by Joan Opyr
There was no answer to this. She was right.
“I’m going to ask one more time. Where have you been?”
“I refuse to answer that, but I am sorry that I didn’t call you.”
“Sylvie Wood.” It was a statement, not a question. The angry tone was now at war with the I-knew-it voice. “You should have called me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, “and yes, I know that all the prisoners in jail are sorry. I won’t make the same mistake again. I’ll get an apartment in town—then you won’t have to worry about me.”
Her ears pricked up like a cocker spaniel’s. “You’ll what?”
“Don’t try and talk me out of it, Emma. I need a place of my own.”
She scowled and put the newspaper down, spreading it out flat on her lap.
“You can’t afford it.”
“I’ll get a roommate.”
“Bil, you’ve only just come back.”
“That’s come out, not come back.”
“Don’t split hairs. You can’t just move in with Sylvie like that, all harum-scarum. Have you talked to her about this? Is it her idea?”
I sighed. “Sylvie already has a roommate, Ma. What I’m talking about is a place of my own, and I don’t want to discuss it with you. Can we please move on?” Not giving her time to object, I said quickly, “Sarah told me you bailed Sam out this morning. Where is he now?”
“Who knows? Did you see the re-spray he gave the billboard at Safeway?”
I blew a stray lock of hair out of my eyes. “That’s your son, always ready with the illiterate mot juste. Any idea what inspired him?”
“What do you think? Francie Stokes and her itchy, twitchy twat.”
“That’s catchy, Ma. You should put it to music.”
She was slapping the newspaper so that it made a rhythmic popping noise.
“After breakfast, when you dropped me off at the hospital, he was up and making phone calls. Brian Sorenson—you remember him, big skinny blond kid—answered Francie’s phone. He told your brother that Francie was still in bed asleep. You can imagine the rest.”
“It might have been perfectly innocent.”
The hand rested temporarily. “Innocent?”
“Come on, Emma. Francie’s place is a flophouse. So what if Brian was there? There were probably twenty-five other people as well, all watching cartoons.”
My mother shook her head. “You are naïve. Sam wasn’t around to give her what she wanted, so she hooked up with someone else. I wish this were a permanent arrangement, but sooner or later, she’ll crook her little finger, and your idiot brother will be right back there, plowing up that garden of earthly delights.”
“You know,” I slipped Archie back into his fully reclined position, “your interest in your son’s sex life is unnatural. You should think about getting a therapist.”
“Don’t push me, Bil,” my mother snapped. “I’m on the thin edge.”
“If Francie is putting out as much as you say she is, I don’t see how the cops can pin this billboard thing on Sam. Anybody could have painted that sign.”
“When they stopped him for questioning, they found a can of red spray paint in the back seat of the car, and he still had some of it running down his arm.” A pained expression had planted itself on my mother’s face. She looked like she had indigestion.
“Tell me the truth, Ma. What did you do when you saw that billboard?”
“What do you mean what did I do?”
“You laughed, didn’t you? You thought it was funny.”
“I didn’t think it was funny when they arrested him.”
“But you thought the billboard was funny. You probably wet your pants laughing.” She looked away, and I knew I’d hit the nail on the head. “Sam has the will to live, Ma.”
“Sam has the will to live dangerously.”
“What the hell’s the difference?”
Sylvie and I got to the Golden Dragon right on time, and we only had to wait forty-five minutes for Sarah, a family record. She came in carrying an overstuffed purple backpack and a fat briefcase, which appeared to be made out of brightly colored swamp grass. She spent several minutes trying to disentangle herself from her wet overcoat, and several more trying to find a place to hang it where it wouldn’t drip on all the jackets around it. In some ways, Sarah takes after my mother—she’s a hurricane with an orderly Rolodex at its eye.
“Sorry,” she said, sitting down damply in the booth next to Sylvie. “I’ve just been trying to track down a facsimile edition of Beowulf. We had one on the shelves, but it’s gone missing. No one’s checked it out, so it’s misshelved or lost or stolen, and . . .”
“Oh dear,” I interrupted. “So, what did you find out?”
She shook her head, laughing. “Have you ordered family style or do I at least get to look at the menu?” She turned and smiled at Sylvie. “It’s true that Bil was raised by wolves, but I’m sure that any moment now, she’ll think to reintroduce us as it’s been years since we last met.”
“Sylvie Wood, Sarah ‘Miss Manners’ Hardy.”
“Pleased to meet you again,” Sylvie said, shaking Sarah’s hand.
“Likewise, I’m sure,” Sarah said. “You were my first babysitting job, did you know that? Your mother dropped you off at our house one night, and I got to officially watch you and be paid for it. I wasn’t old enough to babysit on my own, so Emma was the real babysitter. I took it all very seriously anyway.”
“I hope I behaved myself.”
“Perfectly. I wouldn’t mind having a child just like you. Of course, thanks to Bil here, I’ll never have any children of my own. I was supposed to have a dinner date with a rich professor who might have taken me away from all this.”
“There are plenty of fish in the sea,” I interrupted. “I’d go for the Hunan prawns. Whatever you do, give the Mongolian beef a miss. It always tastes like combat boot marinated in cornstarch and soy sauce.”
“Prawns it is. I hope there are lots of onions in it. I’m covering reference again from nine to midnight, so I’ll be breathing on the patrons.”
“Are you working double shifts or something?”
“I’m covering for the department head. She had a tooth out this morning.”
“You do get the plum jobs.”
“Do you like being a librarian?” Sylvie asked.
“Sometimes. I love books, and I like my co-workers. I even like one or two of the patrons.”
A gangly girl wearing an Alpha Phi sweatshirt took our order, and our dinner soon arrived. Mine was soon eaten. Sylvie pushed her chicken around with a chopstick, while Sarah chewed each bite thirty-two times. My sister is beautiful but sloppy. No matter how slowly she eats, she always drips. At home, she ties a napkin around her neck like the last of the hillbilly gourmands. Thankfully, she doesn’t resort to this trick in public. I tried to be patient as she chewed, but curiosity got the better of my manners.
“Well?”
I had to wait for her to finish chewing. “Well what?”
“What did you find out?”
Sarah picked up a prawn with her chopsticks and dangled it precariously over her stained bosom. “Would you like to see the paperwork, or should I just summarize?”
“Is the paperwork particularly interesting?”
Sarah considered the question, and then she considered me. “I’ll summarize,” she decided. “I don’t know where Frost spent the last sixteen years, but I do know where he spent the last twelve. He was in prison in upstate New York. They paroled him five months ago.”
“Any idea what he was in for?”
“Of course I know,” she laughed. “There were three charges, grand theft, burglary, and malicious destruction of property. None of these would have sent him up for all that long, but he already had a police record as long as your arm. He was what they call an habitual offender.”
“What are you talking about? Wasn’t theft, burglary, and that other thing enough?”
“Malicio
us destruction of property,” Sarah said. “Either you haven’t paid much attention to the many dramas involving our baby brother, or you never listen to what Naomi has to say. Why should taxpayers in a state the size of New York care about an insect like Frost? He was a non-violent offender. You don’t get the chair for this sort of thing, not even in Idaho. And that reminds me, I’ve been reading about Frank’s sins here in Cowslip. I went back a little further in my research than you asked me to, and I found an interesting snippet from the weekly police report about him stealing money from Emmet Rutherford.”
“Millicent’s husband?”
She nodded.
“How much?”
“Quite a lot for a sixteen-year-old. Frost tried to make off with about two thousand dollars from the till at Rutherford’s Farm Supply. He was working there at the time.”
Sylvie was surprised. “Really?”
Sarah nodded, chewing a prawn. Then, with an inclusive gesture in my direction, she added, “So was our mother, and so was your father, but they’re not mentioned in the newspaper.”
“I knew Emma worked there,” I said, “but not Frost and Wood. How did you find this out?”
She gave me a smug smile. “Special collections, sweetheart. When John Fredericks died—he was the sheriff from 1950 until 1982—his widow donated all of his papers to the library. A lot of shit is donated to libraries. If it’s really junk, like someone’s old National Geographic collection, we toss it out, or sell it, or recycle it. Fredericks was a fairly important figure, so we kept his stuff. Notes, diaries, conspiracy theories—the widow Fredericks even gave us all of his dirty magazines.”
“So what do you know?”
“Judging from his taste in porn, he had a thing for lactating women.”
“Please, Sylvie’s still trying to eat.”
“No,” Sylvie pushed her plate away, “I’m done. Did my father have anything to do with Frank stealing from Emmet Rutherford?”
Sarah stabbed the air with her chopsticks. “Remember, this is just Fredericks speculating; he couldn’t prove anything. Your father was working the till on the day the money went missing. Fredericks thought he either gave Frank access to the till, or he wasn’t minding the store. At first, Emmet suspected Wood, but then the money turned up in Frank’s bedroom. Now,” she speared up another prawn, “here’s the interesting part. This all comes up in Fredericks’ diary as background for his theory about the missing money from the county clerk’s office. He reckoned that Burt and Frank were in it together, with Frank, as history suggests, taking the heat. Officer Young . . .”
“Now Lieutenant,” I said.
“Now-Lieutenant Young didn’t agree with this theory. Fredericks dismisses him as an idiot.”
“What did Young think?”
She shook her head. “Fredericks doesn’t say. He makes a few tart observations about Young’s intellect, or the lack thereof, but that’s it.”
“So,” Sylvie asked, “what exactly did they do? How do you steal a quarter of a million dollars from a county assessor’s office?”
“Well, you’d have to get someone like my father to explain the accounting parts to you, but essentially, there was some trick to the way Frank assessed properties, particularly large farms. He figured their values correctly, but then he under-reported to the county. When the taxes rolled in, they pocketed the excess. Fredericks had been watching them for at least six months before they vanished, but he couldn’t figure out where exactly the money was going. He thought someone was laundering it for them.”
“Did he say who?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t have a clue. Burt and Frank were always together, but your father doesn’t seem to have had any other friends. Frank was involved with the community theater crowd and some assorted Cowslip low-lifes, known drug dealers, that sort of thing.”
I chewed on a forkful of rice. If Burt and Frank had been in on the embezzlement together, maybe they really had been planning to abscond together. It surprised me to think that part of the rumor might be true after all.
“Wait,” I said. “Frank did community theater. That’s where he met his money launderer.”
“Yes,” Sarah agreed affably, “it’s bound to be our grandmother. No doubt she’s secretly rich, and we should start being nice to her, or she’ll leave it all to Helen Merwin.”
“Very funny,” I replied. “I was thinking of Fairfax Merwin, actually—he’s the banker.”
My sister winked at Sylvie. “She’s smarter than she looks. So, would you like to take a look at the other possible suspects? I have here our college yearbook, the Cowslipper, for the year 1966. That’s the last year Frank was in school. Take a look at page sixty-seven.”
It was a photo of the college drama department, and they were all there. There were two productions during the school year and one in the summer. In the fall, Frank had played Brick to Agnes’ Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Fred Maguire was resplendent as Big Daddy in his ice cream suit and Panama hat. There was a large picture of my grandmother and Millicent playing opposite Fairfax’s Mortimer in the spring production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Fred was in that photo as well, dressed up like Teddy Roosevelt. The summer production was Our Town. I looked again at the photo of Frank.
“What do you think?” I asked, passing the book to Sylvie.
“Same picture,” she agreed. “Someone’s cropped it, like you said.”
Sarah shook her head. “You’ve lost me. Who’s cropped what?”
“The pictures in the folder of Burt and Frank. I noticed this morning that Frank’s looked like it had been cut from a larger photo. I’m pretty sure this is the original.”
Sarah shrugged. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t give you any photos. That’s why I thought you wanted a copy of the Cowslipper.”
“Well if you didn’t put the photos in there, then who . . .”
I suddenly had a vision of my binoculars sitting at the top of the ridge, waiting for me.
“Goddamn her, what’s she up to?”
“Who?”
“Helen, of course. She’s stole the first file you made, and she’s tampered with this one.”
Sarah considered this. “But why?”
“Because she’s fucking with us, that’s why.”
My sister slammed her hand down on the table with so much force that people stopped eating throughout the restaurant. “Nosy bitch! I once caught her looking up a patron’s circulation record. She doesn’t work in circulation, so she had no legitimate reason for wanting to know what he read. I reprimanded her, of course. That’s a direct violation of ALA policy.”
“American Library Association,” I translated for Sylvie’s benefit. “It’s the librarian version of the FBI.”
“It is not,” Sarah snapped. “ALA sets the standards for my profession, and we take two things very seriously—freedom of speech and patron privacy. You can tell a lot from someone’s reading list, and people have a right to read what they want without comment or censorship. If I find out she took that folder, I’m going to knock her fool head off.”
“What do you know about jimsonweed?”
Sylvie’s head had been resting on my stomach, but now she moved up to lie down beside me.
“You do have a one-track mind, don’t you?”
“I have two tracks, actually. Now I’ve switched to the other one. Have you ever done anything with Datura?”
“I know the genus, but that’s about it. I suppose I could talk to my botany professor.”
I rolled over. Her arm was resting on top of the sheet, her skin tan against the white cotton. I traced a line from her wrist to the top of her shoulder. “The whole plant is toxic, but apparently, the seeds are the worst part. The stuff I read said they don’t taste unpleasant, so I suppose it would be easy enough to slip them into someone’s food. Among our suspects, who do you think would know enough about plants to poison someone?”
Sylvie shrugged. “You and I
know enough. It’s a matter of reading the right books, knowing where to find your plant, and then harvesting the seeds. It’s down to motive and opportunity, which puts my mother pretty high on the list, though it could have been anyone. I think we need to trace the money.”
“Reginald Brown again?”
“I don’t see what choice we have. If it takes him more than a day or two, though, there’s no way I can pay him, not without my mother knowing about it.”
I moved closer, so that our bodies were touching. “It’s cold in here,” I explained. “I’ve got a credit card, we could max that out.”
She shook her head. “Don’t do that. I’ll figure something out.”
“We could try scaring someone. We could call everyone up and say, ‘I know who you are, and I saw what you did,’ and then see what happens.”
She laughed. “Now you’re being ridiculous.”
“Probably.” I traced my fingers back up her arm and rested them on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes. “Sylvie?”
“There’s an extra blanket in the bottom drawer of my dresser.”
“That’s not it.”
She smiled, her eyes still closed. “Don’t tell me. Your train has switched tracks?”
“I think my train has derailed.”
Chapter 27
I had two hours to kill before I was due to meet Sylvie at her place. We planned to attend the Proposition One debate scheduled for seven o’clock at the Cowslip Community Center.
I had just enough time to go to the gym. I hadn’t been for over a week, and it felt so good to lift weights again that I did a full body workout, knowing I’d be sorry later. On my way out, I ran into Tipper and Suzy.
“Well?” Tipper said, lifting a perfectly arched eyebrow.
I looked away. “Well what?”
“That answers my question.” He held me at arm’s length and surveyed me from head to toe. “And it certainly suits you, I must say. You look fabulous. Doesn’t she, Suzy?”
“She does indeed. One might say glowing.”
“If I’m glowing, then you are radioactive. Any idea what the forum will be like tonight?”
Tipper nodded. “The editor of the Herald-Examiner will act as moderator. On our side, we have the pastor of the Unitarian Church, a lawyer for the ACLU, and a spokeswoman from the Idaho Library Association. The forces of evil have our Republican representative to the state legislature and the charming and effervescent Reverend Jones.”