“Fred, what are you doing here?” she said. Her hair was coming loose, but her shirt was buttoned and hardly rumpled, only a little more than usual for this time of day. Most of all, her manner was calm for a rape victim.
“Andrew called. He was worried after he talked to you.”
She smiled. “As hard as I work at not hovering, now he’s doing it?”
“Are you really all right? He didn’t hurt you?”
“Come sit down. Birdie has something I think you need to hear.”
He sat in the chair she pointed to, and she took Birdie’s hand and led her to the love seat. Birdie’s face was tear streaked.
“Tell him, Birdie,” Joan urged softly. “Fred will understand.”
Birdie shook her head and stared at her lap. “I can’t.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you. It’s different now. I’ll back you up. People will have to believe you. I’ll even find you another job, if you don’t want to stay there.”
“Really?” Birdie looked up at her. “You’d do that for me?”
“Of course I would. And I’m sure there are all kinds of people who’d be glad to have you working for them. We just have to find the right one. Someone who will treat you like a human being.”
“What happened, Birdie?” Fred asked gently.
She raised her eyes to his. “Jim Chandler—the man you met at Fulford…”
“Yes.”
“He raped me. More than once.”
“At work?”
“At his cabin. Where Joan went today. That’s how she knows what he’d do.”
“When?”
“The last time was before he started going out with Alex—you know Alex?”
Fred nodded. That meant there was virtually no chance of finding any forensic evidence. Birdie would have bathed many times and almost certainly laundered her clothing since then. And any abrasions there might have been probably wouldn’t show by now.
Birdie went on telling her story. At first she could hardly get the words out, but then they came faster and faster. Yes, she’d washed her clothes. No, she’d never gone to the hospital or filed a police report. But she had told a friend.
“What friend?” he asked.
“Sylvia Purcell. I made her promise not to tell anyone. She didn’t like it, but she promised.”
“Did you go out to the cabin the day Sylvia fell?” he asked.
Her eyes opened wide. “How did you know?”
“We have a witness who heard her call your name just before she fell.” He avoided Joan’s eyes, though maybe she’d already told Birdie what Andrew had said. “She could see his cabin from the tree, you know.”
“I know.” She was staring at her lap again. “She’d call me at work after I’d been out there and tell me I was a fool for keeping his secret.”
“Did he know you’d told her?”
“Yes, but he didn’t take her seriously, and he didn’t think anyone else would, either. And now she can’t tell.”
“But you can. If we need you, would you be willing to testify?”
She nodded mutely.
29
On the short trip home, Joan wished they hadn’t driven separately.
But she let Fred sit down on the sofa to take off his shoes before asking, “Have you excluded Jim Chandler from your list of possibles?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Until today, the man seemed squeaky clean. A Scout leader. He was working at home the day Sylvia was hit—Andrew heard her call out to Birdie not to go there. And he was in Tell City the Sunday Vint hit the tree.”
“That’s what he told Alex, but I wonder. Birdie didn’t tell you that he wasn’t home the day Sylvia fell.”
He straightened up with a shoe in one hand. “He wasn’t?”
“When he didn’t answer the door, she left whatever she was supposed to deliver and got away while she had the chance. So he might have been near Sylvia’s tree. He’s dangerous, Fred.”
“Show me that arm.” She held it out to him, and he pushed up her sleeve. Even though he held it gently, she couldn’t help wincing. “It’s going to bruise. Better ice it down.”
“I will.” Reclaiming her arm, she slid the sleeve back down. “Fred, he could have been near enough. That thing of Andrew’s shoots a hundred yards. But we thought she just fell. All our attention was on her—we weren’t looking for anyone else. And the Petoskey stone proves somebody did kill her.”
“I don’t suppose you spotted a Wrist-Rocket in his house.”
“No. But there was a lot of odd stuff in his lost-and-found. And I saw a basket of shells and likely looking rocks in with the Scout stuff. I hope he didn’t notice that I was trying to see into it better. We’ve got to go back there before he gets rid of them.”
“You’re not going back.” He said it flatly, and she could tell from his face that he wasn’t kidding.
“You sound like Andrew. But I won’t go, if you’ll promise to.”
The phone in his pocket rang, and he held it to his ear. “Yes?… When?… I’m on my way.” He took her hand. “That was Andrew. Chandler just drove off.”
Which way? she wondered, but of course from that end of the road, there was only one way, and Andrew wouldn’t be able to see the car when it reached the main road—he hadn’t been able to see hers when he called her.
Fred held on to her hands. “Promise you won’t go to his house.” His blue eyes stared into hers.
“All right, I promise.”
He kissed her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I’m all right, Fred. You do what you have to do.”
He hadn’t even eaten, she saw when she went into the kitchen. She put away his food and cleaned up the kitchen, but her mind was racing.
Of course, Jim Chandler could be going somewhere perfectly innocent. Maybe he was taking Alex out to dinner. If she didn’t refuse his advances, Joan thought, that romance might continue in an ordinary way. Alex had no idea how dangerous he could be. She was only being her ordinary obnoxious self when she sent me out there.
But he’d gone too far today, and he had to know that she knew Birdie. And if he suspected her of having guessed why Birdie was avoiding him, even though she had taken forever to figure it out, he could figure Birdie would talk to her, probably soon. Would he try to stop her? Or, if it had been worth killing Sylvia because Birdie had told her, would he now go after Birdie or her?
Either way, she thought, we’ll be safer together. I’d better warn her. After drying her hands, she picked up the phone. “Birdie, I’m coming back. Don’t let anyone in until I get there, all right?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Birdie said. “Your husband already sent an officer to stay with me tonight.”
With you? she couldn’t help thinking when she hung up. What about me? No officer has shown up at my door. She didn’t usually lock the doors while she was at home and awake. Not in Oliver. But tonight was different. She turned the dead bolt on both the front and the back doors and checked the window latches on the first floor. All locked, good. She turned on both the front and back porch lights and even pulled the living room curtains shut, something she rarely did. But the dark outside made her feel too exposed with the lights on indoors.
From the corner, her viola and music stared reproachfully at her, but she knew she’d never be able to concentrate enough to practice. This kind of tension called for a good book. Not a mystery, though. The last thing she needed was suspense. She rummaged in the bookcase for her collection of Jane Austen’s early, unsold works. Just right, she thought, and curled up on the big old sofa to let Lady Susan’s machinations take her mind off what worried her.
Even so, when the phone rang, she jumped.
“Mom?”
“Andrew?” But that wasn’t Andrew. “Good heavens—Rebecca?”
“Has it been so long since I’ve called that you can’t even tell me from Andrew?”
There was a time when a crack like that from Reb
ecca would have worried her. Her daughter had gone through a long prickly stage, when almost nothing Joan could say had rubbed her the right way. But tonight she sounded merely amused.
“Forgive me. It’s been a strange day. A strange week, for that matter.”
“He’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Far as I know. I took him supper.”
“Took him—Mom, where is he? He’s called a couple of times, but I thought he was at home. And why can’t he come home for supper?”
Joan wanted to kick him. If he hadn’t told his sister what he was doing, that was one thing. But to call her and omit a little detail like making the call from seventy feet up in a tree was something else. She was tempted to make him do it himself. How much would be too much to tell Rebecca, stuck in New York as she was? Her bank job didn’t allow weekend trips home to visit her family.
“Mom?”
She’d been silent too long. “I’m sorry. Are you ready for a long story?”
“Shoot.”
So Joan leaned back into the sofa and told her, beginning with her own impatience at poor Sylvia when she announced that the tree sit protest took precedence over the orchestra concert.
“Andrew was supporting Sylvia’s protest, and when she fell out of the tree, he took her place.”
“She fell? And he’s up in a tree? So how did he call me?”
“Cell phone. It’s the only way the rest of us can talk to him.”
“Where is this tree, anyhow? And why can’t you just go there?”
“Just inside Oliver. Andrew can see outside the town from his platform up there. But he’s technically in town, which means that Fred is involved in anything that happens there. We can go there, of course, but without the phones we’d all have to scream. Most of the time the connection’s pretty good, and we can swap batteries and recharge them for him. The people who were supporting Sylvia help him, too.” Rebecca was going to think she knew who those people were, but Rebecca didn’t need to know everything.
“How high is he, anyway?”
“About seventy feet.”
“That’s a seven-story building! How did his friend survive a fall like that?”
Joan hesitated, but she couldn’t lie to Rebecca. “She didn’t. She was still alive when the ambulance came, but she died in the hospital.”
“You know all that because of the orchestra or Fred or what?”
“I was there. With Andrew. We saw her fall.”
“Oh, Mom! I’m so sorry. And now Andrew’s up there.”
“Yes.”
“You must be scared stiff.”
“Yes.” You don’t know the half of it.
“I’m going to call him right now and tell him he ought to come down. He doesn’t have the right to worry you like that! Or me!”
Joan laughed. Rebecca, coming to her defense? It was wonderful. Also unlikely to do any good. But she gave her daughter Andrew’s cell phone number and enjoyed imagining the resulting fireworks.
She had hardly opened the book again when the phone startled her again. She grabbed it. But this time, it was Fred’s brother, Walt, asking for him.
“He’s out, Walt. Is something wrong there? Your parents?”
“They’re okay. Mom asks for him all the time, but of course she’s totally forgotten you.”
“That’s all right. I didn’t expect her to remember about me.” Helga Lundquist, whom Joan had met for the first time back before Christmas, was in the early stages of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s. Joan hoped the family would get her properly worked up and diagnosed soon but was keeping her nose out of their affairs for now, at least. They were doing a good job of helping Fred’s parents manage living in the house where he had grown up. Already, though, Helga had begun wandering, and neighbors in their little village sometimes had to help her find her way home. Joan wished they were closer. From Oliver to Bishop Hill, Illinois, was too long a drive for a weekend jaunt.
“I’ll tell him you called. I don’t know what time he’ll be home, though.”
“No problem. Tomorrow’s soon enough. If it gets to be late, tell him I’d rather he waited till morning.” Whatever was on Walt’s mind wasn’t something he offered to share with Joan.
She promised. “Give your family our love. We still expect Kierstin to visit sometime.” Walt’s daughter, a high school senior, had entranced Andrew during their visit and had invited herself to visit them. “I take it she’s not serious about looking at Oliver College.”
“No, she’s accepted at Illinois. There’s no way I could afford a private school, and she knows it. But if you wouldn’t mind, she’d get a kick out of coming to see you. One of us would help her with the driving, of course, but we’d have to go straight back. Between the restaurant and the folks, there’s not a lot of spare time.”
“We’d be delighted.” Once Andrew’s safely out of the tree, that is. “When is her semester over?”
“Not for another month. Graduation’s in late May.”
“That ought to work. Good to hear your voice, Walt. I’ll be sure to tell Fred you called.”
The phone was finally silent then, and she caught herself nodding off. Not tonight, she thought. Not till I know what’s going on. She went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee before settling back down with Lady Susan.
If you’d had Lady Susan for a mother, Rebecca, she thought as she read, you’d have had a right to bite her head off the way you used to do mine.
This time when the phone rang, she reached for it almost absentmindedly.
“Mom?” This didn’t sound like Andrew, either, but it wasn’t Rebecca. It was more muffled.
“Andrew?”
“Mom, is Fred there? I can’t rouse him on his cell.”
“No, he went back to work after you talked to him before.”
He said something unintelligible.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I’m inside my sleeping bag.” That was clearer.
“Is it that cold now?”
“No, but I think someone’s been shooting at me.”
“Shooting!” Her feet hit the floor. “Bullets?”
“I don’t think so. There’s no bang, but I hear things whizzing by my head, and I think one landed on the platform. So I’m as flat as I can get, inside the sleeping bag. Rebecca just called and told me I should get the heck out of here, but I’m safer this way.”
“Andrew, you call 911, and I’ll work on finding Fred. I’ll find someone, anyway. Can you see who it is?”
“Maybe Walcher?”
“You saw him?”
“No, it’s too dark. But I heard one of his bulldozers arrive down there about half an hour ago.”
“You haven’t been hit?”
“Not yet. But I’m well padded, and I’m flat. I’m not budging till someone tells me it’s safe. I remember Sylvia.”
So did Joan. She called Fred’s number but got no answer. Then she tried his cell phone. It invited her to leave him a voice mail. She hung up on the recorded voice and tried the number Fred had given her for when his desk phone didn’t answer.
“Ketcham,” a familiar voice answered. Thank God.
“Sergeant, this is Joan Spencer. I’ve been trying to reach Fred.”
“I thought he went home.” She could hear him wondering whether he should have lied for his lieutenant.
“He did, but he got a call and left again. Didn’t he check in with you?”
“Not yet. He knows I’m here, though.”
“I can’t find him. But Andrew just called. He says someone’s shooting at him. He had the good sense to crawl inside his sleeping bag, head and all, and lie flat on the platform. I told him to call 911, but I need to find Fred. I don’t understand why he’s not answering his cell phone.”
“He must’ve let the battery run down again. We’ll get someone out there right away.”
“I’m coming, too.” She hadn’t known it until it was out of her mouth.
“N
o. If you got caught in a gunfight—”
“It’s not a gunfight.”
“You said—”
“Andrew said there’s no bang, just whizzing past his head. Or there was, until he got inside the sleeping bag. I don’t know how much he can hear now. But it sure sounds like the man with the slingshot.”
“Give me Andrew’s number.”
She did.
“And leave his line free.”
“I will.” Not that it’s a line. But I can’t stay home. Not if someone’s out there shooting at my son. “And Sergeant, he says he heard a bulldozer drive up.”
“Thanks. You sit tight. We’ll handle it from here.”
30
Fred would skin her alive if he knew what she was planning, but there was no way Joan could sit tight, as Ketcham had put it. She pulled on a black turtleneck and pants and dark sneakers and socks. The socks were probably navy, but all that mattered was not to show up in the dark. Cover your skin, she thought, and rummaged in the living room coat closet for the ski cap in shades of blue, none too light, that Annie Jordan had made her for Christmas. If she pulled it all the way down, only her eyes would show. It had slid off the shelf, but she found it mixed in with the boots on the floor. Her navy gloves would hide her hands.
I’m not going to his house, she told herself. And I’m not going to butt in. But I have to know what’s going on. That bulldozer … I don’t know whether Fred ever checked Walcher. There’s so much I don’t know.
She soon was bouncing along the rutted road, not even trying to dodge the ruts. But before she reached the clearing, she pulled off to the side and killed the lights and the motor. Even the tiny flashlight in her pocket would give her away. She’d risk turning an ankle, instead. It seemed to take forever for her eyes to adapt to the darkness, but when the black sky sprouted more stars than she remembered ever having seen, she thought she must be ready. Almost as an afterthought, she reached into the wayback for her walking stick. It would give her a fighting chance at staying upright. She turned off the dome light before she opened and softly closed the car door.
No sign of the police. Where were they, anyway? She shouldn’t have been able to beat them out there.
Death Climbs a Tree Page 22