by A W Hartoin
The smile dropped off his face like it had never been there and that was way more creepy. He reminded me of a mannequin.
“Don’t mind him,” said Leslie. “He has an enthusiasm for the Napoleonic Wars.”
“Among other things,” I said.
“What would you like to know?”
I went over, tightening my grip on Pick’s leash, and took the bayonet out of John’s hand. “Who paid for the Lions to come here?”
“You’re very comfortable with weaponry,” said John.
“I’m Tommy Watts’s daughter. It was required. Now about the Lions?”
Leslie shrugged. “Our guest’s finances aren’t our concern.”
We went around and around for ten minutes, but they weren’t going to say a thing.
I placed the bayonet back in the case. There were three rows of the nasty things lined up and tagged with their particulars and provenance. There was a whole lot of death in that case and standing beside me in the form of John.
I closed the case rather forcefully. “Do you want me to solve this or not?”
“Of course. But, if you don’t, we’ll make other arrangements,” said Leslie.
That sounds ominous.
“Good luck with that. If I don’t solve it, you’re going to be getting lots of attention. Springfield will be crawling all over this place. Right now, nobody knows I’m here. The minute the real cops arrive, my presence is no longer a secret and you aren’t either.”
“Are you threatening us?” asked Leslie with a smile. Clearly, it wasn’t his first time.
“Hello. I’m here. There’s been a murder. You think the press isn’t going to notice?”
“I see your point.” Leslie tapped his strong chin and glanced at John.
“She is Tommy’s daughter,” said John.
Leslie nodded. “Cherie didn’t pay. We comped it.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“The team is talented. Taylor is talented. He shouldn’t lose the scholarship because of where he’s from.”
“That’s very generous,” I said.
And a lie.
“If you won’t tell me the real reason you comped this very expensive weekend, then maybe you’ll tell me something else.”
“What’s that?” asked John.
“Are you missing any gloves?”
For the first time, they looked surprised.
“Not that I know of,” said Leslie. “Should we be?”
I told them about the gloves in the fire pit, but it somehow slipped my mind to mention Pick’s part in it. The poodle lay at my feet, making throaty growling noises. Despite the threat that Leslie and John so obviously posed to me and pretty much everybody else, I felt calm with a fierce poodle beside me. If nothing else, Pick could do some damage before John shanked him.
Leslie called the staff, asking about the gloves and I turned to John.
“Did the other teams know the Lions would be here? I had the impression they didn’t.”
“We don’t let the teams choose their companions. They pick their week and that’s it.”
“But Cherie knew who would be here.”
John merely stared at me. That line of inquiry was over.
Leslie slipped his phone into his vest pocket. “Our head gardener reports that a pair of mechanic’s gloves are missing.”
“From where?” I asked.
“His workroom in the Crystal Tower.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s the tower next to your original tower,” said Leslie.
“Overlooking the rock garden?”
“Naturally. It’s the one with the arched stained glass windows.”
My chest got tight. “Everyone had access to the workroom?”
Leslie nodded. “The door wasn’t locked and it’s next to the exit to the rock garden.”
“Alright. I’m going to call Phelong and have them come out to dust,” I said.
“Of course.”
“I want to know exactly how Cherie ended up with these particular teams.”
John and Leslie remained silent. Something in the way they gazed at me said I wouldn’t get another thing out of them and they sure weren’t getting anything out of me.
“I see,” I said.
I didn’t really see. There was something about those teams. Something about them being at the castle together. That wasn’t an accident. They could’ve told me more. One thing was clear. Leslie and John wanted the Lions there enough to pay for it. Why? Because they knew Cherie would get killed? No, Leslie was upset. He didn’t expect it. I was sure of that. John, on the other hand, was blank. He didn’t care one way or the other.
The other teams cared about Cherie being there and about her death, at least as how it related to them. They cared a lot. No. That wasn’t right. Not at first anyway. It was only the Vipers who cared at that first dinner. Robin and the Grizzlies showed surprise and discomfort. But the Vipers? That was something else.
I found the Troublesome Trio in the library, collating data and working on the map.
“There you are,” said Sorcha. “Do you have some new clues?”
“I do. Can I use your laptop?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Do we get to know what you’re going to do with it?” asked Jilly, twirling a colored pencil between her fingers.
“Sure. I want to do a background on Cherie,” I said, taking Sorcha’s laptop to a cushy green leather sofa.
“Didn’t Morty do that?” asked Bridget.
“No. He said he would and then he didn’t. He wants me to eat more for it.” I opened the laptop and went to a background investigation site I’d seen Dad use.
“Eating wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
“It’s a bad thing. Trust me.”
My cousins exchanged looks and Sorcha said, “You’re awfully thin.”
“You should talk.” The Troublesome Trio were much thinner than me. Okay. Maybe not much thinner but my cousins were straight up skinny.
“But we’re built this way,” said Jilly. “You’re not.”
“You just want me to be flubbery again.”
“We want you to be you again.”
“Whatever.” I put in what little I knew about Cherie. I had her license plate number and that was gold. Ten minutes later, Cherie’s life was emailed to me in a nutshell, and it wasn’t interesting in the slightest. No arrests. She was an LPN at a nursing home, did home care on the side, and delivered newspapers in the middle of the night. No wonder her kids loved her. The woman had no life. Worse than no life. Her husband died in a drunk driving accident. Car vs tree. Anthony wasn’t her father as I had assumed. He was her husband’s father, a retired Chrysler worker.
Cherie had a mortgage, which she mostly paid on time, and the minivan was their sole vehicle. None of this was helpful. It certainly didn’t connect Cherie to the Vipers. What had Dr. Watts said? The cutting was from a long time ago. Maybe if I went farther back. Cherie graduated from St. Sebastian Senior High School in St. Sebastian, MO. I knew St. Seb better than I wanted to, having found a body there once.
I paid to get Cherie’s school records and got them in another ten minutes. Her life was completely available. Nobody had any privacy. It was just a matter of money and interest.
Cherie’s school records were no more revealing. She never got in trouble and graduated with a 3.3. She was seeing the school counselor for the last three months before graduation. That was odd. There weren’t any records of her going before that.
I quickly paid for her medical records and they were pretty thin. She’d been healthy or at least healthy enough. Her parents didn’t have health insurance. They used credit cards for a couple of ear infections, strep, and a yeast infection treatment. It wasn’t until she was in college that there were records of depression and the meds that went with it. I couldn’t see any details of her situation. Thank goodness for that. I needed to know, but it wasn’t right that anyone with
a credit card could know her most intimate secrets.
Jilly plopped down next to me and Pick jumped in her lap, making her squeal about his toenails before asking. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing. She had an ordinary life.”
“That can’t be right. How are you supposed to figure it out?”
“I’ll have to be creative,” I said.
“Then get to it.”
“Thanks for the motivation. Let me think.”
Cherie was depressed in college and all her adult life, taking a variety of meds to cope with it. But she went to the school counselor in 1987. Okay. 1987, it is. I found the online site of the St. Sebastian Herald and poked around their records. For a tiny town, the Herald had it going on. They had their editions on file back to 1980. Excellent. Not so excellent was the search engine or lack thereof. I had to go through the editions one by one, starting with the week Cherie had her first meeting with the counselor. Nothing. The big excitement that week was some kids vandalized both of the town’s gas stations and I didn’t think that would throw Cherie into counseling. I went back a week, another week, and then a third. That’s when I found it in black and white, a front page article next to the article about The Charlie Daniels Band. The article I wanted was about a high school senior who’d fallen to his death off a railway trestle. Cherie was one of three witnesses. The kid was drunk. They all were. The article said that there would be a police investigation, but it was thought to be an accident. The boy’s name was Quinn Hasselback. He didn’t go to school with Cherie. He went to the catholic high school. Quinn. That was an unusual name. The Vipers had a Quinn, Nicole’s son.
“I’ll be right back.” I jumped up and tugged Pick off Jilly’s lap.
“Where are you going?” asked Bridget.
“To the parking lot, if I can find it.” I wasn’t even sure which door I’d come in, much less which one to go out.
“I’ll take you,” said Sorcha. “I have an excellent sense of direction, plus I’ve been studying the map.”
“Thank god,” I said. “Lead on.”
We went through a maze of hallways and ended up in the copper pot kitchen. All roads led to food and it was not a good thing.
“Oh my god,” said Sorcha. “What is that smell?”
Aaron was hard at work, stirring a huge stockpot with a wooden paddle. One of his assistants was slipping a white tube over what looked like a broom handle in the sink.
Pick went crazy, sniffing and wagging. I gagged. “Aaron! Why? Why would you do it?”
He turned and there was a white tube hanging off his paddle. It kinda looked like a ginormous condom. It wasn’t a condom, but I would’ve sooner eaten a condom than what he had in that pot.
“Huh?” he asked.
Sorcha’s shoulders heaved. “What is it? What is it? Oh my god. It’s like something died but worse.”
“He’s making andouillettes,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“A French sausage made of intestines.” Another gag. Myrtle and Millicent forced me to tour an andouillette factory in Troyes, France. That place should’ve made up another circle of hell for Dante. One entitled ‘Smell.’ After the tour, during which I utilized not one but two trash cans, they made me try a sausage during lunch. Myrtle said I must not dismiss things before trying them. Myrtle is usually right about everything. In that case, she was dead wrong. It was perfectly okay to dismiss intestine sausage out of hand.
“Don’t sausages have intestines normally?” Sorcha waved her free arm frantically in front of her nose. “What is that smell?”
“Normal sausages use intestines as the casing. Andouillette is made up of intestines. On the inside.” The memory of biting into that rubbery sausage and how it bounced off my teeth in a most unpleasant way still haunted me. During our lunch in Troyes, the chef kept a beady eye on me to see if the little American could swallow and smile. I did swallow, dammit, and I smiled at him. When he turned his back, I told Myrtle and Millicent I saw a cockroach on the ceiling and tossed the rest out the window. It seemed like such a good idea. Everybody was happy. The sausage, if you really insist on calling it that, was gone and they thought I ate it. But like most things in my life, it backfired. The owner was so pleased, he brought me another sausage on the house. I wanted to stab myself in the throat with my fork.
“Why would anyone want that?” asked Sorcha.
“It’s an acquired taste.”
“Who would want to acquire it?”
“The French.”
“Of course, it’s French,” she sneered.
I grabbed her hand and dragged her and the drooling Pick toward the door. “Don’t judge. Your dad likes pickled pig’s feet.”
She made a horking noise as I pushed her out the door and pointed at Aaron. “I’m not eating that.”
“I trained in Troyes,” he said, his glasses fogged up with intestine steam.
“Nobody’s going to eat that.”
“Morty.”
“Morty requested this atrocity?”
“No.”
“Who asked for it?”
“Morty said he’ll eat it.”
“But who…oh never mind. Tell Morty I’d rather this case go unsolved than eat one bite of that sausage.”
“Huh?”
I shrieked in frustration and slammed the door. Sorcha was leaning on the wall, taking deep breaths. “Is that really what that sausage is supposed to smell like?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” I pulled her off the wall and we skirted the love garden.
“How do you know?”
I told her the story of the factory tour and she laughed until tears overflowed. “I always thought your trips with The Girls were magical. I wanted to go so bad. Now I feel better. You had to eat intestines.”
“Remind me to tell you about the lutefisk in Norway.”
“That sounds pretty bad.”
“There are no words bad enough for it.” I hooked my arm through hers. “I didn’t know you wanted to go on those trips.”
“Of course, I did. We all did. You were so special and we were just us.”
“I wasn’t special.”
Sorcha snorted a delicate little snort. “Yes, you were. It’s like you belong to them like you were part of the Bled family. We could never figure out why.”
I thought about the photo album I’d found in New Orleans and the link between me and the Bleds that it contained. I nearly told her about it while we walked out to the parking lot. Only the memory of the duct tape Sorcha certainly had in her suitcase held me back. I was starting to like my cousins, but they were still my cousins. Not to be entirely trusted.
We found the Vipers’ van in the center of the parking lot. I went around to the back and the memorial was as I remembered it.
Rest in Peace
Beloved
Q
March 3, 1987
“That’s it,” I said.
“What’s it?” asked Sorcha.
“The link between the teams and the reason the Lions and the Vipers are here together.”
“Who’s Q?”
I took the laptop bag from her. We headed to a nearby tree and sat in the shade beneath the branches. I opened the laptop and showed her the article.
“Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe the detail.”
“It’s a standard newspaper article.”
“But still.”
Okay.
I clicked on the background investigation site and paid for an investigation of Nicole. Ten minutes later, the connection was secured. Nicole was Quinn Hasselback’s younger sister. It could not be a coincidence that she and Cherie ended up at the castle together, but I doubted either of them was the one behind it. The Vipers hadn’t been happy to see Cherie and she started cutting again after she got here. Someone put them together, but why? To get Cherie killed? Revenge? That was pretty evil so naturally I thought of John. I was sure he killed whoever was in the woods, but what did he have
to do with Cherie and Nicole? Why would he care about them? He didn’t seem to care about much.
I went back to the article and looked at the other names. Carl Cox and Shaun Simmons were the boys who’d been there that day on the bridge. Carl went to school with Cherie. Shaun went to Immaculate Heart with Quinn. They were on the baseball team together. Quinn was the star pitcher and Shaun was his catcher. Immaculate Heart was the same school Nicole’s son, Quinn, went to according to the bumper sticker on the van.
“Who are these people?” asked Sorcha.
“Nicole is the dead boy’s sister,” I said.
“Which one is Nicole?”
My eyes stayed on the screen. “The one with the long nails.”
Sorcha wrinkled her nose. “Those are over the top.” Then she lost interest and lay down in the grass. “I wonder what Oliver’s doing right now.”
“I’m guessing something to do with baseball.”
“Did you know he was a major league pitcher?”
“Uh huh.” I focused on the Herald and let Sorcha rattle on about Oliver and how smart he was, etc. I found the articles over the next few months more interesting. The three survivors from the bridge were exonerated. Quinn had been drinking and lost his balance. Case closed, except it wasn’t. The Hasselback family raised a stink, not about the boys but about Cherie. They wanted her charged with everything from criminal mischief to murder because they said she brought the alcohol to the bridge so it was her fault. The police declined to charge her with anything. There was some noise about a lawsuit, but the judge threw the case out, citing that Quinn was eighteen at the time and Cherie was seventeen. No one made Quinn drink and nobody pushed him. It was an accident and that should’ve been the end of it. The memorial on the back of Nicole’s van told me it wasn’t.
Carl and Shaun had an easier time of it. Nobody blamed them and I gathered it was because they had prominent families. Carl was the son of the town dentist and Shaun’s father was a retired Army colonel. Cherie’s family was deemed white trash. The Herald didn’t come out and say it, but it wasn’t hard to figure out how people saw her.
I ran background checks on Carl and Shaun and their good fortune ended with graduation. Carl died after he fell out of his dorm window during his sophomore year in college. His blood alcohol was twice the legal limit. Shaun was a star pitcher with a full ride to Mizzou. He did go to Mizzou but blew out his knee his junior year and left school. He joined the army, served one enlistment, and disappeared. And I mean disappeared. Shaun went backpacking alone in Estes Park, Colorado and was never seen again. He was declared dead seven years later. Cherie was the sole survivor and somebody had a bone to pick.