The Murder Motif: An Austin, Texas Art Mystery (the Michelle Hodge Series Book 2)

by Roslyn Woods

  You feel like some wine? I could come over.

  She typed back, Yes please.

  Shell jumped up, and by the light of her computer screen, pulled on a pair of jeans and grabbed the shirt she’d had on earlier and pulled it over her head. She caught up the brush that lay on her dresser and ran it through her hair a few times, but she wasn’t sure why, since it was utterly dark. The glow of the laptop gave her just enough light to make her way to the laundry room without bumping into boxes and furniture. One of those boxes has my flashlight in it, she thought. Why hadn’t she thought to find it before it rained? She had been excited about the new furniture, and she had just forgotten.

  She stood at the back door and waited. It took a good three minutes for Dean’s flashlight to appear through the downpour. Shell really couldn’t see him till he got to the porch, and then she could see he was wearing a slicker. She opened the door.

  “Hey, you’re not really spooked are you?” he asked as he pulled the slicker off and produced the wine and a fat candle.

  “Not anymore!” she said, laughing. “At least I finally have a couch for us to sit on,” she said, hanging his slicker on the hook by the door.

  “Yeah, I saw the truck earlier,” he said, stomping his feet on the mat. “You know, I thought I was being so smart corking the wine before I left my house, but I didn’t need to I guess. You’ve got everything here.”

  “Yes, but could I find it in the dark?” she asked. They were making their way to the living room by the light of Dean’s flashlight, and Shell was trying to remember where her wine glasses were. She hadn’t found a perfect home for any of her things yet. “You’re going to have to help me find glasses,” she said.

  “I should give you my mom’s hutch cabinet. You’d love it. It’s a Stickley, and you probably need it for your china and crystal. The kitchen’s not all that big in this house.”

  “I might borrow it from you,” said Shell. “But a Stickley! That’s pretty special.”

  “It’s just sitting in storage. Kind of a waste, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do. And it would be nice to be able to find my crystal, like right now.”

  “I’ll help you. First, let’s light this thing,” he said, putting the candle on the coffee table. He produced matches from his pocket and took a couple of tries at lighting it. When it was lit the room appeared in dark and ghostly shapes, but Shell wasn’t so nervous now. Dean was here with her, and the storm, though still loud, was much less upsetting.

  They went into the kitchen and checked in the likely cupboards till they saw the glint of glass reflecting the flashlight’s beam. They carried them back to the coffee table and Dean poured each of them a half glass by the light of the candle.

  “What are we having?” asked Shell as they sat down.

  “Old vine Zin from Napa.”

  “Ooh, that sounds nice,” she said as she breathed in the aroma from the glass. “Smells good,” she said. “How do you know so much about wine?”

  “I don’t really,” he answered. “But I like wine. I got interested when I was in California, I guess. I went to wineries, did some tastings. I had a friend who was into enology when I was working in the East Bay, and he educated me a little I guess.”

  “What were you doing in the East Bay?”

  “Before I came back to Austin I had a job developing software for stock market analysis in Silicon Valley.”

  “You know, computer stuff is all gibberish to me. I wish I wasn’t so out of it.”

  “Oh, everybody is,” he said, “if it’s not really your thing. I’m sure you know more than most people if you do word processing and email.”

  “I think you’re being generous!” laughed Shell. “Everybody does word processing and email. But I would like to learn more.”

  “If it was very hard, most people in the business couldn’t do it.” He was being kind, and she knew it.

  “Listen, it’s really nice of you to come over right now.” She was a little embarrassed.

  “It’s not really nice. I’m having a hard time dealing with my own stuff. I don’t want to be alone in the storm either. But at least I have Sadie. I thought of you here all by yourself,” he said.

  “Oh, poor Sadie!” said Shell.

  “She’s curled up with her chew toys,” he said. “I told her I’d be back.”

  “Well, I’m grateful. I’ve always hated storms. We didn’t have very bad storms where I grew up, but even those I hated.” They swirled the wine and Dean watched Shell’s face as she breathed in the aroma from the glass. Lightning flashed through the window, and her hair was lit up like gold for a moment.

  “Where did you grow up?” he asked.

  “Sacramento. I came to Austin for college. That’s where I met Margie.”

  “And you stayed.”

  “Yeah, I liked Austin, but I missed my mom. My dad had only been gone a year when I left, so I worried about her. When I graduated I talked her into moving here, and she got a little condo downtown. I actually moved in with her. It was great having her here, but I sometimes think it was unfair to get her to move away from everything familiar.”

  “But she came. She didn’t have to come did she?” he asked.

  “No. She knew I wanted to try living here, and she knew I’d been traumatized by my dad’s death and wanted to be away from the memory. Maybe she wanted to get away, too.”

  “How did it happen?”

  Shell didn’t answer right away. She had a sudden flashback to her dad saying goodbye that day so many years ago. I’ll be home by seven, he had said after embracing her mother. Then he had kissed the top of Shell’s head. See you later, Shelly Bean. Those were the last words she had heard him speak.

  “He was in a car accident,” she answered. “He traveled to Columbia JC to teach. Usually he took the main road, but that day he took the twisty back road through Gold Country. Anyway, there was stormy weather, a pretty hard rain for California, and something made him go over the side of a mountain. It’s one of those mysteries that stays with you and you keep wondering what exactly made it happen for the rest of your life.”

  “That’s tough,” he said, watching the candlelight flicker across her face. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots between her dad’s death and her hatred of storms. “You were close to your dad?”

  “Yeah, I was. He was a good father,” she said simply, but her throat was aching from thinking about him.

  “You’re lucky. Margie and I didn’t have that with our dad. Oh, he meant to be good, but he was just too selfish. He couldn’t think of us much.”

  “Or your mom?” she asked.

  “No, he couldn’t think of her and what she needed at all. I’ve pondered about his leaving her since it happened.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was nine. Traumas like that just stay with you, I guess.”

  “They weren’t having trouble?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, how much does a kid know about his parents’ relationship? But I think they were okay with each other. I think he was just one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind types who met someone at work and had an affair. He ruined our family so he could have a fling.” He paused and swirled the wine again. “Only it became more than a fling. It produced my sister, and he wasn’t all that great to her or her mom either.”

  “Do you think he was unhappy?”

  “After the break up with my mom? Oh yeah, I do. I think he ruined his own life. He started drinking heavily, and eventually that finished him. He died when I was twenty.”

  “It’s so sad for everyone,” said Shell.

  “Yeah,” he said, running his hand through his hair, “someone just makes a mistake really, a wrong turn, a thoughtless move, and then everything falls like dominoes.” He was staring at his glass now, and Shell got the feeling he was thinking about himself and not so much his father. He looked up at her then, and an expression of pain crossed his face that hurt her, too. “I shouldn’t ha
ve married her, Shell,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have married Amanda?”

  “I shouldn’t have. I was carried away.” Shell felt a little stab in her chest when he said that. He had been in love with her. Of course he had. She was beautiful and smart. Maybe he still loved her and would never get over her.

  “Sometimes the wrong thing seems right and we have to learn the hard way. If we’re lucky we get out,” she said remembering her own experience. “My relationship with Brad Bauer was like that. We’ve all made mistakes in relationships, chosen the wrong person till we knew them better. Sometimes, till we knew ourselves better.”

  “Yeah, but my mistake was a big one. My mom wanted to see me settled, and I knew it,” he said sadly.

  “You mean, you felt you needed to marry because of your mom?”

  “That was part of it,” he said. “She was sick. She had a heart condition. I knew she was worried about me. I’d had some relationships that hadn’t lasted, and she thought it was time for me to settle down.”

  “Seems pretty normal even without a heart condition.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t have any family but her. She saw me being the way I am, lost in my books or my work, not really connecting with other people. I can be kind of a loner that way. I’ve always expected a lot of other people, and there haven’t been very many people I’ve wanted to be close to. In books you get to know people who are good, noble even. It’s so different in real life.”

  “And your mother knew you had a tendency to get lost in literature?”

  “Oh yeah. She could be a little bit like that herself, so she understood me. She didn’t want to die knowing I’d be completely alone.” He paused and looked at Shell. “She even got me to reconnect with Margie.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “She told me one day that it was wrong that I lived in the same town with my little sister and I never spent any time with her. And she told me I should call her. She kind of insisted. I went to see her, and I felt a real bond. It surprised me, actually.”

  “She didn’t have anything against Margie?”

  “Maybe when she was young, but she got over it in her later years. She had to know it wasn’t Margie’s fault that our father had impregnated her mother. And she realized I needed my sister.”

  “And that she herself might not live very long?”

  “Yeah.”

  Somehow the story made Shell terribly sad. His mother’s last wish was for him to have love and stability in his life, and here he was in this awful place. She thought of her own mother and how deeply she had wanted Shell to have love in her life.

  After a long pause, Dean leaned forward and clinked his glass against Shell’s. “To new friends,” he said.

  “To new friends,” she answered looking up at him as she tasted the wine. It was good, some of the best wine she’d had in a long time. He sipped it too, and they both smiled for a moment.

  “This conversation can’t be any better than being alone in the storm,” said Dean apologetically.

  “Yes,” said Shell. “It’s better.” They sat in silence for a while, just drinking the wine and listening to the rain.

  “How could you have known it would be a mistake?” she asked with no preamble.

  “I should have. I should have gone slower, learned her character.”

  “And that would have kept you from marrying her?” she asked.

  “It would have kept me from thinking she was someone she wasn’t. And yes, it would have kept me from marrying her because I would have known I could never love her. I was in love with a phantom.

  “So how did it happen?”

  “I came to Austin, got a job at Dell, and met Amanda. She seemed like a good person then. Even now I don’t think she was a bad person. She was just messed up. But back then I didn’t know she was so materialistic, so angry. I didn’t know her values had been so wrecked by poverty and neglect. I projected my ideas about what I wanted her to be like onto her. And she said all the right things at first, was on her best behavior.”

  “You sound a little like you think she was conning you,” she said softly.

  “Probably not consciously, but yes, I feel I was taken in.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I learned she was nothing like the person I thought she was. It wasn’t exactly her fault, but everything I’d thought was attractive cracked off and fell away like a brittle mask. She became almost…ugly to me. It sounds mean, doesn’t it? I’m telling you my dead wife was ugly—”

  “It just sounds like she was wrong for you. You loved something she wasn’t. She’d just had too much damage.”

  Shell fell to thinking about Brad. She had thought there had to be some depth to him. She remembered the day he had come home and been confused that she needed some quiet time on the anniversary of her mother’s death. Mr. Nice Guy didn’t get it. She had thought, What you see is actually what you get. There IS nothing else.

  There was a sudden flash of lightning, and almost immediately, a deafening roar of thunder, but Shell didn’t jump. She felt a strange mixture of intimacy with Dean and sadness about life and how impossible things had been for Amanda, and for him, and even for herself.

  Outside, the rain was coming down even harder than it had earlier. They sat listening for a while.

  “What am I going to do if they charge me with murder?” he asked.

  “Why do you say that? Why would they do that?” she asked leaning closer to see his eyes in the darkened room.

  “Because they’re not very good detectives. They’ve got the husband with no alibi and a motive. What more do they need? They wouldn’t even investigate the intruder.”

  “Tell me what you mean. First, about the alibi.”

  “I was home by myself the whole day of the murder. I spoke twice on the phone that day. Once in late afternoon to Margie when she told me you needed a house, and once just before the police came when my friend Ray called. That’s it. There are no witnesses for where I was.”

  “The phone records wouldn’t help?”

  “They might, but the time of death was way before either call. They’d figure I’d had time to go up there and come back before the calls.”

  Shell thought about this for half a minute before asking, “And what about a motive?”

  Dean looked at her steadily and said, “Do you know how many men have murdered their wives to keep from giving them half their income? My business took off after I got married. She would have gotten half my income, probably more, when the divorce was final. And for how long? It would have been a long time. That would have been hard. Can you see how someone might see that as a motive?” He looked searchingly into her eyes and then looked away before he said, “And there’s more.”

  “What?” Shell asked breathlessly.

  “I’m pretty sure she was having an affair. If they get a whiff of the fact that I had an inkling of her having a relationship with someone, then they’ve got me with two motives.”

  “And you don’t think Sergeant Gonzalez is really working on leads? There have to be people and places that were connected to her to check out.”

  “I don’t know. All I know is, I’m their only suspect, and there’s not a thing in the world I can do about it.”

  “These things are problematic,” said Shell after thinking for a couple of minutes, “but they aren’t proof. They couldn’t charge you without some hard evidence, could they?”

  “Richert says no, but I’m worried.”

  “Then we have to search for leads ourselves. Someone did this awful thing, and they have to pay for it, not you.”

  They finished the wine and sat listening to the storm till it died down a bit. The rain continued to fall, but in a while the electricity came back on. They could hear the little beeps of the electrical appliances in the kitchen coming back on. It was still dark in the living room, but the light from Shell’s bedroom lamp illuminated things a little through the doorway to the hall. The
candle had almost burned away.

  “I should go,” said Dean, standing up.

  “I know,” she said softly, “but I’m glad we talked.” She stood up now too, and they walked through the kitchen and to the back door. “And thanks for the rescue,” she said. He looked back at her then and smiled briefly.

  “You’re not alone, Dean,” she added, looking up at him. And then he surprised her by putting his arms around her and holding her for a few moments. She could smell a woodsy fragrance in the fibers of his shirt, and she felt his breath in her hair when he said, “Don’t give up on me, Shell,” and he was gone.

  Chapter 16

  Margie put on blue oven mitts and pulled the tray that held three loaves of pumpkin bread from the oven. The aroma of cinnamon and ginger filled the kitchen as she poured two cups of coffee.

  “Donald!” she called. “You want a snack?”

  He was in his office looking at the computer monitor. “Yes I do!” he called back, closing the page he was on. He got up and went into the kitchen.

  “I’ve had several more messages from Dean’s surveillance system. Looks like it works really well,” he said.

  “You get the mailman and the neighbor lady with the casserole?”

  “Yeah, and a neighbor’s dog that came up to the front porch.”

  “I’m glad to know it works! Listen, I should probably let this bread cool before trying to cut it, but I think you need a break,” she said as she sliced the hot loaf.

  This was the life, staying home on a Monday, and Donald wanted more of it. Spending more time with Margie was his goal. They had decided that if he could set things up, she could take over billing his clients. He could handle counseling sessions Tuesday through Friday, and she could handle the paperwork, at least temporarily. It would allow them to have three-day weekends, and maybe the increased togetherness and calm would help them to have the baby they both wanted.

  Margie lifted an aromatic slice from the pan with the knife and put it on one of the small blue plates Donald had taken down from the cupboard.