“And everyone but Micah is in intermediate sculpting this summer,”Alicia piped up, her voice sounding like a cheer.
Streeter looked at Micah and saw a slight flicker behind those smoky eyes. “I’m working. Need to earn the money to pay for fall semester. Not enough in sticks.”
They laughed.
“And Dr. Bravo is part of the gang?” Streeter repeated.
“He hangs with us from time to time; comes and goes like the wind,”Cameron said.
“More like a tornado,” groused Jackson. “Blows in, steals all the girls, and then disappears.”
“Ladies man, huh?” Streeter asked.
The guys nodded. The coeds giggled. Except for Micah. Streeter sensed there might be something more between Micah and Dr. Jay, but he was surprised by Shelby’s answer. “Not all ladies. Just some of us.”
Grady gave Shelby a playful push. “Him too? Not only did you do the TA, you did the professor too?”
“The Professor and Mary Ann,” Jackson crooned the Gilligan’s Island theme song with a smirk. “Right here on Shelby’s Island!”
“Shut up, moron.”
Streeter was getting enough of the picture. He decided to pull his line of questioning back on track. “Do any of you know who would have wanted to see Jill dead?”
They all shook their heads. Micah added, “It doesn’t make sense. Jill had an unblemished soul. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Loved everyone. Judged no one.”
“Was she having any trouble with anyone? Afraid of anyone? A love interest she spurned?”
The gang was still. Zack’s face turned crimson. Streeter added, “Any of you date Jill before?”
The men were still. Jackson blurted, “Dated or wanted to date her?”
The others laughed. A nervous laugh, Streeter thought.
“Okay. Any of you who wanted to date Jill?”
Streeter was surprised by all the nods. Every man except Zack, who looked down at his shoes.
“Any of you ever ask her on a date?”
“She wasn’t into that. She was too busy, too focused on school, on B-ball,”Andrew explained. “I might have hinted around at it, but she never gave me any indication she was interested in dating. Just in friendship.”
The men all nodded. Zack looked up at Streeter.
“Zack?” Streeter pressed.
“Andrew’s right. Jill wanted to keep everything at a distance. She just wanted to be friends.”
“And did you?” Streeter asked.
“Did I what?” Zack spat back.
“Did you keep it on a friendship basis?”
Zack shrugged. “Did I have a choice?”
Micah said, “Jill didn’t let anyone in. She was guarded.”
Shelby wiggled on Grady’s lap. “You mean a prude.”
Zack barked, “Well, at least she wasn’t a slut.”
Shelby stood and slammed her fists on her hips. “What does that mean?”
Zack looked down.
“You were the one who was always trying to hump her leg. You’re the slut, and she didn’t want anything to do with you,” Shelby sniped.
Zack’s eyes burned through her. “Not every girl’s like you, Shelby, spreading your legs the first time a guy pays any attention to you.”
Grady popped to his feet. “Hey, cool off, Zack.”
“Tell her to cool off. We’ve all had her and we all know it,” Zack shot back, pointing at Shelby. “Jill was different.”
Streeter stepped forward, placing his hand gently on Grady’s shoulder. “Hey, hey. Have a seat. This is going nowhere. I’m not here to judge. I’m here to find out what happened to Jill.”
Grady took a seat. Shelby shot daggers at Zack before turning her back to him and plopping herself onto Grady’s lap again. Zack stomped off toward the bar, glowering back at them and calling over his shoulder, “I have to use the bathroom.”
He was gone before Streeter could say anything; besides, he knew this crowd was restless and his time with them short.
Streeter studied each one’s face, weighing whether this was the time to catch them all off guard and gauge their reactions. “Ever hear of anyone named Jonah?”
THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
I lay there, eyes closed, wondering which commandment it was. Fifth? Six? I had cried myself to sleep last night because of Lisa, my heart full of sorrow that her time had been cut short at the peak of her brilliant life. I prayed to God my heart wouldn’t be as full of hate as it was for de Milo and could hear Sister Delilah telling me I would go to hell for thinking such bad thoughts about him.
“What makes his sin of murder worse than yours of wishing him dead?” she would ask me if she were still alive.
“Because,” I would reply.
“No sin is greater than another,” she would insist.
“Bullshit,” I would think.
I could hear Sister Delilah reciting the Ten Commandments, forcing me to memorize them. In order. The exact wording. She was tough. Third grade religion class was the first and only C I ever earned in all my years of schooling. It wasn’t because I couldn’t memorize and regurgitate. That was easy. It was because I challenged and questioned.
When we were studying Genesis, for instance—all about the beginning of time, of creation, of the world, and the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve and all the subsequent generations begotten up, or down, to Noah—I had been sitting behind Jason, the classroom bully. I happened to have a crush on him, probably because he was the one person Sister Delilah disliked more than me, which made us kindred spirits. As I recall, he was sporting a black eye that week, and I imagined he had got it from Sister Delilah, which both tickled and frightened me.
The lightbulb went on when we read that Adam and Eve had two sons. Cain slaughtered his brother, Abel, in the field, and then Cain took a wife and had Enoch, and so on and so on. The question in my mind was, Who the hell was Cain’s wife? His mother, Eve? Or was it a sister never mentioned in the Bible? Or, more accurately, never mentioned by Sister Delilah. Either way, unless God had created a bunch of Adams and Eves, wasn’t there something terribly wrong with that picture of begetting?
I don’t recall exactly how I broached the subject, but I do remember Sister Delilah’s expression quite vividly, and the collective gasp in the classroom. Jason grinned and flashed me a grin, which cost him his recess for the next week.
Sister Delilah never answered my question.
Her eyebrows simply bobbed and wobbled above her thick, black glasses, her chins doubling in number as she banished me to the principal’s office. And believe me, any moment with Sister Marie in her go-go boots was way scarier than catechism with Sister Delilah. And both were scarier than the prospect that we were all descendents of biblically unexplained incest.
I should have learned back then to keep my big mouth shut. But within a week, I was asking what was so good about Good Friday.
As the sunlight slipped into my room between the blinds, I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the darkness to return until I could rid myself of evil wishes and of desires to break several of the commandments on this wicked Sunday. To start with, I cursed God for taking Lisa.
A crash of broken glass pierced my thoughts. Not a lightning bolt, but certainly a sign nonetheless.
I bounded out of bed and dashed down the hall. Agent Kelleher was standing in my kitchen, a broken coffee cup at his feet, his face sheepish.
“I am so sorry, Miss Bergen,” he said. “I will repay you. Did I wake you?”
I shook my head and retrieved the broom and dustpan, making short order of clearing away the mess. “I was awake anyway.”
He pulled another cup from the cupboard. “You were awake most of the night.”
I shot him a glare. “How would you know?”
He unabashedly answered, “I could hear you crying.”
My cheeks burned. I dumped the broken glass into the garbage and put the broom and dustpan away. Agent Kelleher poured himself a second cup of coffee and re
trieved a cup for me, filling it as well and offering it to me.
I thanked him and sipped, grimacing at the bitter taste.
“You don’t like it,” he stated.
“How many scoops did you use?”
“Three per cup,” he said. “I like mine black.”
His grin was pleasant. He was definitely growing on me.
“Well, okay, but does it have to be thick enough to chew?”
That converted his grin to a small smile. He regarded me and drank. At that instant I became aware that I was standing in my kitchen with a well-dressed man, perfectly coiffed and wearing a navy blue suit and wingtips, and me in nothing but an oversized T-shirt and panties. Agent Kelleher’s eyes hadn’t roamed, and he had had the decency to pretend not to notice.
I excused myself, gripping my coffee cup as if it were a shield, and retreated to my bedroom.
“Shit,” I said, leaning against my bedroom door after I’d closed it. “Why, God? Why me?” I asked, staring at the ceiling.
I could hear Mom say, “Why not?” which always made me quit whining. Her point was always, if not you, then who deserves the challenges? God was indiscriminate and everyone had challenges of one kind or another. She would always tell me when I was feeling too sorry for my pitiful self to look around me and see how many had it worse than me. She was right. She was always right.
And she would never have asked Sister Delilah how Cain procreated. So much better mannered than her daughter.
I set my coffee cup on my dresser and sat on my bed to pray. I had switched from Catholicism to Lutheranism when I was in college, mostly because I struggled with the concept of transubstantiation. But I told people it was because all that kneeling, sitting, standing, and kneeling again wore me out. Kneeling to pray was brutal on my knees, so I’d been sitting to pray, like the good Protestant I was, for the past decade or so.
I prayed every morning for God to dull the edges of my sharp tongue and to help me to stop swearing, but that worked about as well as New Year’s resolutions had. At least I never used the Lord’s name in vain. Sister Delilah would be proud, wouldn’t she?
I made my bed and had turned to grab my coffee cup before heading for the shower when I noticed the photograph of my family. All eleven of us huddled in the woods in our most colorful shirts and blue jeans. Something was amiss. I counted the cluster of rocks that encircled the photo, rocks I had collected from the various quarries we mined throughout South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado. Ten. One was missing. My eyes swept the floor around the dresser then swept across the circle of rocks again. I was missing the crystal, the one from the quarry at Livermore where I work. The crystal was the most fragile of my rocks, most of which were limestone, sandstone, iron ore, gypsum, or gravel. Where the crystal had been, I could see the tiny shiny pieces that had crumbled from it.
I pulled on my jeans and rushed down the hall. “Agent Kelleher?”
He stepped out of the kitchen and turned toward me, his gun drawn. The urgency in my voice must have signaled alarm for him.
I held up my hands, “No, I’m sorry. I’m okay. But I think I found something.”
He followed me into my bedroom.
I pointed to the picture and the rocks. “One of them is missing. The crystal from my quarry, where I work. It’s gone.”
He stared at the rocks and at the picture. I could tell he wasn’t following me.
“I have eight brothers and sisters. That’s my mom and that’s my dad,” I explained, pointing to them as I spoke. “We’re in the mining business. I like rocks. I have one for each of my family, a rock from different quarries. Mom’s is missing. The crystal. The Beauty. It’s gone. Someone took it. See how the crystal dust is all over the wood?”
I feared he still wasn’t following me.
“The complete circle of rocks was here Friday evening when I changed the sheets for Agent Pierce. I remember seeing everything in its place. I made sure of it. I’m kind of a neat freak.”
“Maybe Agent Pierce took it,” Agent Kelleher said.
“Maybe,” I agreed, “but if he or the crime scene people didn’t, maybe the killer took it. Or Lisa hid it or placed it somewhere, as a clue.
Even as I was saying the words, I thought how silly I sounded. Again, I had become the really bad version of Nancy Drew’s or Encyclopedia Brown’s younger and idiotic sister. Agent Kelleher rubbed his chin and stared at the empty space on the dresser.
“Let me make a call or two,” he said, leaving me alone in my room. “And don’t touch anything on that dresser,” he called over his shoulder as I shut the door.
I took a shower and enjoyed the feeling of the hot water over my aching muscles. I had been too tense to sleep last night and I was paying for it this morning. I quickly dried off, brushed my teeth and hair, and pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a button-down oxford shirt. I was no match for Agent Kelleher, but at least I wasn’t in my sleepwear anymore.
I padded down the hall in time to hear Agent Kelleher say good-bye to someone on the cell phone. “The crime techs dusted in your room already, and no one except Streeter remembers seeing the rock. He said it was there when he was staying in your room; he had noticed you had a rock for everyone in your family.”
“That was observant of him,” I remarked, amazed at his attention to detail.
“He doesn’t miss much,” Agent Kelleher said.
“I’d like to meet him,” I said, wondering if a guy this great at his work and handsome to boot could exist. Lisa had obviously been crazy about this guy, even though she’d insisted it was nothing sexual. I wondered how he was taking all of this. It couldn’t have been easy for him or anyone with the Bureau; Lisa was one of them, a coworker, who had been murdered in the line of duty. I hadn’t really given that much thought yesterday when Agent Kelleher had told me the news. In fact, I had been wound up so tight with self-pity and grief and irritation with him, I had been totally unsympathetic to his feelings. I really hadn’t even given one thought to how Lisa’s death might be affecting him.
“Agent Kelleher,” I began, “I am so sorry for your loss. You must be devastated by Lisa’s death. And thank you for being there for me yesterday and staying with me last night to protect me.”
He nodded, folding his hands behind his back as if he were a soldier at ease. “You are welcome, Miss Bergen.”
“Liv,” I sighed. We stood in the living room, not sure of what to do next. He seemed less at ease than I was. I finally clasped my hands and said, “Well, can I make you breakfast?”
“That would be lovely. Thank you.”
It was hard not to think back to yesterday, when I had spent the morning with Lisa Henry in this very kitchen. I recalled what she had told me about the case. And after we talked, she had mentioned again that I should seriously consider joining the Bureau. Her last words to me. I thought about what my last words to her had been. On my way out the door, I had told her to be careful.
“Agent Kelleher!” I yelled to him in the living room, startling both of us. I dropped the spatula I’d been using to stir the scrambled eggs. It tumbled to the floor, sending bits of egg in all directions. I didn’t care. He was beside me in seconds.
“I forgot all about this. Yesterday morning I told Lisa to be extra careful. I was worried because I could have sworn I saw someone at my window Friday night; it was Saturday morning, really, at 2:00 am. I had awakened to a noise. I was sleeping in the basement on the couch so Agent Pierce would have a comfortable place to sleep. The noise woke me up and I could have sworn I saw someone standing outside the window. I could see halfway up the shins, but for some reason my mind jumped to the conclusion it was a man.”
I was embarrassed that I hadn’t remembered that detail again until now. I must have thought it was more than a dream, because I had the inclination to mention it to Lisa before I headed off to work. And now she was dead. Murdered by someone who broke into the house.
“Maybe he was casing the house,” I said, sound
ing more and more ridiculous every time I spoke. Casing? I’m surprised I didn’t just jump off the deep end completely and tell Agent Kelleher that the perp was casing the joint.
Kelleher didn’t find it as ridiculous as I thought I sounded. He turned toward the stairs and said, “Show me where.”
I followed him down and showed him where I’d been sleeping the night before, pointing to the high window on the basement wall.
“Were there lights on outside?”
I shook my head. “No lights, but the moon was bright. Enough for me to make out two legs. And shoes.”
“What kind of shoes?”
“I don’t know exactly. I had rubbed my eyes to get a better look, and when I looked again, the man was gone. But I’m sure of what I saw. At least I must have been sure, because I had the sense to warn Lisa to be extra careful.” I was starting to doubt everything. Maybe I hadn’t seen anything at all. Maybe it was just an overactive imagination brought on by the situation and my houseguests. I couldn’t be sure.
Kelleher rubbed his chin again and stood on his tiptoes to see out the basement window.
“Dirt,” he said, walking up the stairs and out the front door.
I followed close behind him.
He rounded the house to the picket fence and gate, unable to work the latch.
“Here,” I said, stepping around him and lifting the metal latch on the inside of the fence to release the gate.
He scanned the grass in my backyard and walked toward the basement window. When he approached the window, he scanned the dirt closest to the house and noticed a partial boot print right where I had said I’d seen a pair of legs. His eyes searched the area, and he stepped within inches of the partial boot print without compromising it and lifted his gaze upward. The guest bedroom window sat directly above the basement window. Kelleher was looking directly into the room where Lisa had slept. He was unable to see the four feet or so beneath the window, but he was able to see the rest of the room by stepping on his tiptoes.
Agent Kelleher flipped open his cell phone. “Streeter, it’s Phil. We need to get the techs back and lift a boot print. Miss Bergen had warned Lisa yesterday morning about a prowler she’d seen earlier that morning around two o’clock.”
In the Belly of Jonah: A Liv Bergen Mystery Page 16