Mother's Day Murder

by Leslie Meier

  “Me? How can I stop it? It’s the way of the world,” he said, putting his napkin down beside his plate. “Sorry, but I’ve got to run. I’ve got office hours in half an hour.”

  “Thanks for the lunch,” said Lucy, reaching for her napkin and starting to rise.

  “No, no. Stay as long as you like. Finish your lunch.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Lucy, picking up her fork. “This salad really is delicious, and so was the soup.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell chiquita,” said Bart, taking his leave. A few minutes later she heard the crunch of his tires as his big Mercedes rolled down the pristine oyster-shell drive.

  Lucy sat there alone, enjoying the rare moment of quiet. There was no sound in the kitchen except for the ticking of the clock and the chirping of birds outside. The huge stainless-steel refrigerator clicked on and hummed a bit, then stopped. She savored each bite of salad, chasing down the last bit of walnut, the final dried cranberry. She had just finished but was lingering, hoping Alma might return so she could ask a few discreet questions, when Ashley wandered in.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, surprised.

  “I’m Lucy Stone, from the Pennysaver. I was interviewing your father. He left for work before I finished my lunch, so he told me to stay.”

  “Oh.” Ashley fingered her hair, which looked as if it needed a deep conditioning. In fact, it seemed to Lucy that the girl could use a decent meal. Her legs were little more than sticks, with round, bulging knees, and her collarbone poked up sharply beneath her pink Juicy Couture shirt. “I guess that’s okay then,” she said, taking a glass out of a cabinet and filling it from the water dispenser on the refrigerator door.

  “I saw your mother the other day,” said Lucy. “She’s doing okay.”

  “She’s in jail,” said Ashley.

  “Yeah, but she’s doing all right. I know she’d want you to know that.”

  Ashley gave her a sideways look. “Well, thanks for the info.”

  “Listen, I know you’re going through a lot right now, but there’s no point making other people’s lives miserable.”

  Ashley stared at her, scowling. “What are you talking about?”

  “My daughter. Sara Stone. You’ve been playing some mean tricks on her.”

  “Did she tell you that?” demanded Ashley, angrily.

  “That’s not the point,” said Lucy. She was angry herself but trying not to show it. “The point is that I know what you’ve been doing, and it has to stop.”

  “Whatever Sara’s told you, she’s lying. She just wants to get me in trouble. She’s the one who’s playing tricks, trying to make me look bad.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lucy. She was shocked at Ashley’s reaction. She’d expected contrition, maybe even an apology, but not this outright defiance.

  “Look,” said Ashley, pulling herself up to her full height and staring at Lucy with enormous, blazing eyes, “maybe my dad said you could stay, but you’ve finished your lunch, and it’s time for you to go.”

  “Okay,” said Lucy, picking up her bag. She paused at the door. “Tell Alma the lunch was delicious.”

  “Whatever,” said Ashley, slamming the door behind her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The walk back to the office passed in a flash as Lucy replayed the lunch with Bart. This was one guy, she decided, who did not improve upon a closer acquaintance. He claimed to love his wife but hadn’t really come up with a convincing denial of the rumors that he was a womanizer. Come to think of it, thought Lucy, if the way he treated Alma was any indication, he was a classic misogynist. He seemed to have absolutely no respect for women, viewing them as little more than beings created for his convenience and sexual gratification.

  The lunch had been delicious, the surroundings had been lovely, but somehow the whole experience had made Lucy feel a bit dirty. In most interviews she was able to establish a rapport with the subject, and she usually felt that she got to know the person in some way, but not with Bart. His desire to control things, to be in charge, got in the way of any real communication. His only interest had been getting her to believe the line he was spinning; there had been no real exchange at all.

  And what about Ashley? She seemed to be a chip off the old block, every bit as cold and callous as her father. Or was it just a front? Was she suffering all the insecurities normal to adolescence, compounded by grief and shame over her mother’s situation, but skilled at hiding her anxiety?

  The one conclusion that Lucy drew from her contact with the Humes was that they were not an appealing group. But if she were to choose, she decided as she opened the office door and set the little bell to jingling, Bart was the rottenest apple in that particular barrel. She suspected he might well be capable of anything as long as it seemed to be in his interest.

  “So what did you think of the doctor?” asked Phyllis. “Did he come on to you?”

  “No,” said Lucy. “He said he hopes to celebrate his fiftieth wedding anniversary with Bar.”

  “I guess you’re not his type,” said Phyllis, handing her a stack of press releases.

  Lucy sighed and settled herself at her desk, prepared for a slow Thursday afternoon since Ted was still away at the conference. She plugged away at the listings, routine work that involved reading press releases announcing various events, such as club meetings and ham and bean suppers, sorting them by date, and condensing the relevant details into a concise format for the Around Town section of the paper. Lucy usually enjoyed working on listings, because it offered a break from the more demanding task of reporting, but today she would have preferred something that involved more concentration. The listings were leaving entirely too many brain cells with nothing to do except worry about Sara.

  It was ridiculous, she told herself as she typed in the ticket price for the Sweet Adelines concert. School was supposed to be about learning, wasn’t it? About getting kids ready for college, right? And Sara had always had good grades; she was right up there in the top 10 percent. So why was she worried about this social nonsense? What did it matter if Heather and Ashley were spreading false rumors? Sara’s friends would know it was all lies. And as for the photo they’d circulated of Sara in her underwear, well, truth be told, the sports bra and cotton panties she wore on gym days covered a lot more skin than the bikini she’d worn last summer. And as for that rumor about Sara having sex with Chad, Lucy refused to believe it.

  Come to think of it, she told herself as she moved on to the police department’s lost property sale, there was a real possibility that she was a lot more concerned about Ashley and Heather’s mean tricks than Sara was. As a mother, she instinctively wanted to protect her daughter, but Sara seemed quite capable of taking care of herself. She had good friends, her teachers liked her, and she was surely better liked than Ashley and Heather, with their mean tricks—which was exactly what Lucy discovered when she got home.

  She had barely gotten through the door when Sara jumped on her with exciting news. “Guess what, Mom? Chad asked me to go to the movies with him on Friday night! It’s a date, a real date!”

  Lucy didn’t share her daughter’s enthusiasm. The well-supervised prom was one thing; a date with an older boy who had a driver’s license was another thing entirely. Lucy didn’t like the idea one bit. “Last I heard he was in jail,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Bail, Mom. And he says his lawyer is confident they can’t make the charges stick. He was just defending himself from Tommy.”

  “That’s a bit of a reach, isn’t it? After all, Tommy ended up in the hospital.”

  “He was in school today, with a broken finger, which serves him right, if you ask me. So what about the date?”

  Lucy didn’t want to handle this one. “You’ll have to get permission from your father.”

  Sara’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  “You heard me. You need to check with your father. After all, Chad’s quite a bit older than you are, and he has a driver’s license. I’
m not sure we want you to be in a situation like that. Maybe we could drive you to the movie, and you could meet him there.”

  “Mom! That’s crazy! It’s embarrassing!”

  “Better embarrassed than dead,” said Lucy as news footage of crashed cars ran through her mind. Every month, at least, it seemed some teen driver in the region managed to lose control and crash into a tree or stone wall. And often as not, the driver wasn’t alone but had a car full of friends. It was practically an epidemic. “Besides, you’re only fourteen. I’m not convinced that’s old enough for dating.”

  “I’m almost fifteen! And it’s a group date, Mom. A whole crowd is going.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” asked Lucy.

  “Aw, Mom. There’s safety in numbers, right?”

  “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘group pressure’?”

  “You’re so mean!” exclaimed Sara, storming out of the kitchen.

  “Goes with the territory,” muttered Lucy, opening the refrigerator and pulling out the chicken breasts she planned to cook for dinner.

  When Bill came home, he didn’t offer the support Lucy was looking for. “I don’t get it,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table and popping the tab on a can of beer. “You’ll spend hundreds of dollars on a fancy dress so she can go to the prom, but you don’t want her to go to the movies?”

  “It’s different,” began Lucy, sensing she wasn’t entirely rational on this subject. “The prom is supervised. They’re all dressed up. They’re on their best behavior. The movies, on the other hand, well…It’s dark and anything can happen.”

  “But you said she’s going with a group.”

  Lucy wanted to scream. “Weren’t you ever at a party where there was group pressure to do something you didn’t want to do, like, say, play spin the bottle?”

  Bill took a swallow and set the can down. “Nope. I always wanted to play spin the bottle.”

  “My point exactly!” she crowed, triumphant. “Do you want your daughter playing spin the bottle?”

  “In a movie theater?”

  “You know what I mean!” she exclaimed, disgusted. “She’s fourteen years old. This Chad is seventeen. That’s a big difference.”

  “Face it, Lucy,” said Bill. “She’s growing up. Sooner or later she’s going to get kissed. You’re going to have to let go and trust her to make the right decisions. I don’t have any problem with a group movie date.”

  “You’re the best dad a girl ever had!” exclaimed Sara, bursting through the door to the kitchen. “See, Mom. Dad understands.”

  “Not so fast, young lady,” said Bill, irritated by her eavesdropping. “There are some conditions. I want this young man to pick you up at the house, and I want him to come into the house to meet me. None of this honking the horn and you flying off without saying good-bye.”

  “No problem,” said Sara.

  “And don’t eavesdrop when your mother and I are having a conversation,” added Bill.

  “I’m sorry.” Sara lowered her head in an effort to look contrite.

  Lucy wasn’t convinced. She was furious with them both but knew when she was beat. “Supper’s ready,” she said, stabbing a chicken breast with a fork and transferring it from the skillet to a platter. “Sara, pour the milk.”

  Ted was due back at the office Friday morning but came in late due to a news conference at the county courthouse in Gilead, announcing that progress had been made in the Corinne Appleton case. The details, as he recounted them, were enough to give any parent pause.

  “You remember how that bird-watcher found those bones?” he began. “Well, the crime lab techs found some tire tracks nearby, and they were able to match them to a van belonging to a guy they’d questioned back when Corinne disappeared, a video store manager over in Lodi. Name is Martin Wicker.”

  “This guy’s been there the whole time?” Lodi, Lucy knew, was just a short distance from Shiloh and served as a commercial center for the area, with several bank branches, a supermarket, and a strip mall with several small shops, including the video store.

  “Yeah,” said Ted. “Wicker was a suspect because witnesses recalled seeing a white van in town that morning, but the cops didn’t have anything else on him until they made the match to the tires,” said Ted.

  “I suppose Corinne knew him. She’d been to the store?” asked Phyllis.

  “You said it. Apparently, he made a point of being real nice to the kids. He’d recommend movies and ask them how they liked them, stuff like that.”

  Phyllis frowned. “So when he pulled up in his van…”

  “She recognized him. She thought he was a nice guy, and she hopped right in,” said Ted.

  “That was pretty stupid,” said Phyllis.

  “He tricked her,” said Ted. “He made a full confession. He was apparently quite proud of himself. He told her he’d seen a little boy wearing a rec department T-shirt, stumbling along the sidewalk, and crying a few blocks back. He thought he must’ve skinned his knee or something and offered to take her to him and bring them both back to the park, where she could give him first aid. She felt responsible for the kid, since she was a rec program counselor, and she recognized Wicker. She thought he was okay. Better than okay, a really nice guy.”

  “This is seriously creepy,” said Lucy, thinking of how Sara had been flitting around town in her bikini. Would she have fallen for a trick like that?

  “What happened after that?” asked Phyllis.

  “There was no kid, of course, but he told her the kid must have decided to go back home. It was still about a half hour before the rec program was supposed to start, so he suggested they go for a little ride. He knew where there were some rare trillium flowers blooming in the woods, not far from the road at all. She hesitated, he said, but agreed as long as he promised to get her back to the park in time. Of course, he took her a good ways up the mountain road, and when she began to protest that she’d be late, there was really nothing she could do, short of jumping out of the van. When they finally stopped, she was pretty upset, crying, and he took that as an opportunity to hug her. She began to struggle, and he says that’s when he accidentally killed her, but the cops don’t buy it.” Ted paused. “There’s evidence she was in his apartment.”

  “Oh my gosh,” said Lucy, horrified.

  “It gets worse,” continued Ted. “They’ve got his van, and they found duct tape and plastic bags and a shovel in it.”

  “When they arrested him?” asked Lucy. “How come they didn’t find that stuff before?”

  “The stuff wasn’t there when they first checked the van.” Ted paused. “They think he was getting ready to do it again.”

  Lucy’s stomach lurched; she felt sick. “You mean he was out there, prowling for another young girl?”

  Ted nodded. “This is his mug shot, if you’re interested.” He pulled a Xerox copy of the photo out of his briefcase. It showed an ordinary-looking guy, about thirty years old, with glasses and a standard barbershop haircut. In profile he had a slightly receding chin.

  “He doesn’t look like a murderer,” said Lucy, “but they never do, do they?”

  “Well, if you ask me, when they catch him, they should just skip the trial and hang him,” declared Phyllis.

  “Amen,” said Lucy.

  Daughters were certainly a trial, thought Lucy as she helped Sara primp for her date. They wanted to be pretty and attractive, and you helped them with your motherly advice—“Try holding the blow-dryer like this” and “The pink lipstick is prettier”—and then you had to hope they weren’t going to attract the wrong sort of attention. As she fussed over Sara’s hair, she wondered if Corinne’s mother had given Corinne advice on her appearance that fatal morning. Wear the blue shirt, honey. It matches your eyes.

  “You’ve got your cell phone, right?” Lucy asked.

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Well, don’t hesitate to call if you feel the least bit uncomfortable.”

  “Mom
,” protested Sara, her cheeks turning pink. “He isn’t going to rape me or anything.”

  “I certainly hope not, but date rape does happen. Boys have a different physiology.”

  “What’s physiology?” asked Zoe, who was watching the process with fascination.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” said Lucy, bending low and whispering in Sara’s ear. “Remember, you don’t need to do anything you don’t feel right about.”

  “Mom!” exclaimed Sara. “Stop! It’s a movie. That’s all.”

  A dark suspicion suddenly formed in Lucy’s mind. “What movie?”

  “I’m not sure. Some superhero thing, from a comic book.”

  “Oh,” said Lucy, but her relief was short-lived. The sound of the doorbell sent her scurrying into the upstairs hall, where she could hear Bill’s conversation with Chad.

  “How ya doin’?” he was saying.

  “Good,” said Chad.

  Lucy waited for Bill to begin reading him the riot act, but she was disappointed.

  “You’re missing a good game,” said Bill. “Dice-K is pitching tonight.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Chad. “I’ll see it later. We’ve got DVR.”

  Come on, Bill, Lucy was saying to herself. Tell him she has to be home by eleven, no exceptions.

  “So how does DVR work?” asked Bill.

  Lucy wanted to scream.

  “It’s with the cable company. You can program the cable box to record games, whatever you want. It’s pretty cool.”

  Ask him about the movie, she muttered to herself. What’s the rating?

  “Is it complicated?” asked Bill.

  “Nah,” said Chad. “My mom can do it.”

  For pete’s sake, she fumed. Remind him to drive carefully.

  “I’ll have to look into it,” said Bill as Sara appeared at the top of the stairs.

  Observing their reaction as they watched Sara descend, Lucy was convinced she knew just how Dr. Frankenstein felt. She had created a monstrously attractive girl. They were both speechless, gazing upward, as this slender yet buxom blond vision in skinny jeans and a halter top bounced down, holding a sweater over her arm.