She searched through the remaining articles, but there was nothing more to fill in the mysterious gap. Well, surely Annie would know what had happened to Bob Rutledge in that intervening period.
Thea jumped as a hammy hand landed heavily on her shoulder. “Whatcha doin’, Dot?” Her mother’s voice was querulous. “George doesn’t like anybody messin’ with his computer.”
Thea forced a smile as she turned to face her mother. “It’s okay. He told me so.”
Mother’s lips were pursed and she shook her head as if to say, ‘Well, it’s not my fault if you get in trouble.’
Thea kept the smile on her face, although it was a strain to do so. “Something you need?”
Mother’s eyes were fixed on the computer screen. A strange mixture of excitement and consternation played across her face. “I know him,” she said with that pride she had whenever her powers of recognition came back to her. She pointed at the picture on the screen. “George doesn’t—George hates him.”
Thea turned back to look at the computer monitor. On it was a businesslike studio headshot of Bob Rutledge.
CHAPTER 14
After her initial reaction to the photo of Bob Rutledge on the newspaper’s website, Mother clammed up. Her eyes, which had displayed a triumphant gleam as she had chortled out her identification of the image on the screen, went blank and flat.
Thea felt so sorry for her. Seeing that fleeting, momentary recognition fade so quickly from her mother’s eyes prompted her to pull back from asking any more questions. Instead, Thea gazed at her parent and saw the pain there, the pain of not being able to focus her slippery, unruly cognitive powers long enough to find whatever else was attached to the wisp of a memory that she had been able to summon up.
“It’s okay,” Thea soothed. “You don’t have to tell me any more now. Maybe later you’ll remember what George told you about him,” She gestured toward the computer monitor.
Mother shook her head forcefully. “Don’ wanna remember. He’s a bad man.” She shut her eyes as if to hide from the man himself. “George said he was bad.”
Thea put an arm around Mother’s waist. “That’s right. Don’t look at him. Don’t even think about him. Think about having something nice, something like...hot chocolate. Would you like that?”
Mother opened her eyes and gave Thea a wary glance. “With marshmallows?”
Thea spent the next half hour giving her mother her undivided attention. It was like dealing with a recalcitrant, pouty child or a puppy that hadn’t quite mastered the concept of “sit.” First the hot chocolate was too hot, then there weren’t enough marshmallows in it, then she wanted cookies to go with it, and then, and then. Eventually, either satisfied or bored—Thea couldn’t tell the difference—Mother wandered out of the kitchen and headed for her favorite spot, the recliner. Turning on the television to a cop show with a lot of squealing tires and intermittent gunshots, she withdrew back into her cocoon of mindlessness.
Thea stood in the door to the den watching her for a few moments, then went back down the hall to George’s office. She read through a few more of the articles on Bob Rutledge, but found nothing that seemed pertinent to his obviously strained relationship with George.
Leaving the newspaper’s website, she looked around at a few of the local sites, but found only the barest of references to him, although there was quite a bit on the Save Our Downtown committee. Then she remembered the file she’d seen marked “Collins.” Since Bob Rutledge was a shirttail relative, she might find something about him in there. She discovered the file among George’s documents and tried to open it. Nothing doing; it was password protected. She picked up the little notebook where George apparently kept some of his passwords, but could find nothing under “Collins.” She started with “Cubbies” and then tried a few of the other passwords on the file and still couldn’t get it to open. Frustrated, she tried some family names: “Daphne” didn’t work, and neither did George’s mother’s name, “Lavinia.” Why had George made this so difficult? What was in this file that he didn’t want anyone else to see?
Back in California, Thea had a friend she always called upon to solve her computer dilemmas, and now she hoped he might be able to help her again. It was at least worth a phone call, but she didn’t dare get on the phone until after she’d gotten her mother off to bed.
In the interim, she thought she’d educate herself a bit more on the background of the Save Our Downtown committee. One thing she already knew: there had been a previous attempt to salvage the moribund downtown a good twenty or twenty-five years ago. City planners, architects, and other consultants had been brought in, but what they had come up with hadn’t helped. Although they had created a pedestrian mall through the heart of the downtown area, the stores kept closing anyway. Some of them moved out to the suburban shopping malls, but a lot of the old businesses simply died.
With a somewhat surprising fondness, Thea remembered the downtown of her youth, a vibrant place with charming shops and restaurants where you could stroll from store to store and know you would meet most of your friends and neighbors doing the same thing. In particular, she remembered Christmas shopping, when you could find everything you needed in a six-block radius. The stores often had carolers out front, and sometimes there was a magical dusting of snowflakes, adding even more to the holiday spirit.
Now the whole downtown area was cheerless, and the remnants of the pedestrian mall had been taken over by the homeless. The courthouse was just about the only enterprise that remained from that thriving downtown of years ago, and people who had business there got it over with as fast as they could and scurried away to the brighter, busier streets of the outlying areas. Whatever the Save Our Downtown committee had in mind, it would take some kind of miracle to accomplish.
Thea wished now she could remember more of George’s comments to her about his work on the committee, but, unfortunately, she had tuned out most of the details George had discussed with her. Her hometown’s tribulations had held about as much interest for her as something happening on the other side of the world. Now she regretted that lack of curiosity. What she remembered most was George’s attitude toward some of his fellow committee members, but as he hadn’t named names, she had no idea which ones he might have been talking about.
Perhaps George had made some notes on those meetings, she conjectured. She hunted around in the cubbyholes of the desk, but couldn’t find anything that looked like meeting notes. She went back to the computer and found a file named “SOD,” but this appeared to be George’s sketchy thoughts on what the committee might do. One idea stood out to Thea as being particularly enterprising: rezoning the downtown so that nearly all the vacant buildings could be used for residences, with tax incentives for homeowners and reduced rents for those who couldn’t afford to buy. If the people came back to live, then shopkeepers wouldn’t be far behind. Thea made a mental note to ask Annie if Dan ever mentioned this inspired idea of George’s.
Leaning back in the comfy captain’s chair, she wondered if it was really possible that something as mundane as the SOD committee could have been the catalyst for murder. And yet, Annie had told her that George and Dan had been heated rivals on this committee, so much so that Dan had come to loathe George.
Had George reciprocated that feeling? He’d never indicated that to Thea because he had been well aware that Annie was Thea’s closest friend, so he’d never said a word to her against Dan (unlike Annie herself, who groused about her husband all the time). So Thea had no personal knowledge of George’s feelings toward Dan Biggs. Maybe some of George’s friends could fill her in on this.
And then she had an inspiration: the minutes of the SOD committee must be available somewhere, if not in the public record, then members of the committee surely had copies. If she could find these minutes and read them over, she could get a better idea of what was going on between George and Dan—and Dan’s crony, Bob Rutledge.
And speaking of Mr. Rutledge, what had he do
ne to merit George calling him “a bad man”? Whatever it was, it had been memorable enough for Mother to hold onto it deep in the convoluted synapses of her brain.
Thea opened a file drawer in the desk and searched through the neatly labeled folders until she found one for “SOD.” In it were some clippings with George’s name underlined, and—Eureka!—copies of the minutes of each meeting. Looking them over, Thea thought she would save reading them for later in bed, as they looked particularly dry. But who knew? Perhaps they would turn out to be as fascinating as a murder mystery.
CHAPTER 15
A sense of peace drifted over Thea. She was in an inner tube floating along a lazy stream that meandered through emerald-green Midwest farmland. Feeling she could just be carried along forever, she gaped at the azure canopy of sky arched above her and clouds the color of newborn lambs gamboling across the field of blue. Lavender and purple wild flowers filled the banks of the stream, birds sang out sweetly as she slipped along, and dewy-eyed cows came to witness her leisurely journey. And then, thunder rumbled, the sky darkened, the temperature plunged and—clunk!—the tube hit a rock. She was unceremoniously tipped out and found herself bobbing in icy water.
The abrupt shock woke her up.
She knew at once what the dream meant: an idealization of a childhood memory. She had been only five or six, so Beryl would have been three at the most. It was a family picnic in a serene pastoral setting near a farm. They brought inner tubes so that Thea and Beryl could float on a nearby shallow pond, but Beryl was afraid of the water. Thea and her mother ended up using the inner tubes while Beryl and their father watched from the bank. Holding hands, Thea and her mother drifted together out to the center of the pond and stayed there, kicking their feet to keep from being carried back to shore, in spite of Beryl’s cries for them to return. Instead, they leaned back, gazing up at the sky, lapping up the sunshine, and picking out fanciful, marvelous creatures they spied in the puffy clouds overhead. It was perhaps the only time Thea remembered ever feeling such a special bond with her mother.
The psychoanalyzing didn’t have to go too deep. The dream was a harkening back to a long-lost moment in time. The reason Mother hadn’t been in the dream scenario, of course, was that her presence would have made it just too bittersweet. And, Thea realized, the stream was a means of simply floating away from all her problems to some Disneyesque landscape. That was the only place where dewy-eyed cows existed, as far as Thea was concerned. The cows she’d seen up close were stupid and smelly, and she’d stopped drinking milk after that, much to her mother’s annoyance.
Thea sat up. The bedroom light was still on and the copies of the SOD meeting minutes were scattered across the counterpane. Ah, now it started to come back to her—she had nodded off while reading the incredibly boring and, so far, unenlightening records of those meetings that George had found so fascinating.
Something was wrong, though. Something about the house. It was much colder than it should have been—as if a door or window had been left open. She piled up the papers, pushed them to the side, and swung her legs out from under the covers. Brrr.
She had to hunt for her slippers, which were hidden under some pages that had slipped to the floor. Then she reached for her bathrobe at the foot of the bed and wrapped it tightly around her.
Tiptoeing into the hall, she turned on the light and headed straight for her mother’s room. At first glance she thought she could see the outline of Mother’s body in her bed, but a second, closer look told her that it was not her mother—only a pillow. Uh oh. Had Mother attempted to hide a midnight foray by using the old pillow-under-the-blanket ruse that Thea had learned as a child at camp?
She told herself not to panic as she ran to the other rooms upstairs where Mother could be, but there was no sign of her. Racing downstairs, she found the reason for the sudden cold; the back door was flung wide open. The storm door was closed, but it was not enough. After only a token search of the kitchen and adjoining den, Thea ventured out into the backyard. Now her heart was pounding, and full-blown panic was threatening to overwhelm her.
The motion-detector lights came on immediately, and she forced herself to stop and think instead of running wildly into the night. The security lights indicated that there had been enough of a time lapse since Mother had exited the house for the lights to turn themselves off. How long was their cycle? One minute? Two minutes? With that kind of lead she could be halfway down the block.
Thea couldn’t see any obvious signs of Mother in the backyard, so she ducked back inside the kitchen and found a flashlight in one of the drawers. Stepping outside again, shivering, Thea wondered if her mother had bothered to put on a coat—or even her bathrobe.
The motion-detector floodlights illuminated most of the backyard, but there were still corners with deep shadows where they didn’t reach. She turned on the flashlight and aimed it at the darkest part of the backyard—the area beyond George’s tool shed—and headed for the bushes bordering the back wall, thinking they would be a perfect place for Mother to hide. As she started to direct the light on the nearest bush, she heard a small sound. It wasn’t quite a giggle, more like a stifled cough, but close enough to bristle the hairs on the back of Thea’s neck.
She froze. “Mother?” she called out, hoping her voice didn’t sound as uncertain as she felt. “Is that you?” she asked, forcing the words out as if this was just another ordinary, everyday situation.
Sensing a presence coming up behind her, Thea began to turn when she was suddenly hit between the shoulder blades by a blow that dropped her flat on her face onto the nearly rock-hard, frozen ground, crushing the flashlight beneath her.
As she lay on the ground, she felt disoriented and dazed, and it hurt to breathe. The sharp edges of the flashlight’s broken rim lay directly underneath her solar plexus, and each breath reminded her of that. It took a few seconds for her to recognize the sound of heavy, thumping footsteps running away toward the side yard. Instinct told her that they belonged either to a man or a woman much larger in size than her mother.
If it wasn’t Mother, Thea managed to think through the fog that enveloped her brain, then who was it? And where the hell is Mother? Is she all right?
Thea roused herself and got to her knees, carefully brushing dirt and pieces of broken plastic from the front of her bathrobe. Wincing, Thea hunched over from the pain in her back, rubbing at the area where she’d fallen on the flashlight, consoling herself with the thought that both places were probably just bruised—she’d have big black-and-blue marks tomorrow. Then, a little unsteadily, she got to her feet, crunching more plastic remnants underneath them. She turned abruptly at the sound of a man’s voice calling out: “Hello, is anybody home?”
Standing at the backdoor, holding it open and peering inside, was a strange man in his pajamas and bathrobe.
It seemed highly unlikely that he would be the one who had just knocked her down and run away. No, whoever that had been was long gone. So this was somebody else wandering around in the backyard at this ungodly hour. Maybe she should put up a toll gate and charge admission.
Thea took a deep, painful breath and called to him, “Yes, I’m here. What do you want?”
“Oh.” He seemed startled at the sound of her voice and turned to gape at her. “Are you—do you live here?”
Thea walked toward him. She thought she recognized him as the neighbor next door, but it was hard to tell because the last time she had seen him he had been in a suit and tie at George’s funeral. He was looking quite a bit different now, with his red hair standing up in odd cowlicks, and he was wearing a blue bathrobe with yellow ducks on it.
“You live next door, don’t you?” she said as she drew closer, trying to keep some semblance of dignity even though she was in her nightclothes and covered with dirt and bits of grass.
“Yes,” he nodded his head a bit uncertainly. “Oh, I remember you now, you’re Daphne’s daughter from California, aren’t you? I’m sorry, but I’ve forgo
tten your name.” Before she had a chance to respond, he rushed on, “I hate to tell you this but you’ve got to come get her. She’s in my children’s playroom and she won’t leave. The damn cat is freaking out!” He paused to catch his breath before adding, “The kids, they don’t underst—ohmygod—the kids are scared to death!”
CHAPTER 16
At least she knew now where Mother was, Thea told herself in bitter consolation. For the moment, she had to forget about her assailant and the pain she was suffering. There was a more pressing situation to be dealt with. The fact that Mother had made her way in the middle of the night into the next door neighbors’ house—and now, apparently, wouldn’t go quietly—well, what did that say about the state of her illness? Had she crossed some indefinable line that would label her as a nuisance—possibly even dangerous? Of course, according to the Rockridge police, she was already the latter.
Thea hoped that the poor, put-upon man who was staring at her and wanting her to come and take care of the “problem” that had awakened and upset his family couldn’t see her own confusion and fear.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, making an effort to seem as if she were in command of the circumstances in which they found themselves. “Of course I’ll do what I can to get her out of your house. Just show me the way.” As he turned his back to her and started walking toward his own property, she said a silent prayer that she would be able to get Mother out without her making even more of a scene than she had already.
What Has Mother Done? Page 10