Quinn shrugged and shouted, "You got me. Who?"
"Alison's old man, that's who! I guess he recognized me from the old days when he used to bring in his truck for a tune-up; I don't know where he takes it now. Anyway, we were at the same self-serve island at the Shell—near the IHOP? I haven't seen him in years. Man, the old bastard is as ornery as ever. I don't know how Alison ever put up with him."
"She didn't," Neal said, flattening a beer can with his shoe. "She got herself her very own knight in shining armor."
"Oh, yeah—Sir Lancelot," Cutter said with a snort. "A lotta help he was."
"What did you expect? What did Randy Lancelot ever end up doing for any of us?"
"Not take us all the way, that's for sure. Sixth place, that he could do. Whoopee."
They laughed contemptuously and turned to other talk, leaving Quinn sitting there stunned. The exchange had come and gone in the crunch of a potato chip, but it left no doubt in Quinn's mind that Rand Bennett had been deeply involved with his cousin Alison. The question was, what kind of involvement? Quinn had never seen any evidence that the two had been close. Did that itself point to a secret involvement of a sexual nature? Or had Rand simply and quietly been acting like the big brother that Alison never had?
Quinn felt as if he'd been staring into a kaleidoscope and someone had given it a giant turn.
"Hey, Cutter!" he said, trying to get the talk back on track. "You never told me what Alison's old man said."
"Oh, yeah. He said, 'Is that punk still hangin' around town?' And I said, 'Which punk would that be, Rupert?' And he goes, 'It's Mr. Bennett to you, you little punk.' And I go, 'Not if your truck ain't in my boss's garage.' "
"Good one, Cutter," said Neal. "What'd he say then?"
Cutter popped a tab on another can and said, "His exact words were 'Tell Quinn I know where he lives.' That was it. Then he went inside to pay for his gas and leer at this chick behind the counter who was young enough to be his daughter, naturally."
"He's had plenty of practice at that" said Todd, sneering into his beer.
"Todd, put a lid on it, would you?" Mike Redding snapped. "It's ancient history. Ray, turn that damn thing down! The game's starting, for chrissake." He glanced at Quinn apologetically, as if he could no longer be responsible for the juvenile behavior of their old teammates now that they were grown.
It was another wild turn on that kaleidoscope. Quinn sat back in his plaid chair, mesmerized by all the new pieces he saw. A mere ten percent of his brain was needed for following the game and keeping up with the score; the rest was focused on the shocking innuendo that had been run past him in the last few minutes.
Rand. Alison. Rupert. It was a triangle of involvement that Quinn couldn't have imagined in his wildest dreams. Immediately his mind, like a computer, began mulling the possible combinations. The more he mulled, the queasier he got. He pushed away the half-eaten jerky; he couldn't stand even to look at it.
Someone impregnated Alison, and someone killed her.
Those were facts. Alison hating her father, Rand becoming her knight, Rupert leering at girls—that was all gossip. Quinn knew all about the downside of gossip. It wrecked dreams and it ruined lives.
But assuming that there was some kernel of truth in the guys' drunken remarks—what then? Quinn couldn't think about Rupert without picturing his niece. He couldn't think about Rand without picturing his twin sister. And he couldn't think about Alison without picturing her cousin. Olivia was everywhere in his thoughts, slinky in silver, soft in wool sweaters. Olivia—idealistic ... loving ... defiantly loyal to family and friends, including outcasts like him.
Oh, damn. Oh, hell. Please ... let it have been someone with no connection to her. A bum. A teacher. The mayor of Keepsake.
By the end of the first game, Quinn resolved to corner Mike Redding in the next couple of days and find out what he knew. If Mike wouldn't talk, Quinn would go to Cutter, then to Neal, and on down the line. Someone had to be willing to pass on the full dirt—which was all Quinn believed it was. If there had been anything truthful to it, Mrs. Dewsbury or Father Tom would have heard about it over the years.
Yes. Idle gossip between horny teammates who'd lusted after the mysterious Alison themselves. Quinn remembered well their locker-room talk about the girl. Everyone wanted her; none of them had had her.
The Cotton Bowl ended in overtime. Quinn groaned inwardly as he cheered outwardly. Eventually Tennessee beat Nebraska and they all moved on to the Sugar Bowl. From the first pass, run all the way in for the touchdown, the Sugar Bowl was a blowout—boring, interminable, and embarrassing, at least to Quinn. The rest of the guys loved it, of course. As with sex, they didn't care who scored, as long as it was often.
By halftime Quinn had had all he could take. Over everyone's protests, he stood up to leave. His excuse was lame—he told them he'd promised to bring back a prescription for Mrs. Dewsbury. It was the best he could do.
"Y'know—you may as well be married," said Neal with more than a hint of condescension.
Quinn laughed it off, but Mike was feeling his beer. "You should talk, Neal," he said with a burp. "You're gonna have to install a freaking dishwasher for having today off."
"Oh, like you're here free and clear? Who's in charge of the sleepover at your house next Friday? Huh? Who?"
"You guys are pathetic," said their bachelor host. "Tell you what. I'll give you eight bucks an hour if you come and clean this dump on your next day off," he teased. "I'll even supply all the rags."
"Hey, here's a thought," said Cutter, also single. "You can call yourselves the Merry Mates. Get it? Merry Mates?"
"Haw-haw-haw."
Their pissing contest was still in full swing when Quinn waved them all a genial good-bye and took off.
Somewhere during the second quarter of the Cotton Bowl, he'd had a premonition. He didn't like to think of it that way; he was more comfortable calling it a hunch. Either way, he wanted to act on it.
Before heading back to Mrs. Dewsbury's house, he drove downtown, parked his car on one of the deserted streets there, and strolled around the corner to check out Miracourt. He was relieved to see that it looked the same: sophisticated and warm and inviting, and all in one piece. He strolled up to the window and peered inside, checking out the interior to make sure that everything was okay. Several glass-shaded lamps threw a soft glow over the fabrics and trimmings scattered around the shop. It all reminded him of Olivia. He liked that.
Reassured, Quinn turned and headed back for his truck. And then, because he was brought up to be thorough and because he wanted to clear his head and because he could not shake his hunch of a premonition, he detoured and walked around to the alley that ran behind the shops.
The alley was narrow, deserted, and dark, with bleary lights standing guard over dark brown Dumpsters and cardboard boxes flattened for recycling. Patches of buried cobblestones peeking through asphalt echoed under his footsteps as he tried to figure out which back exit belonged to Miracourt. A stack of wooden crates, obviously from citrus fruits, told him that he'd reached the juicerie next to Olivia's shop.
He wasn't surprised to see that Miracourt's backside looked as trim and neat as its front. The metal door, painted a deep shade of green, was decorated with a handpainted wreath of twigs and flowers; the light that shone down on it looked like an old ship's lantern, another anticommercial touch. Quinn smiled. Leave it to Olivia to bring charm and whimsy to the most workaday site.
The door was closed, but Quinn tried the doorknob anyway. He winced as he did it, fearing that he would set something off, and was surprised when the knob turned easily.
He stepped cautiously inside a stockroom filled with boxes and bolts of fabric. The room itself was unlit, but a rectangle of amber told him that the shop lay directly ahead. He was in the cutout of light with no place to hide, so he stood and just listened. It was eerily quiet. Whoever had been in the shop had come and gone, of that he felt sure.
He walked into th
e warm glow of the shop itself and went immediately up the stairs to the second-floor loft. That's where Olivia's desk was, and her personal effects. Quinn decided that if anyone had gone amuck, he would do it upstairs, out of the view of window-shoppers.
He was right. At the top of the stairs he saw her desk, a big wooden antique in fine shape and set squarely in the middle of the loft. He could see that papers were strewn across the desk and all over the planked floor around it. As he got closer, he discovered something else: a humongous rat, bloody and eviscerated, lying sprawled across a stack of invoices and packing receipts on the desk.
Quinn stared with disgust at the mauled rodent. It was déjà vu all over again, except that this latest punch to the gut—maybe combined with all that beef jerky—was a little more strident, a little more vicious. The thought that Olivia was intended to stumble sleepy-eyed onto this scene the next morning was chilling.
As for the rat, Quinn actually found himself feeling sorry for it. There it had been, sniffing around for crumbs and minding its own business, when ... whack. How exactly had the critter been dispatched? Surely not with a knife. Quinn turned the three-way lamp up to its brightest light and, flopping the carcass over with a pencil and a ruler, gave it a closer look.
As he suspected: a bullet hole, right through the middle. So the rat was a country rat and the prankster, an expert marksman. Surprise, surprise. Hunters were common in Keepsake: Some hunted for food, most for sport. It didn't much matter to Quinn why the guy had acquired the skill. The important thing was that he possessed it.
Automatically he reached for the phone to call Chief Vickers, then thought better of it. Olivia would want to be in on the loop. She might be home. Clutching a nearby sample of fabric, he used it to pick up the phone, then punched in Olivia's number with a pencil point.
She answered on the first ring. She sounded relaxed and happy. It made him sick to have to be the one to tell her what had happened, but there were no better options. The first words out of his mouth were, "Does Miracourt have an alarm?"
"Of course. My insurance requires it. Why?"
Shit—an expert marksman who was bright enough to cut the right wire. "The alarm's been disabled," he said. In a few terse sentences he explained where he was and what he'd found.
"I'll be right over," she said in a wobbly voice, and she slammed down the phone before he could ask about Vickers.
While Quinn waited, he looked around more carefully. Nothing seemed to have been stolen. There was only the rat and the papers strewn like flower petals in a path to the carnage. At the last minute Quinn thought, to hell with Vickers and proper procedure, and he rolled the rat up in a Miracourt bag like a gourmet cheese head, then tied it around for good measure with twine. He didn't want fearless Olivia taking a peek; he really didn't.
****
Olivia had no intention of looking in the bag.
"Take it out to the Dumpster—please!" she said, trying not to picture its contents. "If Chief Vickers needs the rat for an autopsy, he's welcome to retrieve it."
She forced herself to become all business. Snapping open a shopping bag, she said to Quinn, "Would you hand me the pinking shears?"
"The—?"
"Those scissors with the zigzag blades," she explained. Quinn gave them to her on his way out to the Dumpster, and she began to pick through the wreckage of her paperwork, using the scissors like tongs to retrieve the invoices and dispose of the packing slips.
Her hands were shaking as she did it. She told herself that it was with indignation, but that didn't account for her sky-high jump when Quinn came back into the loft and started to say something behind her. "I'm sorry," she muttered. "I'm just—"
She threw down the shears and said, "Scared. Quinn, I'm a little scared now. This is two in a row. Why is he suddenly targeting me?"
Quinn took her into his arms and immediately she felt safe. If she could only stay that way, she'd be ready to take on the world. Once upon a time, she thought she could take on the world. Not anymore. This was not a world she either knew or understood.
Quinn held her close, caressing the back of her hair. "He's figured out how much I care for you," he said softly, "so he's sending me messages—"
"Is he a he?" she asked, hoping somehow he was not.
"I'm pretty sure of it," Quinn said. "Although, none of these stunts took exceptional strength—just a strong stomach."
"Which I don't happen to have," she said, shuddering.
Quinn sighed and said, "Anyway, the text of the messages seems to be, 'Go away and I'll leave her alone.' "
"I know," she admitted in a faltering voice. "I've read them that way, too. But you're not going away; I don't want you to go away. So what will we do?"
He said nothing. For much too long, he said nothing. Olivia felt her heart plunge like a cannonball into her admittedly weak stomach. "Quinn?" she said, looking up at him. "Say something?"
She knew him well enough to know when he was picking and choosing his words with care. This was one of those times. She laid her head back on his shoulder and waited.
"Olivia," he said softly, "we have to wonder whether whoever is doing these things got your cousin pregnant, or murdered her, or both."
He was telling her that he thought the prankster was the killer. But that couldn't be. Not after all these years. It would mean that the killer had lived among them all these years.
"No. I don't see it," she said, shaking her head. "Killing a woman is different from killing a rat. This,'" she said, waving her hand at the bloody mess, "was disgusting and mean, but that's all. People kill rats all the time. They hire hit men; we call them exterminators. Or they use them for target practice—you remember how kids in school did that with their BB guns."
"I understand that, but—"
"No," she said, cutting him off. "I really do not see it. You're overreacting." She preferred her version of events to his, so much.
"I wish I could agree with you, Liv."
Olivia glanced at the papers that remained to be cleaned up. She wanted to wave a wand over them and make them go away. But no one else knew which things to keep and what to toss, not even Quinn. It was up to her.
She picked up the pinking shears and went back to work. "After this, I want cocoa. A Hershey bar will not do. We have to find cocoa. And marshmallows, too. We'll make a nice fire in my fireplace, and I'll make the cocoa extra rich and sweet—"
"Olivia, do you have a gun?" he asked, interrupting her ramble.
She stopped and stared, more distressed now than before and more determined not to let him know it. In a weird way, it was flattering. He thought she could handle a gun.
"No. I don't."
"Does anyone in your family? Does Rand?"
"Well, yes, I'm sure he does. For skeet shooting. You remember that he was always pretty good, don't you?"
Quinn shrugged. "I suppose. Sometimes you move on. But you're saying he's ... kept up with it?"
"There's a range not far from here. It's what some men do in the country. Why are you asking? Do you think I'd actually tell Rand that I need his guns to protect myself? My God, he'd have my mother in hysterics."
"Yeah, you're right," Quinn said abruptly. "Forget I mentioned it."
"Now that I think about it," Olivia added, "I'd rather not have Chief Vickers know about this disgusting episode."
She raised her hand over Quinn's objections and said, "Wait, wait, hear me out. Vickers hasn't been able to do a thing so far about these pranks. And you know what? I don't think he wants to. We both know he'd rather you just went away. So what will we accomplish by telling him? He'll go straight to my father, upsetting him needlessly and making things even harder between you and me."
"That's not a good idea, Liv."
"Well, that's how I feel. It's bad enough that my father knows about the cape."
"Are you sure that he does?"
"Yes. He told Rand about it—in strictest confidence. Naturally Rand immediately told Eilee
n, also in confidence; she called me as soon as she heard. My mother, as usual, hasn't been told anything. Eventually she'll find out and then she'll be angry at all of us. But that's the way my family operates. I can't even keep track of all our confidences anymore; after a while, they begin to blur." She plucked the last bloody paper with the pinking shears and dumped it in the wastebasket.
Quinn pulled out the plastic liner. "I always thought honesty was the best policy," he said, glancing up at her as he knotted the bag.
"Nobody lies," she said with a shrug. "Just ... nobody tells."
Quinn smiled wryly at the distinction, then said, "Are you missing anything from your desk—a knife, a letter opener, a pair of scissors?"
Olivia glanced at a small ceramic vase that she kept filled with pens and pencils, rulers and openers. "Yes. I keep an X-Acto Knife right there. Why? Is it the murder weapon?''
"Not exactly. The rat was shot. The knife was used to draw and quarter it."
Olivia took a deep, slow breath, then let it out just as deliberately. With a lift of her eyebrows, she said, "Well! I hope he has the courtesy to replace the blade before he brings it back."
She was dismayed to see that Quinn neither laughed nor smiled.
A little later on, they found the bloodied knife after all, lying on a bolt of winter-white silk.
Chapter 17
The only night that Mike Redding was home and available for buttonholing by Quinn happened to be Mitzi's Bunco night.
Mike had to baby-sit, so Quinn found himself in Mike's basement workshop, trying to carry on a conversation with his old friend as he alternated between sawing wood for a new set of kitchen cabinets and yelling up the stairs at his three kids, who sounded bound and determined to tear the house down as fast as Mike could build it up again.
"God, I hate January," Mike growled. "At least in the summer they're outside."
He marked off a dimension with a carpenter's pencil on a sheet of lumbercore and carried it over to the table saw. "Hold that end up while I rip this, would you? Thanks."
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