Mother's Day Murder

by Leslie Meier

  He shook his head, then dropped to his knees beside his wife and picked up her limp hand, pressing it to his face.

  Lucy could hear the sirens approaching and willed the rescue squad to speed it up, to hurry. Tina’s life was spilling out onto the tennis court. Blood was now filling her mouth, but Molly continued to try puffing breaths through her nose until an EMT pulled her away. Lucy immediately put her arms around the shaking young woman, who began crying with deep, heaving sobs. Like Lenny, her shirt was smeared with Tina’s blood.

  “I tried. I tried,” she repeated, burying her head on Lucy’s shoulder.

  Lucy could only hold her and stroke her head while the EMTs quickly transferred Tina to a gurney and loaded her into the ambulance. Another member of the squad, a woman, took charge of Lenny and led him to the ambulance, too. In minutes, they were gone, and the police were cordoning off the court. Their radios sent up a constant squawk, and the lights on the squad cars flickered like strobes. It all seemed very unreal and disorienting; Lucy led Molly to a bench, and they sat down, holding hands. A young woman officer approached, carrying tissues and a foil blanket.

  “Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it’s not enough,” the officer said, enfolding Molly in the glittering silver wrap and seating herself beside them on the bench.

  “Is she dead?” asked Molly, dabbing her face with the tissues. Her eyes were red rimmed and swollen, her face splotchy.

  “I’m not a doctor,” said the officer, “but it doesn’t look good.” She paused. “If she does survive, it will be due to your quick action.”

  She pulled out an official-looking notepad with a black leather cover. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “We were leaving the spa, driving along the road,” began Lucy, “when we heard shots.”

  “How many?”

  Lucy looked at Molly. “Four or five?” she asked.

  Molly nodded. “About that.”

  Lucy went on. “I was afraid someone was shooting at us, so I drove to those rhododendron bushes and stopped the car, and I called nine-one-one on my cell phone and got out of the car….”

  “Why did you get out of the car?” asked the officer. “Why didn’t you just keep driving?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Lucy, amazed at her own recklessness. “You can’t just ignore something like that.”

  “We heard him screaming for help,” said Molly.

  The officer nodded. “What then?”

  “Well, we could see Tina lying on the tennis court, and Lenny was yelling for help,” replied Lucy.

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “No,” said Molly, sniffling and pointing to the wooded hill beyond the tennis courts. “We saw someone running away, up that way.”

  “Can you give a description?”

  Molly shook her head. “I only got a glimpse.”

  “Male or female?”

  “I’m not sure. Like I said, it was a blur, a white blur,” replied Molly.

  “The shooter was wearing white?”

  Lucy nodded. “Short blond hair. I noticed that. It was very bright in the sunlight.”

  “Then I got to the woman and started CPR,” Molly interjected.

  “And I stayed on the phone with nine-one-one,” said Lucy.

  “I guess that’s all for now. I just need some form of identification,” said the officer.

  “Up in the car,” said Lucy.

  “Names and addresses then.”

  “Can we leave?” asked Molly. “I have a baby at home who’s getting hungry.”

  In fact, the blanket had slipped, and Lucy noticed that Molly’s breasts were leaking milk, forming dark circles on her already blood-smeared blouse.

  “Sorry. Detective Horowitz wants to talk to you.” The officer gave a sympathetic little half smile. “He’ll be here soon.”

  Indeed, Lucy spotted a plain dark sedan pulling into the parking area, which she suspected belonged to the detective, and a few minutes later saw him enter the fenced area, where he was met by the officer who had just interviewed them. He listened attentively to her report, then took a few moments to study the geography of the site before approaching them.

  “Another body, Mrs. Stone?” he asked, one eyebrow raised as he stood in front of them. As always, he was dressed in a rumpled gray suit, and his thinning hair was also gray. He looked tired, with deep creases on either side of his mouth.

  “Just bad luck,” muttered Lucy. “Would it be okay if Molly went home to her baby?” she asked. “It’s long past feeding time.”

  He nodded and called for an officer to drive Molly home.

  Lucy watched as they hurried across the court, then turned to Detective Horowitz, who had taken Molly’s spot beside her on the bench.

  “I understand from your preliminary interview that you saw the shooter, whom you described as a person of indeterminate sex wearing white, with blond hair. Is that correct?”

  “We only had a glimpse,” said Lucy.

  “Don’t second-guess yourself,” he instructed. “Just try to think back to that moment and tell me what you saw.”

  Lucy closed her eyes. “I was in the car, driving, when we heard the shots. My first instinct was to flee. I put my foot down on the gas and speeded up until I reached the bushes by the driveway. But when the shots stopped, we could hear Lenny calling for help. We kind of peeked cautiously around the bushes at first, but then we saw Tina lying there.”

  “You knew it was Tina?”

  “Yeah, I noticed them as we drove past. I even said something to Molly.”

  “What did you do when you saw her on the ground?”

  “Molly started running toward her, and I was following, trying to talk to the nine-one-one operator and trying not to fall or run into a tree, and I saw, I saw something white that caught my eye. I tried to get a better look, but the person was moving very quickly, running, almost leaping up the hill, away from me. The figure kind of came and went, you know, disappearing and then reappearing as she, I don’t exactly know why, but I think it was a woman, as she ran through the trees and the shadows.” Lucy raised her hand and pointed. “See that clearing there? It was flooded with sunlight, and when she ran across, I could see she had blond hair.”

  “Long hair?”

  “No. Short, but it caught the light, you see. It was very bright. Unnatural, really. Maybe a dye job, or a wig.”

  He nodded. “You know, of course, that this shooter had to be a very good marksman. At least one shot went straight to the victim’s heart.”

  “Tina’s dead?”

  “I think that’s a safe assumption.”

  Lucy was silent, thinking. All of this seemed to point to Bar, but would the woman really shoot her rival? Finally, she spoke. “We got a press release last week at the paper announcing that Barbara Hume was named the Maine Gun Woman of the Year.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “What color is her hair?”

  Lucy didn’t like being a tattletale, but she figured she wasn’t telling Horowitz anything that the whole town didn’t know. “Blond.”

  “Does she know the victim?” asked Horowitz.

  “Oh yes. This is a small town, and they both have daughters in the same class at school.”

  “Were they friends?”

  “Not really.” Lucy paused, remembering the scene she had witnessed at the Mother’s Day brunch and debating whether or not to tell Horowitz.

  “Everybody knows they detested each other,” she said, speaking slowly, reluctantly. “I saw them fight in the IGA over the last issue of the Boston Globe. And at a brunch, I overheard Bar tell her husband that when she was target shooting, she never missed if she imagined Tina’s face on the target.”

  “Thanks,” he said, standing up. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “I wouldn’t make too much of it,” she said, calling after him. “It almost seems too pat, too easy.”

  It really did, she thought. It had seemed as if the shooter wanted to be see
n. Why else would she wear white? If she had worn black and covered her hair, she would have been able to melt, unseen, into the shady woods. It was all very puzzling, and Lucy wanted to get to the bottom of it. But first, she knew she ought to call Ted to let him know they had a breaking story on their hands.

  “Great work, Lucy,” he told her when she’d finished. “Now I’ll take it from here.”

  Lucy was dumbfounded. “What? It’s my story. I broke it.”

  “Yeah, but you have your hands full right now….”

  “Not that full…”

  “No. It’s best this way. I’ll take this, and you stick with the prom.”

  Lucy couldn’t believe it. “The prom?”

  “Yup.” Ted wasn’t about to argue. “That’s my final word. Now I gotta go.”

  Lucy snapped her cell phone shut and sat for a few minutes, watching as the white-suited crime-scene officers examined every inch of the tennis court’s surface. Other officers were combing the woods, looking for the spot where the shooter had stood. She heard a shout and saw someone waving from a patch of rock that offered a clear view of the tennis courts below. Players, absorbed in their game, would never have noticed the predator perched high above them. The thought made Lucy shudder, and she stood up, eager to get away from the evil that seemed to sit like a low-lying cloud over the place. She could almost feel it, like a dank morning mist that gave you goose bumps, and she hurried toward the gate, where Horowitz was conferring with a couple of officers. They moved aside to let her pass, but he held up his hand, indicating he wanted a word with her. She had to fight the impulse to flee while she stood a polite distance away, waiting for him.

  Finally, he turned and approached her. “There was something I forgot to mention,” he said.

  Lucy knew what was coming. “I know, I know. Mind my own business. Leave this investigation to the professionals. Well, don’t worry. I’m not covering the shooting. Ted’s assigned me to a different story.”

  “Well, good,” said Horowitz, nodding. “If you don’t mind, what’s the other story?”

  “The prom,” said Lucy.

  “The prom!” exclaimed Horowitz, chuckling. “You, covering the prom! That’s a good one.” He grinned mischievously. “I’ll alert the rescue squad, tell them to keep an ambulance on standby.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Lucy, who wasn’t finding this the least bit funny. “Are you implying that I had something to do with this?”

  “Well,” he said, “you do seem to have a knack for finding bodies.”

  “Pure coincidence. I was here for a relaxing day of pampering at the spa.”

  “You should demand a refund,” advised Horowitz before turning and heading into the woods for the climb to the rocky patch.

  For once she agreed with him, thought Lucy, walking along the driveway back to her car. This had hardly been the soothing experience she had been looking forward to. The blissful sense of relaxation she had felt after her massage was long gone; now it seemed as if every muscle in her body was clenched tight. Even worse, she felt exposed and vulnerable, as if she had a target painted on her back, and she had to resist the urge to keep looking over her shoulder. It wouldn’t do any good, she realized as she dragged the car door open and collapsed behind the steering wheel, because if the shooter had her in her sights, she’d never be able to avoid the bullet.

  Chapter Nine

  Driving home, Lucy couldn’t erase the image of that red stain spreading on Tina’s white Ralph Lauren shirt, swallowing up the little embroidered polo player logo. Even at a gallop, he couldn’t escape the flowing blood, and neither could Tina. This was no random shooting, not one of those frequent Boston drive-by shootings that hit innocent bystanders. Whoever had shot Tina had carefully chosen a spot that gave a clear line of fire and had deliberately and cold-bloodedly chosen her as a target.

  But was Bar the shooter? She certainly had the means: she was recognized as a skilled shooter and owned guns. She also had had the opportunity, but for that matter, so had the whole world. Tina had been shot in plain sight. And what about motive? Sure, the two had been rivals, but that had been going on for a long time, and when Lucy interviewed them about the after-prom party, they had apparently agreed to disagree while working together on a shared project. She could hardly believe that they’d suddenly had a conflict strong enough to prompt one to kill the other. But, she admitted to herself, it could all have been a big show for her benefit. Her instincts weren’t infallible. She’d been fooled before and likely would be fooled in the future. It was one of the hazards of reporting.

  And she knew from her own recent experience with Sara that sometimes it was difficult for a mother to separate her emotions from those of her child. If Bar had felt that Ashley was somehow threatened by Heather, she might have come to the tortured conclusion that killing Tina, Heather’s mother, would somehow tip the scale in Ashley’s favor. But that, she decided, would mean that Bar was seriously unbalanced, and that did not seem to be the case at all.

  Approaching the turn onto Red Top Road, Lucy sped up. She was eager to reach the safety and security of home, but as she tooled along the wooded road, she had a sudden mental replay of the shooter fleeing through a similar landscape. All she’d seen, really, was that blond head of hair and a blur of white shirt, and once again, she thought it was an odd outfit for an assassin to choose. It was almost as if the shooter had wanted to be seen and identified. But why? Was Bar hoping that the jury would buy the argument that she would never have behaved so stupidly, especially right after the Gun Woman of the Year Award was announced? Or, thought Lucy, turning into her driveway, had Bar been set up by someone else?

  “Gee,” observed Bill as she entered the kitchen, “I thought you’d come home glowing and relaxed. You look like you’ve just witnessed a train wreck.”

  “Kind of,” said Lucy, slipping her arms around his waist and resting her head on his chest. “Tina Nowak got shot on the tennis court at the spa.”

  Bill jerked away. “What?”

  “Molly and I had a lovely time, we both felt great, and we were on our way home, driving past the tennis courts, when we heard shots. She was down. Lenny was holding her. She was bleeding….”

  “Oh my God.” Bill pulled her closer. “That’s terrible.”

  “Molly tried to give her CPR, but the EMTs don’t think she’ll make it.”

  “Shot, right out in broad daylight?”

  “Yeah. We even saw the shooter running away.”

  “Could you tell who it was?”

  “I’m not sure, but it looked a lot like Bar Hume.”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Bill, shaking his head. “I mean, everybody knew they hated each other, but this is crazy.”

  “What’s crazy?” asked Sara, coming into the kitchen and staring at her mother. “I thought a facial was supposed to make you look better.”

  “Your mother had a bit of a shock,” said Bill.

  Sara was opening the refrigerator door. “Like what?”

  “Tina Nowak got shot on the tennis court,” said Lucy.

  “By Bar Hume,” added Bill.

  Sara dropped the bottle of tomato juice she was holding, and it began to flow onto the floor, oozing across the wide wooden planks.

  Lucy stood watching as the red liquid pooled on the floor, just like Tina’s blood had spread beneath her on the tennis court, and felt herself getting very dizzy.

  “Whoa there,” cried Bill as she slumped against him in a dead faint.

  Sunday morning was like Mother’s Day all over again. Bill ordered Lucy to stay in bed while he made waffles for breakfast. Zoe delivered the tray, which had been decorated with a little bunch of pansies from the garden, and Bill followed with the morning paper.

  “The shooting made the front page,” he told her.

  Lucy stared at the headline, which announced FATAL SHOOTING SHOCKS SMALL TOWN, then set the paper aside. It wasn’t exactly a shock; she hadn’t expected Tina to live, but she had hoped for a
miracle. “I can’t face reading that just now,” she said, taking a sip of orange juice. Before she knew it, she’d polished off her entire breakfast of blueberry waffles with maple syrup, bacon, orange juice, and coffee.

  She had set the tray aside and was perusing a glossy home and garden special section when the phone rang. It was Ted. “I guess you heard that Tina’s dead,” he began.

  “I saw the headline,” she admitted. “It wasn’t really a surprise. Any new developments?”

  “Police are still investigating,” he said.

  “No arrest?”

  “Not yet. They’re waiting for forensics.”

  “Oh,” said Lucy. She could hear voices in Sara’s room. Sassie and Renee had slept over the night before, and it sounded as if they were beginning to wake up.

  “I’m shooting for…uh, sorry about that. I want to put out a special edition, so I need you to come in this afternoon. Is that okay?

  “Sure,” said Lucy, somewhat surprised. Ted, always budget conscious, rarely ran a special edition. What was going on? Was he trying to impress a potential buyer?

  “Good,” said Ted. “You can write the obit.”

  Lucy was about to protest, but he’d already hung up.

  She was studying a photo of a charming cottage garden that mixed flowers and vegetables in the home and garden special section when Sara passed her open door and did a double take. “Why are you still in bed?”

  “Dad thought I should take it easy today because of the way I fainted yesterday,” she explained. “He gave me breakfast in bed.”

  “Can I look at the paper?”

  “Sure.” Lucy passed over the front section, watching for Sara’s reaction.

  “Golly,” she said, sitting down on the foot of the bed. “Are they gonna arrest Mrs. Hume?”

  “Ted says they’re waiting to see if the bullet came from her gun.”

  “What’s going on? Can we come in?” Renee and Sassie were clustered in the doorway, adorable with their sleep-mussed hair and pastel jammies.

  Sara held up the paper. “Mrs. Nowak died.”

  “That’s awful,” said Sassie.