt I’m makin’ for Mom and Dad’s anniversary. Or, or, went to a movie or—”
“Until two in the morning? Yeah, uh-huh. You was at Tiffany’s, who I know for a fact just had her a new baby two months ago. Prob’ly readin’ verses from the Good Book and drinking chamomile tea, too, right?”
There was a pause, and then a dramatic sigh. “Stella, here’s the thing, I know you think of me as a big party girl and all, but I’m kind of maybe a little into this one. And I’ll tell you ’bout him, soon’s I know is he gonna stay around for a while.”
Stella couldn’t help noticing the unfamiliar uncertainty in the girl’s voice. Whoever she was making time with, he’d gotten much more of a reaction out of her than any of her recent string of lovers, who she usually went through with good cheer and a healthy appetite for variety.
“Chrissy, I doubt there’s a man alive who’d willingly leave your love trap,” Stella remarked and then took the high road before she could change her mind. “But I guess if you want to keep it to yourself, why, I ain’t got any business tryin’ to beat it out of you.”
“Mmm. Well, I got a little surprise for you. I went looking around to see what-all financial info I could find on Benton Parch, like you suggested. I found a few big withdrawals out of his checking account for the dates you asked about, back when he was bringing Natalya over to the States and then when her son came over, and also a couple other withdrawals I’m thinking were probably for the wedding, all that shit. It all added up to over thirty thousand, so if that’s what he wants to charge your nephew, I don’t know, might be about right.”
“It ain’t like he’s trading hogs,” Stella said hotly. “This is a woman we’re talking about, not somethin’ to be bought and sold, a fugitive from a—a cruel life, on her way to enjoying the freedoms of a United States citizen…”
“Uh huh. Save the Stars and Stripes, Stella, I’m with you on this one. Family of yours is family of mine and all that. Just giving you background. Anyway, your guy Benton is pulling down fifty-three thousand a year at Courtland Mills, a little more than Manetta, but then he’s one pay grade higher. I went back four years on his taxes, nothing special there. Kept up on his mortgage, paid regular on his Shell card, blah blah blah.”
“This is what you called to tell me?” Stella yawned, stretching luxuriously. “It ain’t exactly breaking news.”
“No, what I called to tell you, other than happy goddamn birthday, was that if you were thinking Benton was gonna buy an island or a Lamborghini or something after selling off the ManTees patent, you can think again. LockeCorp paid out exactly ninety-one thousand four hundred and eighty dollars, and I got records of a wire transfer of half of it into Manetta’s account within a week. Parch put a chunk of his half into savings, prob’ly so he’d have it for taxes, and it’s been sitting there pretty much ever since. Except for…”
Stella, who was quite familiar with Chrissy’s dramatic pauses, knew she would get no further until she played her part. “What, what, whatever could it be? Why, I’m all aquiver with anticipation, Christina Jaynelle—please tell me your amazing news before I expire from curiosity!”
That got her a disgusted snort. “You just got to take the fun outta every damn thing, don’t you? Okay, fine, I’ll just tell you and then I’ll go earn us both a living since you’re too busy to work at anything that actually pays. A month or so after he got all that cash stashed away, Parch went and spent a big chunk of it. First was a charge for eleven thousand dollars at Hawthorn Jewelers, 444 Broadway right there in Smythe.”
“No kidding?”
“The other was an insurance policy. Half a million bucks in the event of his death.”
“And don’t tell me—Natalya’s the beneficiary,” Stella said with a sinking heart.
“Nope. In the event of his death, all of his dough goes to one Alana Parch-Javetz.”
* * *
If Natalya had spent the night planning and scheming to kill Stella because she was too close to the truth of Parch’s demise, she hid it well. Stella found her standing at the stove, humming and stirring something in a pan, something that smelled heavenly and buttery and set Stella’s mouth to watering.
Her reading spectacles were nowhere in sight. The sweater sleeve, however, was laid out carefully on the table, and Natalya had knitted several more reasonably neat and error-free inches.
“Look what I am doing after you are sleeping, Stella!” she said proudly. “Now I must hide it again. I put away before Chip is coming home.”
Stella clucked her admiration and helped Natalya stow the project in a big cardboard box labeled KIRKLAND KITCHEN TRASH BAGS. Then she enjoyed a plate of eggs scrambled with chives and dill and some of Natalya’s strong coffee. True to form, Natalya nibbled on some toast and ate one forkful of eggs. Stella noted that even if she pulled off the younger-woman ruse, she was likely to starve to death in the process.
“I need to go see someone,” she said, after rinsing her plate off in the sink. “How late will Chip sleep?”
Now that she wasn’t quite as convinced that Natalya had killed her husband, since another suspect was currently deflecting suspicion, she felt warmly toward the couple. She even considered telling Natalya it was her birthday but decided that should wait until she was sure there wasn’t going to be a big awkward scene if it turned out the woman was a murderer.
“Oh, he will be up before too long. Today he is helping me washing the windows. We are spring cleaning!”
“Okeydoke, then.”
As Stella drove through town and back onto the highway toward Madison, she made a few calls.
Potter’s Auto would have the Jeep ready by Friday. That was the easy one.
Stella took a deep breath and dialed Goat.
“I don’t know what kind of crazy I musta been to agree to this,” he growled by way of a greeting.
“Well, hello to you, too, Sheriff,” Stella said, trying to keep the Goat-wobble—a strange vocal effect that occurred only when she was talking to him, a circumstance that seemed to rob the air of oxygen—out of her voice. “It’s my birthday.”
There was a pause, and Stella crossed her fingers tightly, then hastily uncrossed them when her loosened grip on the steering wheel caused the little car to drift toward the median.
“Huh.” Into that one syllable were layered so many emotions and hesitations and tempered enthusiasms that Stella couldn’t gauge where she currently stood in Goat’s esteem.
“I’m…” For a moment she thought of lying, of choosing a number on the junior end of fifty, but that wasn’t her style. “Fifty-one.”
“That’s a nice number,” Goat said brusquely, and suddenly it was. “Maybe that oughtta be celebrated, in some way, by us. When you get back. Like we were saying the other day.”
“I guess that would be okay.” Stella ground her nails hard into her leg, to keep her cheerful from showing—she had a feeling it might be evident even across the phone lines.
“Speaking of which.” So much for the sweet. Goat’s voice went all business, the way it did every time Stella managed to bring trouble over to the sheriff’s office. “Dale Savage came by this morning looking to get a permit for the shop.”
“’Bout time.” Tornadoes had swept through Prosper the year before, tearing off the five-foot-tall paint can that had been perched on top of Savage Paint & Wallpaper ever since Stella had been a little girl, reducing it to a pile of crushed fiberglass and plaster, and also gouging the siding and wrecking much of the trim. Stella wouldn’t go so far as to call it an eyesore, but she was happy that Dale was getting ready to spruce up the place.
“He’d got most of the t’s crossed and i’s dotted—Iren
e seen to that—but there were one or two points that were a little sticky. What with the building codes and all.”
“Oh—that’s too bad.” That was exactly what Stella hated about the law, right there—a focus on the picky details getting in the way of the greater good.
“But we found our way around it,” Goat continued, as though Stella hadn’t said anything. “Seein’ as I sent Luke over there to help ’im out for a few days. He’s gonna get to the shop when Dale does, at eight, and work on through until he goes home at six. Fact, he’s got himself invited to dinner at the Savages’ long as he minds his p’s and q’s, and then Ernice can bring him back when she comes into town at nine to get little Bud from choir practice.”
“Is that right?” Stella had to give him credit—Goat had had Luke all of a few hours and already managed to get him hired out and fed. Which led her to believe that Luke had been mighty careful to be on his best behavior. If even a sliver of his sly bad-boy side had been on display, Goat would have had him chilling in the waiting area under Irene’s watchful eye, or washing down the department vehicles, or even mucking stalls out at Landers Stables.
The paint-shop job was a cushy one, and Stella suspected Goat saw something worthy in the boy, something redeemable and worth the effort and a measure of trust. The thought made her smile.
“’Course Dale’s only payin’ him four bucks an hour,” Goat said.
“Four bucks sounds about right,” Stella concurred, wondering what he’d been pulling down in the playgrounds and school restrooms in Smythe. Whatever he’d been earning, it didn’t much measure up to what she had started to have in mind for him. A plan was taking shape—a shadowy, uncertain, more-hope-than-reason type of plan, but so far so good. “You have any trouble with him, I’ll take full responsibility.”
That got her a snort of derision. “Stella, you’re already into me for more favors and promises and IOU’s than I can count, I don’t know if I’d even notice one more or less.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t you be playin’ the shy lass with me, Dusty. You know damn well—oh, hell. Just get your business done and get your ass back here where you belong, hear?”
“Why, yes, sir,” Stella murmured after she’d hung up, after it was too late for Goat to hear, because she wasn’t sure if she was quite ready for him to know how it stirred her up when he did that growly thing and pushed her around a little.
Stella had been pushed plenty in her life—Ollie’d not only pushed, he’d slapped and punched and belittled and reviled and insulted her practically every day of their three decades together—and she was not about to stand for one more hand raised against her, one more ill-considered outburst meant to shame her, one more joke of which she was the butt. That said, there was something almost magical about being manhandled, when you knew that man was guided by decency and a genuine fondness for the female gender and an all-around respect for the ladies he dated. When there was no fear involved, a remarkable door opened up, one that led to teasing and breathless risk-taking and dipping toes into trust, and wickedness for the sheer joy of the heart-stopping thrill … a smorgasbord of delights Stella had never imagined in her married days.
Stella checked the speed odometer and saw that she’d been going faster and faster. She took her foot off the gas and coasted, grinning, thinking about how happy she’d be to see Wisconsin in her rearview mirror as she headed for home.
But first there was work to do.
Chapter Twenty
She found Benton’s sister’s house with little trouble. The directions Chrissy’d given her were more than adequate, but she could have picked the house out on the cul-de-sac even without them, just thinking about the gawky long-jawed gray-haired woman she’d encountered on Chip’s porch the day before.
The neighborhood, which was several miles from the outer limits of the student-and-professor chaos of the campus fringes, seemed to feature two styles of tract home: a shrimpy little asymmetrical one-story box, and a slightly more spacious trilevel with a lumpy stuck-on porch. Most of these had been landscaped and painted and primped in such a way as to convey a proper embarrassment at their humble roots, with swaths of faux stone trim or composite railing or at the very least Martha Stewart–inspired paint palettes suggesting that the owners, while chagrined at the homely bones of their abodes, had taken pains to rise above them.
But there, lodged like storm-drain flotsam between two much higher-reaching neighbors, was the home that had not aspired to much at all, unless you counted unfettered overtaking on the part of the invasive native grasses that had beaten back the sod, or the splintery original paint job that seemed ashamed of its own sun-faded mauve and blushed a rain-stained deep cherry. A fluttery row of tinkly chimes, hammered from aluminum leavings and sawed-off bamboo, kept up a dispirited cacophony in the background. Stella studied the front door—a dingy alabaster slab decorated with a frowsy plastic wreath—and willed it to open, to regurgitate its neglectful owner, preferably in a chatty and confessional mood.
No dice. Stella finally sighed and shut off the ignition. She gathered her purse and emergency kit, a bare-bones sampler of various restraining and intimidating tools packed into a Clinique gift-with-purchase vinyl cosmetic tote emblazoned with pastel strawberry vines, and got out of the car.
Stella glanced around for onlookers and potential witnesses—not something she wanted to encourage—and came up satisfyingly empty. That was why Stella didn’t expect much as she got out of the car and approached the house. Alana had not given off any housewife vibe that Stella could identify. She probably spent her weekends canvassing for the local green party, or collecting obsolete electronic parts to turn in for recycling fees.
Stella pressed the doorbell while in the middle of her professional once-over. Rent or own, that was not immediately clear; the peeling paint and cracked concrete certainly didn’t speak to an attentive interest, but the neat rows of fresh-planted rudbeckia and Indian paintbrush, the tole-painted mailbox, the pot of geraniums—all of these said “owner” to her.
Before she had time to decide, the door burst open and Alana popped out, wielding a watering can.
“Wait a second.” She squinted, then patted around on top of her head until she was able to disentangle a pair of glasses that Stella hadn’t noticed perched in all that unruly gray hair, and slipped them on.
Stella had heard the phrase “her face fell” but never actually seen a convincing example of it until that moment. Alana, who appeared to be somewhere around Stella’s age, had fairly nice firm skin for someone who didn’t spend a nickel on upkeep, but when she realized who had come to visit, it flattened and drooped. “Oh. It’s you.”
Stella stuck out a hand. “Stella Hardesty, in case you don’t remember the name. Natalya’s attorney. Just following up on a few things. May I come in?”
Alana cast about her front yard, apparently finding no excuses there. She set down the watering can and sighed. “Well, I need to get to rehearsal before too long, but I guess I have a few minutes. I got coffee made, but it’s probably cold by now.”
“I’d love some.”
Stella, who’d enjoyed about eleven cups of Natalya’s never-ending brew, needed more coffee like she needed a bandeau bikini top, but she figured on taking advantage of the situation to check out Alana’s place. She tiptoed discreetly into the dinette area, which afforded her a view of the entire first floor. The house was built in that soaring-ceiling fashion builders insisted on where all the heating and cooling kilowatts one purchased hovered high above where they couldn’t do any good, and in a small-footprint dwelling like this one, one got the feeling the house had been set on its end, long ways.
The house smelled strongly of herbs. At least Stella supposed they were herbs, since there was a top note of cinnamon or something like it—maybe tea. Or just layers of dirt: Alana was an indifferent housekeeper, and though she had the blinds shut against nearly all sunlight and hence it was hard to see
, Stella was pretty sure she could write her name in the dust that covered every exposed surface. Alana appeared to have a fondness for scarves, or perhaps shawls, or maybe just long lengths of silky fabric, which were draped over tables and looped over the drapes. An enormous set of speakers dominated the living area, along with what Stella, after a moment of confusion, figured out was a music stand. On a bench pulled up next to a chair was a violin case.
“Oh, you play violin?” Stella asked politely as Alana brought her a fussy flowery mug that was, indeed, cold to the touch, and sat down across from her with a glass of water.
Alana sniffed. “That’s a viola. And I don’t just ‘play,’ it’s my vocation. I’m fourth chair in the Madison Symphony Orchestra.”
“Really?” Stella was impressed. She’d been to the Kansas City Philharmonic once, years ago when she was in high school, on a field trip led by the ambitious student teacher who’d taken over the Prosper High Girls’ Chorus that year. They’d gotten first-row seats, which was thrilling until Miss Klein explained that they were cheap on account of the fact that you got a heavy dose of violin and not much else. Stella, however, had been enchanted by the young concertmistress, a woman who never once glanced at her music but gazed, enraptured, at the conductor and swayed as if guided by invisible strings and, at one point, played a solo that had her fingers dancing up the delicate throat of the instrument and impossibly close to the frenzied bow as a melody unwound itself in startling, brilliant crescendo. The entire concert hall had fallen silent as the young woman finished with a fling of her bow and a toss of her hair and then went limp, apparently drained by all that pouring of her soul into the music, and a second later the rest of the orchestra came back and picked up the thread, to the thunderous applause of the audience.
Stella generally preferred fiddle to violin, and never deliberately put on the classical station, but she had never forgotten that day or that performance. Somehow, though, she doubted the glum and musty Alana Parch-Javetz stirred the same kind of passion in her listeners as that long-ago violinist had.
A Bad Day for Mercy Page 18