Sleeping Dogs Lie wfm-1

by Sharon Henegar

  Bob looked at me in astonishment. “Good lord, your cousin is amazing,” he managed, as Kay’s footsteps came back toward us.

  I could have told him that.

  “Did you hear that?” Kay demanded as she came back into our view. “Doesn’t that woman ever go home? She lives in Seattle, for goodness’ sake! What the hell is she doing in my store all the time?”

  “She has clients all over,” I told her. “She’s famous for her knowledge of import and export law. She’s always jetting somewhere. Roger used to complain about it. I think he was jealous.”

  “Well, let her jet somewhere else,” Kay said crossly. “Now, what was I doing when we were so rudely interrupted? Oh, I know. I was about to call Ambrose.” She turned again to go to the phone.

  The next thing I knew I had burst out laughing. I felt decidedly out of control. They stared at me. I flapped a hand at them. When I could catch my breath enough to speak I said, “Sorry, sorry, it's just…the last twenty four hours have been so ridiculous. All of us moving around in our own little circles, me lost in the woods and hiding in the barn and trudging through suburbia. Bob tied to a chair being grilled by a beautiful blonde and sneaking away. Ambrose in here carting away the Albatross. What’s his name looking for the tape which is now in a restaurant somewhere in High Cross. The way things are going we’ll probably learn that the restaurant is next door to the bank they stole the original tape from. And now Doris has circled her way back here to buy a wooden box that you sold two weeks ago…” I faltered at Kay’s expression.

  She shook her head. “If I had time I’d slap you out of this hysteria,” she sniffed. “You ought to know our inventory better than that. The box hasn’t been sold, it's sitting about three feet away from you on that dresser. I told you I don't take money with cooties on it.” She marched back to her office. I looked at the dresser, and saw the box. My laughing jag was over. I hiccupped.

  Bob took my hand between both of his. “Would she really slap you?” His look of concern made my breath catch in my throat.

  I managed a shrug. “Probably not unless she thought I was really out of control. I'm okay now. You were right earlier when you said things like this don’t happen to people like us.”

  “I don’t know what I'd have done if you hadn’t found me in the barn,” Bob said, shaking his head. “Gone on the run again, maybe. Or gone blundering back into that woman’s hands.”

  “Well, we can’t have her catching you again,” I said. “You should have called me as soon as you got loose.”

  “Call me old fashioned,” he smiled, “but I never got into the habit of calling a lady at three a.m. And I do not want you involved in this thing. I can't believe how I've put you in danger. If Walsh had found you in the barn, I don’t think he’d have been as polite as my kidnapper was.”

  I was silent as I imagined some distinctly unpleasant scenarios. I remembered another detail we had not yet covered. “I need to know something else,” I told him.

  “Anything.”

  “Who is Trixie?”

  Kay bustled back into the room. “Ambrose is coming, but it’s going to take him a while to get here,” she announced. I saw one of her eyebrows go up as she noted Bob holding my hand.

  “Oh, good,” Bob said, glancing over at her. Then he turned back to me. “Trixie? I don’t think I know anyone with that name.”

  “I found a book of matches on your kitchen table. ‘Trixie’ and a phone number were written inside.”

  “On my kitchen table?” His brow puckered. He shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea. I rarely use matches, and I don’t know any Trixie.”

  “Oh. Okay,” I said, taking my hand from his.

  * * * * *

  While we were waiting for Ambrose, Bob said he’d like to take a shower. I made him hand out his clothes so that we could give them a quick wash and dry. “You’ll find new toothbrushes and disposable razors in the medicine chest,” I told him through the door. I heard him thank me as the shower started.

  Kay put laundry soap in the washer and I dumped in Bob’s clothes. As she fiddled with the dials I turned to her. “Kay, I want to ask you about something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I should have asked a long time ago, and I'm sorry I’ve been so self-centered that I didn’t do it before now.” I spun the dial on the washer and pushed it in to start the wash cycle.

  She looked surprised and a little wary. “Yeah? What?”

  “What happened with you and Ed?”

  “What do you mean, what happened? We went out for a while and then we stopped.”

  I know Kay as well as she knows me, and I knew that stonewalling tone of voice. “Uh-uh. Nope. There’s more to it than that. I remember some of your phone calls to me in Seattle when the two of you were first going out. You sounded like a teenager. You were having a really great time together. But about the time my life got complicated—”

  “That’s one way to put it,” she inserted.

  “When my life got complicated you stopped talking about yours. When I moved back to Willow Falls, no Ed to be seen, and any time his name comes up you practically spit. Of course now that I've met him, the question is what you ever saw in him in the first place—”

  “I should think that at least would be perfectly obvious!”

  “What?”

  “Well, Louisa, you’ve seen him. You have to admit he’s pretty darned gorgeous.”

  “Oh. Oh yeah, that,” I said. An amazed voice in my head said, oh my god, she is still in love with this guy. Where I saw slightly tubby middle aged cop, she saw Adonis.

  “Okay, looks aside,” I tried tactfully, “he is pretty maddening—”

  “But you’ve only met him once,” she leapt to his defense. How could she not see what she still felt for him? “He takes his job seriously, and he’s good at it. You should see all the letters of commendation he’s gotten, and he solved some very complicated cases when he was with the state police.”

  “Well, if you say so. I happen to think a really good cop would never call you ‘lady’ in that sarcastic tone of voice, but you know him better. But how did you go from being a teenager in love to so pissed you can't talk to him on the phone for two minutes?”

  Her eyes dropped. She turned and closed the top of the detergent box and put it back on its shelf, fiddling to get it perfectly aligned. Then she wiped a few grains of detergent off the lid of the washer. At last she turned back and said, “I just hate to talk about it. It sounds so stupid. We broke up over a parking ticket.”

  “A parking ticket?”

  “Well, you know how crowded Maple Street has gotten, right? Some days you can't find a parking place for blocks, and all of us who have businesses here depend on people being able to get to our stores. Most of the people who work in the area drive as well. We’ve had a lot of hassle about employees parking their cars on the street. And the police station and city hall are only a couple of blocks away, and the people who work there need to park too.”

  I nodded. Even in the daze in which I had cocooned myself for the past six months, I was aware of the parking problem. The city council made a couple of vacant lots into parking areas and put time limits on the street parking places a few months ago, and the police were quick to write tickets if you overstayed your two-hour welcome.

  “So about the time everyone was so worked up about parking and that’s all we talked about at city council meetings, I noticed that Ed and the other cops parked their cruisers in the two hour spaces and sometimes left them half the day. They were out giving other people tickets for staying too long, but they weren’t willing to walk two blocks from the station or move their own cars. So I brought it up at a council meeting.”

  “Did you talk to Ed about it before you brought it up at the council?”

  She looked abashed. “Well, no. I was already kind of mad at him because of his mother and his daughter.”

  I held up a hand to stop her. “Wait. Wait. I know you’r
e about to digress and I will never find out what happened at the council meeting. Keep going and we will come back for the mother and daughter.”

  She laughed and leaned her hip on the now-vibrating washer. “I see you still have your meeting facilitation skills intact,” she teased. “Okay, we’ll take his mother and daughter under advisement.”

  “Good.”

  “I happened to mention at a council meeting that I thought it was unfair for the cops to be able to park their cars on the street all day while they gave tickets to other people for the same thing.”

  “I’m just curious, did you casually mention it or did you raise a stink?”

  “Okay, okay, maybe a little bitty stink. I wasn’t ranting and raving and waving my arms or anything. But it ended up with the council instructing Ed to tell his deputies they had to follow the rules too, and he was pretty peeved. And you’re right, he was mostly mad about me blindsiding him with it.”

  “Yeah, I imagine so.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know why I was so stupid. Of course I should have talked to him about it first, but I just blurted it out in public.”

  “We all do stuff like that though. My mouth has gotten me in trouble plenty of times.”

  A twinkle gleamed into her eye. “We’ll take that under advisement too. I'm going to want to hear about this. Anyway, about a week later, I had to run a quick errand. I started out but realized I'd forgotten to grab the mail and I was going near the post office. So I circled the block and saw a parking place right in front of my door. I ran inside for the mail, and the phone rang, and one thing led to another, and before I knew it a couple of hours had passed. I suddenly remembered my car was parked on the street instead of behind the building. So I went out to move it, and there was Ed writing a parking ticket.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Right. I told him I was moving my car and it could only been a hair over the two hours, but he kept writing that damned ticket and saying something about what’s good for the gander ought to be good enough for the goose.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “I wanted to smack him but he would have arrested me for attacking a police officer in the execution of his duty. So I grabbed the ticket and tore it into little bitty pieces and threw them at him and got in my car and drove it around back and parked it and practically busted the door slamming it when I got out. I stomped around kicking the walls for a few minutes until I was a little calmer. When I went back in the store, I found a new parking ticket lying on the counter, plus another ticket for littering. Which I have not paid, either of them. And we’ve barely spoken to each other since.”

  “Wow,” I breathed. “I haven’t given him enough credit for bravery.”

  “Damn straight. He’s lucky he’s still walking around. He could have ended up like that TV cop in the wheelchair.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Oh, about two seconds before Roger died, which is why you never heard about it. Didn’t seem right to be talking about parking tickets just then.”

  I reached over and gave her a hug. The spinning washer vibrated us both. “I should have had the brains to ask, but as you know I haven’t been able to find my head with both hands for months. But I am better, mostly thanks to you.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t do anything that any upstanding and loyal cousin wouldn’t have done. I think Bob has made all the difference.”

  “There you go again, changing the subject.”

  “I'd say he is the subject, or at least his duds are. Looks like they’re ready to put into the dryer.”

  I opened the dryer door and she threw the clothes in. As I set the timer I said, “Okay, so now to the tabled part of the agenda. What’s the deal with Ed’s mother and daughter?”

  “I think they really started all the trouble between us. We were getting along okay. Not that we didn’t argue about stuff, because he’s really pigheaded sometimes, but that was okay. It wasn’t serious fighting, just some bickering.”

  “Fun stuff,” I suggested.

  She grinned. “Yeah, actually it was.” Then her expression turned serious. “You know his wife had died—”

  “Cancer, I think you said?”

  “Yeah, she had breast cancer. He still worked for the state police then, but after she died he took an early retirement. But that made him crazy with nothing to do so he came to Willow Falls. His mother moved in with him and his daughter Faith to keep house and take care of them. That’s her story, anyway. I think she just loves to tell people what to do. I don’t know how he stands her. Faith is a great kid though.”

  “But what did they have to do with you and Ed?”

  “Well, you can't get away from family, can you? Mrs. Johnson decided as soon as she met me that she hated me, so she was constantly pushing at Ed to break up with me. And Faith and I really hit it off, and she was pushing her dad to marry me. So with one of them pushing in one direction and the other in the other—“

  “I bet he was wishing he’d never heard of you.”

  “Right. And the thing with the parking just sent it right over the edge.”

  “What about you, what do you want? Wouldn’t you like to try again?”

  “Hell, no,” she said robustly. “My life is just fine the way it is. At least it will be as soon as we get hold of that tape of Bob’s and get this murderer taken care of. Come on, let’s go call Trixie’s number again, and tell Bob his clothes are drying.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A heavenly smell preceded Ambrose up the stairs from the shop. He entered the apartment bearing gifts: two large, fragrant pizza boxes. “Hello, Louisa, Bob. I picked up something to nosh on. Kay and I both think better with pizza in front of us,” he explained.

  She took the boxes and set them on the dining table, saying, “Doesn’t everyone? Though it does seem like we’ve had a meal every twenty minutes today.”

  Ambrose shrugged off his tweed sport coat and adjusted the cuffs of his periwinkle silk shirt. “God, Kay, this pizza habit goes back to that very first one we made all those years ago, when we were designing the costumes for the school play.”

  I went to the kitchen for knives and forks while Bob got beers and soft drinks out of the refrigerator. Kay handed out napkins from the basket that holds her collection of those-that-don’t-matter-if-you-get-pizza-sauce-all-over-them.

  “I can barely remember that long ago,” she said, shaking her head. “Chef Boyardee pizza in a box—a little packet of dough mix, and a little can of sauce, and a little packet of desiccated cheese. I was in the eighth grade and you were a mighty sophomore, and I wasn’t sure I'd like this pizza stuff but you were so incredibly sophisticated that I had to act like I did no matter what it tasted like. Was that your first pizza too? I never knew that.”

  We settled with the dogs at our feet. Their interested faces clearly expressed their hope that pizza bones would fall on the floor. The bagels we’d consumed earlier had no effect on our willingness to attack the contents of the boxes. Ambrose spread his napkin on his lap and picked up his knife and fork. As he cut into his slice of pizza, he said, “Oh, yes, that was me at the age of fifteen, the complete cosmopolitan.” He looked around the table at each of us. “I understand that I carried away the Albatross at just the wrong moment, but that’s about all I do understand.” He conveyed a neat bite of pizza to his mouth and chewed.

  Kay paused in her reach for a pizza slice and looked at Bob and me. “Permission to speak freely? I can vouch for Ambrose’s trustworthiness.”

  “Of course,” I said, and Bob nodded. Kay turned to Ambrose.

  “Bob is a hypnotherapist. He had a copy of a video of a session with a client who, while under hypnosis, remembered seeing his stepfather in the house on the night that his mother died.”

  “That sounds fraught with peril,” Ambrose said. Kay nodded.

  “Her death was ruled a suicide because Carl Walsh, the stepfather, had an alibi for being elsewhere, and Ian had blanke
d out the memory of seeing him in the house. We think that Ian confronted his stepfather with his recovered memory, because Ian died the same way his mother had, an apparent suicide.”

  Ambrose had cut another bite, and hastily swallowed it so he could ask, “I take it, Bob, that you hid this tape in the ungainly piece of furniture I hauled out of here this morning?”

  Bob nodded. “Except that the tape in the Albatross is a copy of the original. I put the original in my safety deposit box in my bank in High Cross. What I didn’t know at the time was that Walsh owns that bank—he inherited it from Ian’s mother. I don’t know how he got into my box, but that’s where I kept the original tape.”

  “My goodness,” Ambrose paused in cutting another bite, “is nothing sacred?”

  I had just taken a big bite of pizza, and strings of cheese were festooned from my lips back to the slice. I was trying to separate myself from the cheese when Ambrose’s mild rhetorical question struck me as wildly funny under the circumstances and I snorted with laughter. This had the effect of drawing all eyes to me. I chewed hastily. “Sorry, don’t mind me.”

  Kay frowned and went on. “It's possible that a police detective tipped Carl off to the existence of the tape. Bob tried to tell him about his suspicions, but the detective brushed him off. But he was the only person Bob told about the tape.”

  “Suggestive.”

  “When the tape disappeared, Bob figured if this guy had killed twice, it wouldn’t be safe to hang around and wait for him to do it again. So he came to Willow Falls to hide while he figures out what to do.”