I looked at my watch again. It was now just past closing time, and it would be even later by the time I got there. And what surprise could Avis have for me?
“How about tomorrow?” I suggested.
“Tomorrow will be just wonderful,” Avis agreed cheerfully.
A chill tickled the hairs on my neck. I didn’t like the idea of a surprise during murder season.
“See you then,” Avis said and hung up.
I told myself that there was one person I trusted in this whole thing. Avis. And anyway, she couldn’t attack me in daylight—
The doorbell rang before my mind could argue otherwise.
“Doorbell!” Kevin yelled helpfully. The yell had a muffled quality. His mouth was full, I would have bet, full of leftovers from Wayne’s recent meals.
So I answered the door.
Howie Damon stood where so many had stood before him, on my doorstep. Suddenly, I was glad that Kevin and Xanthe were munching away in the kitchen. Because Howie Damon was a suspect. And one I knew almost nothing about.
Howie thrust his hands toward me suddenly. I stepped back without thinking and raised my own hands in a defensive tai chi posture.
But then I saw what he was thrusting my way. A stack of neatly photocopied paper. You couldn’t kill someone with paper, could you? “I have a copy of my manuscript for Wayne,” Howie murmured shyly. He looked down at his feet. “I thought he could look at it. I know he’s a writer. And he seems really intuitive.”
I lowered my arms and tried to think. Would Wayne want to read Howie’s manuscript?
“You know, Wayne only writes fiction,” I told Howie gently.
“Oh, but he knows how to write.” Howie raised his round face, his small eyes hopeful. “I’m sure of it. He’s very sensitive.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
Slowly, I extended my arms, and Howie placed the manuscript in them, as if handing over a foundling.
“Well, I’ll make sure he sees it,” I told Howie.
“Thank you,” he murmured, his eyes on his feet again.
“Would you like to come in?” I asked. I can’t tell you why. Only that some habits die hard.
“No, I couldn’t,” Howie answered, shaking his head.
That was a relief.
“Well, see you later, then,” I declared, though I was fairly sure he wanted me to talk him into staying. One verbal invitation was enough, though. Habits die hard, but they can still die.
I shifted the manuscript to one arm and reached out my hand, gripping Howie’s. His palm was predictably moist, though his handshake was unpredictably athletic. My hand ached when he dropped it.
“Goodbye then,” he said wistfully and turned to walk down the front stairs.
I watched until he was actually out of my driveway and into his Honda Civic. When he started his engine and drove away, I closed the door. Manuscript or no manuscript, Howie Damon gave me the creeps. And how did he know where I lived? Then I reminded myself that just about everyone seemed to know where I lived. They probably looked me up in the telephone directory, nothing more sinister than that.
On cue, the phone rang.
I answered, expecting my mother, and was pleased to hear Jean Watkins’s voice instead.
“Kate, have you found out anything new?” Now I wasn’t so comfortable, especially with an unsolicited manuscript still nestled in one arm.
“Nothing,” I told her. At length. My nothingness came out in a stream of complaints about interrupted interrogations, dead ends, and wasted time.
“Darcie talked to Lisa this afternoon,” Jean informed me. “Darcie and Lisa are very concerned.”
I sighed. We were all concerned. All but the murderer. Or maybe the murderer was the most concerned of anyone.
I was not in a good mood when I set the receiver back in its cradle.
I took Howie Damon’s manuscript and set it ceremonially at Wayne’s place at the kitchen table.
Kevin and Xanthe had apparently come to the end of their meal, and Kevin was boiling water for tea.
“Want some?” he offered, reaching for another cup.
“Sure, why not?” I agreed and sat at the table across from Xanthe, trying to think things out.
“I don’t know why you’re so uptight, Kate,” Xanthe told me. She popped a pill in her mouth and washed it down with some apple juice. “If you’re really scared about this murder thing, hire Slammer.”
I didn’t ask, For what? this time, because I was fascinated by the pill she’d just taken. Hadn’t Reed said something about a pill? But what? I searched my brain, but it was no good. His words had disappeared from my memory banks. But he had said something. I was sure of it.
“Listen, Katie,” Kevin said, handing me a steaming cup of peppermint tea. “We’re here if you need us for the next few days. You’re family, okay?”
And unexpectedly, my eyes moistened.
He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a pyramid cap, then held it out to me. I started to object. “On the house,” he told me before I could, and set it on the kitchen table.
“We’re gonna stay in town a little longer, but then we’re splitting,” Xanthe announced, standing up, ignoring her own cup of tea.
I stood too. Were they really leaving?
Xanthe stepped around the table, put her arms around me, and squeezed tentatively. I took a breath that smelled of perfume and squeezed her back.
“We’ll probably visit Mom,” Kevin murmured.
Lucky you, went through my mind, but I was pretty sure I didn’t verbalize it.
Kevin and Xanthe both looked sad from behind as they walked down the front stairs, their tea forgotten and cooling in the kitchen, their respective shoulders slumped.
I put a hand over my mouth to stop from calling them back. My family. Damn.
And then, I really did work on Jest Gifts. Full-tilt boogie, I got down to slinging invoices and ledgers until late that evening when Wayne came home.
“How’d your day go?” he asked.
I settled into his arms, opening my mouth to tell him about each and every suspect. No, I decided, and used my mouth to kiss him instead.
*
Thursday morning I woke up late. My head ached and my stomach didn’t feel so good either. Guilt, anxiety, flu?
By the time I stumbled out of bed, the phone was ringing to match my throbbing temples.
I padded to the phone in my jammies and picked it up, interrupting the answering machine mid-speech.
“Hey, kiddo,” Barbara greeted me. “I know you just got up. But I wanted to tell you that you’re real close now.”
“Real close to what?” I asked blearily. “A nervous breakdown?”
“I’m not sure exactly what you’re close to, but you’re almost there. I can feel it.”
“Barbara!” I bawled. That hurt my head.
“Kate, you have to learn to trust in the unseen—”
“What unseen? What are you talking about?”
“You’ll see,” she answered. “Love ya, kiddo.” And then I heard the dial tone.
After I showered, I checked out my suspect chart one more time. Maybe that’s what Barbara had meant about being close. I added, “angry with Dr. S.,” in a few columns, “Dr. S’s patient,” in a couple more, and “rosemary” and “pill” under miscellaneous. Then I looked at it again. Whatever Barbara meant, it clearly was “unseen,” at least by me.
Wayne came up behind me as I was staring at the chart. I stuffed it under my desk blotter and turned to him.
He held out the copy of Howie Damon’s manuscript in my direction. His eyebrows were low, his jaw set angrily.
“What’s this?’ he growled.
“Howie’s manuscript,” I said defensively. “I didn’t think you’d mind. He wanted you to read it, and—”
“Did you let him into the house?” Wayne demanded. And then I knew his anger was directed at my possible danger, not the possibility of having to read Howie’s
manuscript.
“No, I didn’t,” I shot back. “And Kevin and Xanthe were here, anyway.”
“Oh,” he said, his voice still tight. “And were they here when you entertained your other visitors?”
How did he know about the other visitors? I decided he was just guessing.
“Wayne, I’m here,” I reminded him softly. “I’m alive.”
“Be careful, Kate,” he pleaded. “I couldn’t bear losing you.” Then he forced his face into a smile. “Just think of probate now that you’re my wife. A mess.”
God, I loved the man. A joke, even now.
I laughed, and turned my chair all the way around. He bent down to hug me.
“Wayne,” I began when he straightened. “I was going to visit Avis at the nursery today.” Had he known his own, personal, good cop, bad cop routine would elicit a confession like this?
He looked up at the clock. “Gotta go into La Fête in half an hour,” he muttered, frowning. “Avis asked you?”
I nodded.
“Avis is okay,” he declared, and turned to walk off, looking down at the manuscript he held in his hands as he did. He was already reading it before he left my office.
Well, if Wayne wasn’t afraid of Avis, I wouldn’t be either. I was right the first time. Avis was the one suspect I could trust. Though I hadn’t told Wayne about Avis’s “surprise.”
I left my suspect list under my blotter as I worked. I would forget the whole thing. I just wished Lieutenant Perez could too.
By ten o’clock, I decided it was time to visit Avis and find out what her “surprise” was.
I found Wayne in his back office, his nose buried in Howie Damon’s manuscript.
“Time to go?” he asked, looking guiltily at the clock. He jumped up. “Whoops, past time. Howie’s story’s too good. Three generations of California. I got lost.”
“Just don’t get lost on the way to work,” I told him, with a goodbye kiss.
He returned the kiss, then looked into my eyes.
“Be careful at the nursery, Kate,” he said. “If there’s a hassle, call me on my cell phone. Or at work.”
I nodded.
“I mean it,” he growled.
“I love you, too,” I growled back.
At least he smiled. And then he ran out of the house, got into his Jaguar, and roared out of the driveway.
I was just about to leave the house myself when the phone rang again.
I made the mistake of picking it up.
My mother had finally caught up with me.
“Where were you yesterday?” she demanded.
“Working,” I lied.
“Aren’t you married now?” she asked.
I groaned inwardly. Should I try to explain the possibility of the peaceful coexistence of work and marriage? I decided specifics were necessary.
“I still have my business, Mom,” I reminded her. “Remember Jest Gifts?” I didn’t add how many years of my life had gone into building Jest Gifts.
“Well, Kate,” she lectured, “don’t forget that men like attention.”
“Right, Mom,” I conceded. Everyone liked attention. I had no problem with that concept.
“And Kate…”
I waited impatiently.
“I…I miss you,” she whispered and hung up.
My heart thunked down with the phone. My mother missed me? I was in a daze as I grabbed my purse and made my way out to the Toyota. Maybe I ought to visit Mom. I turned the key in the ignition. I would visit her. The question was how soon. Hours, days, weeks?
I still didn’t know the answer by the time I got to the nursery.
There were only a couple of cars in the lot when I got there: Avis’s Saab and a Lexus that looked familiar. Avis wasn’t doing much business. But it was still early, and a weekday, probably not the best time for a nursery.
I walked into the main building and found Avis behind the counter. There were no folding metal chairs set out today. And Avis was smiling.
“All right,” I prodded, her good mood catching. “What’s up?’
“Olive got the job!” she announced with a great flourish of her gloved hands.
“Congratulations,” I told her, still waiting for the surprise. “Is she moving out?”
“Yes!” Avis whooped and came around the counter to hug me. “And it was all because of you.”
“Me?” Now that was a surprise.
“Remember, the clothing wholesaler?”
It was coming back. I’d promised to recommend Olive. But the wholesaler had never called me.
“Eileen O’Brien—”
“Eileen O’Brien—I know her,” I interrupted.
“So she said,” Avis went on. “She said if Kate Jasper recommended Olive, that was good enough for her.”
I put in a short, agnostic prayer that Eileen O’Brien would still be speaking to me the next time we met.
“And this was your surprise?”
“Yes,” Avis answered, and gave me another hug. After she released me, she told me to pick the biggest plant in the nursery as my reward.
It was an offer I wasn’t going to refuse. I walked out the door of the main building into a paradise of plants. Annuals, perennials, shrubs. Yum. I let the delicious earth and plant smells surround me and fantasized about roses and cherry blossoms. Deer, I reminded myself. I needed something that the deer wouldn’t eat. And something that wouldn’t break Avis’s budget either. I wasn’t betting on how long Olive would keep her job. An early-blooming wisteria caught my eye. It was stunning, already trained, its tall stem tied to an even-taller stake, that allowed its clusters of violet-blue buds to stream majestically downward like a waterfall made magically solid. I was in love. I didn’t even look at the price tag. I just picked up the pot and lugged it back into the main building to show Avis, panting with exertion.
But once I was back in the building I couldn’t see my friend anywhere. I looked down aisles and past the counter.
“Avis?” I called out, setting the wisteria down carefully.
I thought I heard something from behind the counter. Was she hiding? Was she playing a trick on me?
I walked around the counter cautiously, and then I saw her. She was flat out on the cement floor, her hat beside her.
“Avis!” I cried and crouched down beside her. Her eyes seemed to be trying to open. I felt for her pulse and found it. Her skin was warm.
“Avis?” I said again, this time in a whisper, my own body having frozen upon seeing her.
With cold hands, I reached up for the store phone. Time and sound seemed suspended. I remembered what Reed had said about a pill. He’d said there was a green pill, and that Dr. Sandstrom had pocketed it the first time he was hit with the statuette. Suddenly that seemed important. But why?
Lisa Orton. My hand touched the phone ever so slowly and an image flashed in my mind’s eye, an image of Lisa lifting something to her mouth and swallowing it that first evening. A simple hand movement, and then she’d swallowed. A pill? It must have been a pill. A green pill? And she’d talked about her abusive father who was a doctor, too. But Lisa? No, I told myself, not Lisa.
That’s when I saw the pitchfork coming in my direction.
- Twenty-Three -
It’s lucky I’d learned to move from a squatting position in tai chi. And to move fast. I sidestepped and stood at the same time, seeing the pitchfork slam into the counter out of the corner of my eye. Then I turned to face the person holding the important end of the pitchfork and prepared myself to dodge another jab.
But the second jab was verbal, though none the less piercing.
“Lie on the floor next to Avis, or I’ll have to kill her,” Lisa Orton told me, her voice high and anxious.
Lisa Orton? I looked into her childlike face and was chilled. Because she didn’t look any different than before. Her eyes were round. And she sucked in her lower lip, looking her usual vulnerable and waiflike self as she yanked the pitchfork out of the counter. M
y only clue to her mental state was the perspiration I could see on her vulnerable face.
“And will you have to kill me?” I asked, not quite ready to lie on the floor.
“I don’t know!” she shrieked. She raised the pitchfork over Avis’s body. “Just do it.”
I did it.
I lay down next to Avis like a fellow corpse on a mortuary slab, and then wished that metaphor hadn’t occurred to me.
I drew my knees up slowly, and placed my palms on the floor, ready to spring back up in an instant. The concrete was cold everywhere my body touched it.
Lisa tapped my chest with the prongs of the pitchfork, and the concrete felt even colder. I resisted the urge to close my eyes and waited for the thrust.
But the prongs didn’t dig any deeper. Lisa wanted to talk. Or explain. Or rant. Whatever, it was fine with me.
“He caught me at the break and lectured me!” she wailed. “He said I shouldn’t be popping pills. He yelled at me, told me to shut up. So I did.” She paused, her eyes going even wider. Her pupils seemed to spread like spilled ink across her irises, leaving nothing but black for color. Was she talking about Dr. Sandstrom? I wanted to ask, but decided this wasn’t the time.
“The pills,” she went on, her voice lower. “I don’t know, maybe he was right.” She looked down at me and screamed as if I’d disagreed. “No, he couldn’t have been right! Anyway, he shouldn’t have yelled at me. But then I found the deer statue and hit him with it from behind. I wrapped my scarf around it so I wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.” She was talking about Dr. Sandstrom, all right. I was beginning to catch the gist of her narrative. “The Goddess must have wanted me to do it.”
“But the Goddess is benign,” slipped out before I could stop it.
Lisa didn’t hear me anyway. She just kept on, the words tumbling from her mouth as fast as my heart was beating.
“I thought he’d never guess it was me. People think I’m a wuss. But my therapist told me I have Goddess energy within me. That I’m strong. I don’t know!” She was wailing again. The pitchfork wavered, skidding down to the side of my ribs. All I felt was pressure, no pain under my sweatshirt. “But I did it, I hit him. Only, a pill must have rolled out of my pocket.”
Lisa paused for breath. She wasn’t really looking at me anymore. Her head was turned to look out the door of the main building. Was she seeing Dr. Sandstrom as she spoke?
Murder, My Deer (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Page 24