Deadly Housewives (v5) (epub)

by Marcia Muller

  “Are you an expert?” Luther asked.

  “No, but that’s the kind of thing everyone knows,” Temple said. “What about the samples from the house? Where was the bomb set? What was it made of?”

  Luther jotted a note. “I’ll see what the feds are willing to say. Going back to who could have planted this on you, do you have any ex-tenants, or old enemies in the neighborhood, who might have it in for you?”

  “Just Ruth Meecham,” Jessica said. “She’s always calling the alderman’s office about the number of people living here.”

  “Oh, Ruth,” Karin said dismissively, when Temple interrupted her.

  “There’s something I need to check on. I’ll talk to you later, but get some rest, go to the Buddhist temple, do something for yourself, okay? Today isn’t your day for being Titus’s babysitter.”

  She darted from the room without waiting for anyone’s reaction—just as well, Karin thought, given Jessica’s furious expression. A moment later, they heard the clatter of metal lids. Jessica and Karin went to the window, followed by Luther. They looked down to see Temple rummaging through the recycling bins. A flash of light made Karin look across the yard. Ruth Meecham also had her binoculars trained on Temple.

  V

  Alvin and Lettice had spent the whole morning discussing Karin’s arrest, and how she’d managed to plant the bomb. When Temple finally arrived at the lab, a little after noon, they pounded her with questions.

  “My mother did not put a bomb in that building,” Temple snapped at them.

  She pulled a couple of specimen bags from her canvas briefcase and laid them on Lettice’s desk. One held the distended plastic jug, the other a newspaper. “Can you analyze these?”

  Alvin came over to look down at the bag. “Hmm. Small print, lots of words, a screed about liberals in the media, must be the Wall Street Journal.”

  “Please don’t joke about it, Alvin—these might help with Karin’s defense.”

  “What are they?” Lettice asked.

  “The Wall Street Journal and an empty water jug,” said Alvin, unrepentant.

  Lettice picked up the specimen bags. “What am I looking for?”

  “Yes, what is she looking for, and why are you giving her the assignment?” It was their boss, Sanford Rieff, who had materialized in the doorway.

  “Oh, sir, it’s—you know, the Spadona building, my mother was arrested, they planted false evidence in her green house, I’m sure of it, and I want—”

  “Slow down, Temple. I can’t follow you. Give me a step-by-step picture of what this is about.”

  Temple shut her eyes. Where Karin chanted for harmony, Temple saw her to-do list, laid out in her head like a spreadsheet. It was so clear to her that she had trouble putting it into words, so she went to her computer and typed it all out.

  Sanford Rieff looked at it and nodded. “And who is the client? Who is going to pay for time on the mass spectrometer, and for Lettice’s time?”

  Temple swallowed. “I guess that would be me, sir.”

  Sanford looked at her for a long minute, then walked over to her computer and typed a few lines. “Okay. I’ve added you to the client database. You can finish Lettice’s tests on the water in the Lyle township pool—you know enough chemistry for that, right? And do you know what you expect Lettice to find?”

  Temple took a deep breath. “I don’t know if these are connected to the explosion, but—I’d look for ammonium nitrate, to see if the stuff they found in the green house is on these, and check for acetone in the jug. I knew it smelled funky when I took it away from the baby yesterday, but it was only just now I realized it was nail-polish remover, I mean, I never use it, and I’d forgotten, I had a college roommate who was always doing her nails, but what I ought to do is go back to the Spadona building and get samples.”

  “You’re not making sense again, Temple,” her boss said, “but what you ought emphatically not to do is go back to a closed-down explosion site to get samples. You could be arrested, or even worse, injured. Someone has taken samples and we’ll see if we can find their reports.”

  Sanford Rieff pushed her gently toward the door. “You have the makings of a forensic engineer, Temple, but we need the swimming-pool analysis this afternoon. Alvin, what are you doing, besides trying to best Temple’s time at Minesweeper? Get me all the reports that are available on the Spadona bombing, then go back to the electronics lab to give Dumfries a hand with the timing problem he’s working on.”

  It was six before Lettice was able to get time on the spectrometer. Temple, who’d finished her work on the swimming pool an hour earlier, stood next to her while Lettice read the bar graphs into her computer.

  Temple pointed at a peak on the graph. “Would C3H6O spike there?”

  “Temple, I swear, you are hovering like a bumblebee, and if you don’t stop, I am going to swat you. I’m not going over these with you—I’m taking them to Sanford first, and he’s left for the day, so get out of my hair!”

  “I’m the client,” Temple objected.

  “And you’re like every other annoying client, trying to run the investigation for us. Can’t you do something useful? A yoga headstand or something?”

  Temple stepped away, fiddling with her watchband, and looked at the samples she had brought in. Lettice had returned the Wall Street Journal to its protective bag, but the jug was just standing open on the counter. Come to think of it, who at her mother’s house read the Journal? They got their news from The Nation and In These Times. And if she was right, if that was acetone in the jug—well, that came from nail-polish remover, and she was sure no one in Karin’s house used polish or remover—Karin didn’t approve of environmental toxins, what ever use they were put to.

  But Ruth Meecham—that was another story. Temple had seen the polish on her toenails earlier this week, and Ruth, supporter of Clarence Epstein and the Spadona Institute—she surely read the Journal.

  She walked over to her desk and called her mother. Jessica answered the phone and told her Karin was resting. “Do you want me to give her a message?”

  Temple hesitated, trying to balance her jealousy of Jessica with her need for information. “Where did you get that jug, that one that I took away from Titus yesterday?”

  “I told you—I found it in the backyard! Did you call up to give me another lecture on child safety? Because I don’t need it.”

  “Don’t yell at me, Jessica. I’m trying to figure out how to clear my mom’s name, and I think that whoever planted the ammonium nitrate in her green house made a bomb out of something different, probably out of acetone. I don’t know how it worked, but if a fire had gone up through the air-conditioning vents, it would have left the kind of burn pattern you can see on the outside of the house, following the track of the vents around the perimeter, and acetone would be a really good fast-igniting agent. We’re waiting on the test results, but I’m wondering if Ruth Meecham might have tossed the jug into our—into Karin’s yard.”

  Jessica paused before answering, then said, “If she did, what motive could she possibly have for blowing up the Spadona Institute? She adored Clarence Epstein, she talks about him as if he were a saint. I think they were lovers or something back in college and she kept mooning over him even when he obviously had moved on to bigger and better things. He was a star, but she was only a moon.” She laughed at her own pun.

  “I don’t know motives,” Temple said impatiently. “Ms. Meecham hates the way Karin uses the house as a commune, she hates the causes Karin supports—maybe she’s deranged and figured if she could plant a big crime on Karin and send her to prison, the house would shut down. But I need to go through her garbage and see if I can find any traces of the ammonium nitrate before she gets rid of it, or even worse, dumps all of it in Karin’s trash. I think I’ll come down tonight and have a look, before it’s too late. Don’t tell Karin—she doesn’t like people thinking vengeful thoughts.”

  Before leaving, she checked back at the spectrometer
lab, but Lettice had disappeared. She wandered back to Lettice’s desk and looked at her computer. Lettice probably used her cat’s name as a password. Temple’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, then withdrew. She knew it was acetone in the jug; she bet it was some kind of dried acetone compound on the newspaper that had burned her fingers yesterday afternoon. It was more important that she get down to Ruth Meecham’s house and go through her garbage before Meecham decided to move it. And despite what Sanford Rieff had said, she’d go through the basement at the Spadona Institute and get some samples there. She had a hard hat in her trunk, she had a briefcase full of specimen bags, and she had a disposable camera in her glove compartment.

  The late-summer dusk was turning from gray to purple when she reached Hyde Park. She left her car on a side street and came up behind her mother’s house through the alley—other neighbors were probably just as nosy as Ruth Meecham, and she was less visible in the alley. Ruth Meecham’s back gate was locked, but Karin’s—naturally—stood open to anyone who wanted to come in that way.

  Temple came through the gate as quietly as she could. The fence that separated her mother’s and the Meecham property ended at her mother’s green house; there was just enough space behind the green house for her to squeeze past. When she reached Ruth Meecham’s side of the yard, someone tapped her on the shoulder and she almost screamed out loud.

  “Temple? Sorry to scare you.” Jessica’s face loomed over her in the dark. “Something worrying has happened.”

  Temple could still feel her pulse thudding against her throat.

  “Right after we talked, Ruth Meecham called Karin, and Karin went over to Ruth’s house and—I don’t know. If Ruth was really crazy enough to blow up the Spadona Institute just to get back at your mom, I’m worried what she might be up to now.”

  “We should call the police,” Temple said.

  “To tell them what? That Karin has gone to visit a neighbor and we don’t like it?”

  “I guess I could go in and see what’s going on,” Temple said uneasily.

  “I’ll wait here. If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’ll call the police and tell them I saw someone breaking in,” Jessica said.

  “Where’s your little boy?” Temple suddenly remembered Titus.

  “He’s asleep. He’s okay by himself for a few minutes. Don’t worry about him—you’re as bad as your mother, fussing over me!”

  Temple shut her eyes briefly: let it go. Jessica was a major pain in the ass, but she was helping, don’t waste valuable energy fighting her. She didn’t say anything else, but walked around Ruth’s house to the front door and rang the bell. Jessica stayed behind her at the bottom of the steps, squatting so she couldn’t be seen from the front door.

  After she’d rung twice, Temple cautiously tried the knob. The front door was unlocked. She turned to wave at Jessica and moved inside. Her heart was still beating too hard, so she stood inside the doorway for a minute, picturing a decision tree: where she would look for Ruth and Karin, what she would do, each decision with its “yes” and “no” forks visible in her mind.

  She’d been in the house only a few times and didn’t know the layout, but she moved quickly through the ground floor without seeing anyone. Stairs to the basement led from both the kitchen and the front hall. Since she was right by the kitchen stairs, she went down those, but the house was so quiet she was beginning to worry that Ruth might have persuaded her mother to drive off with her somewhere.

  She pulled a small flashlight from her canvas bag. She was in a small laundry area, with doors leading out of it to other parts of the basement. She swept them with her light. An instant later, she heard her mother call for help.

  “It’s me, Mom, it’s Temple, I’ll be right there.”

  The voice had come from her left. In her haste, she tripped over a basket of towels, but when she got back to her feet she managed to find a light switch. At first she saw only the furnace and other mechanicals, but when her mother called to her again, she found her in the back of the room, by the water heater, bound hand and foot. Next to her was Ruth Meecham, also tied, but unconscious.

  Temple knelt next to her mother and started to undo her hands; her own were shaking so badly she could barely use them. “Karin! What happened? I thought Ruth—”

  “Temple, look out!” Karin shouted.

  She turned and saw Jessica standing over her, a piece of firewood held like a club. She tried to roll out of the way, but shock slowed her reflexes, and the wood hit the side of her head as she rolled.

  VI

  She blacked out for only a minute or two, but when she came back to a nauseated consciousness, she found herself lying bound on the floor next to Karin. Jessica was placing a wrinkled copy of the Wall Street Journal on the floor next to the water heater, her motions as precise as a temple goddess laying out a sacrifice.

  “Jessica, what are you doing?” Temple knew she was slurring the words: everything was blurry—the lights, her voice, the giant standing over her clutching the Wall Street Journal.

  “I’m solving the Spadona bombing,” Jessica said. “Poor Ruth—her hatred for your mother had grown to such out-size proportions she brought the two of you here for a funeral pyre.”

  “But, Jessica, why? Why do you need to kill all of us? We don’t wish you any harm, or at least, if it was you who blew up the Spadona building, why do you want to harm us on top of killing Mr. Epstein and Mr. Antony?”

  “Because you were meddling!” Jessica spat. “You had to go taking my supplies to your stupid lab. This way, it won’t matter what they find, because all the evidence will point here! To the jealousy between Ruth and Karin.”

  “My God, you’re foul!” Ruth had regained consciousness and now tried to sit up. She fell over again but said vehemently. “You thought no one would pay attention to your harassment of Clarence, but I saw it for what it was. I tried to warn Karin, but she’s too holy for warnings and doubts.”

  “Let it go, Ruth, let it go, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Let it go?” her neighbor said. “For five cents I would leave you to blow up here if I could, you and your sanctimonious chanting. Jessica worked for Clarence in Washington. Titus was his baby. She came here to Chicago to taunt him with it, and you let her use you as a dupe! If you ever asked the questions I’m prepared to ask, you’d never have given her house room!”

  Temple felt a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in her, like a bubble floating on a fountain in a child’s water experiment. She still felt dizzy, dizzy and ditsy; she thought, What a way to go, and she laughed helplessly.

  “So you think it’s funny?” Jessica snapped. “You’re little Miss Perfect, aren’t you, living your life according to so many rules you’re like a walking computer, so I don’t suppose you’ve ever even thought of having sex with a married man. Professor Conservative, the economic saint of the neo-cons, tried to force me to have an abortion. He didn’t want a child on his résumé, at least not one belonging to one of his interns, not when he has a perfectly respectable wife in their Potomac mansion. When he was here last week, he threatened me, threatened to take Titus away from me, he said he could prove I was an unfit mother, and get me put in prison.”

  “But, Jessica, I would have helped you,” Karin said. “You didn’t need to kill him. You can stay calm, I know you have it in you, we can work this out together.”

  “Oh, fuck you and your calm!” Jessica screamed. “Read the newspaper—it’ll forecast the end of the world for you.”

  She ran from the basement. Karin began chanting softly, “Eka leya, eka leya.” Harmony.

  Ruth told her to shut up, she didn’t want her last minutes on earth to be filled with Karin’s hippie crap. Overhead, Temple heard water running in the pipes.

  “Is someone in the house? Who’s running water?” she demanded, opening her mouth to scream.

  “No one, I’m not like your idiot mother, running a commune in my parents’ beautiful—”

  The new
spaper. That was it, Jessica had made explosive paper, soaked it in acetone, left it to dry, made a perfect torch. She was running hot water somewhere upstairs, and when the water heater pilot flicked on—it would at any second—the paper would go up like a napalm bomb. Temple rolled over painfully and flung herself at the heater. The drain tap, she needed to open it, she couldn’t get her hands in front of her, dammit, seconds not minutes. She clenched her teeth around the tap and jerked hard, again, a tooth cracked, again, and a stream of hot water flooded her, the paper, and Ruth Meecham, lying in its path.

  VII

  “You’re going to be okay, darling.” Karin stroked Temple’s bandaged head. “You got burned on the side of your face, but not too badly, and the surgeon says there will only be a faint scar, once they operate. You were so brave, my darling, so clever. How did you know what to do?”

  “I’m an engineer,” Temple said. “They teach us that stuff.”

  “But what was on the paper?” Karin asked.

  “Acetone, with mineral oil and something called PETN, that’s kind of a detonator,” Alvin said.

  Lettice and Alvin had come to the hospital to see Temple. They had brought a video game that they assured her was impossible to solve so she’d have something to do while she waited for her surgery. “Now the feds are agreeing it’s what Jessica used in the Spadona building—anyone can get the details from the Anarchist’s Handbook—you don’t have to be an explosives engineer. It was smart of you to guess how the fire went up the mechanicals—Sanford says you did well for a beginner, even if you stuck your head in where you shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t know,” Temple said. “She made me think Ruth was behind it all.”

  “Oh, Ruth, she’s just a confused and angry person. She got us out of there—once she saw you use your teeth to open that valve or tap or what ever it was, she used her teeth to pull the knots apart on my wrists. Even though she was still woozy from the blow to her head, she got upstairs to phone for help.”