Number three on the killer’s list, I’d been so close to death that razor sharp images of everyone I’d ever loved seared my brain in a desperate attempt to carry them with me into eternity. Every nerve I possessed focused on the barrel of that gun poised to rip a fatal hole in my body. The millisecond before I was nearly shot, a primal scream of fear roared from my soul in outrage at my own mortality.
Allison had been my friend.
I couldn’t bear the thought that she, too, had screamed that final cry of frustration and fear. I prayed she wasn’t the victim of someone who, as she fought for every molecule of air in that room, held his breath hoping she would die.
My killer hadn’t succeeded.
Hers wasn’t going to either. If she had been murdered, I was going to find out who and why.
When I reached my house in Albany, the first thing I did was scrub my feet and ankles in anti-bacterial soap. Then I changed into gray sweats to blend into the fog-drenched landscape. I’d bought them last year in the hope new clothes would motivate me to go the gym for some much needed exercise.
Another fantasy bites the dust.
Pulling the strings of the hood tightly around my face so no trace of Radiant Ruby stuck out from beneath the edges, I zigzagged through the flats of Albanythe suburban solution to urban livingto Hopkins, up Hopkins to Berryman, down Berryman where it turns into Shattuck, past the Gourmet Ghetto, and up Virginia to Allison’s apartment. I was a little surprised that with her meticulous sense of order she’d chosen to live in Berkeley. Not only had we ended up in career paths more suited to the other’s talents, Allison would have heartily approved of the manicured and homogeneous character of my Albany neighborhood, while I felt more at home with the wacky, envelope-pushing, eclectic nature of Berkeley culture.
Gradually the neat houses with trikes parked on the front porches and playsets dominating the backyards were replaced by the older, bigger homes in Berkeley, which in turn gave way to the hodge-podge of housing that characterized the north side of campus.
Northside is student country. Over thirty-thousand of them. With little official university housing, the scramble for even a large closet into which to throw a futon is fierce. Berkeley is a perennial hostage to the housing crisis. Northside, in particular, has lost much of its original charm. Tacky apartment buildings are crammed among older homes that have been chopped up into awkwardly shaped flats. Most places need paint jobs, the yards weeding. Old maple trees line the streets, hinting at an earlier time when stately houses sat in every lot, not yet balkanized in the frenzied need for student housing. Every now and then a home sits back on a well-tended lawn with only one mailbox and a fairly new Volvo in the driveway, and you wonder how in the hell it escaped.
Even if I hadn’t memorized Allison’s address, I wouldn’t have had any trouble finding her building. An older, newly painted four-plex, it was the only building on the block without leaves littering the front porch. Yellow and blue primroses lined the path up to the front door. Allison had clearly found a landlord whose passion for order complimented her own.
On the drive over I’d decided I’d march up to the front door and act like I belonged there. If anyone challenged me, I’d say Allison’s parents had asked me to drop her purse off at her apartment. It was shocking at how easily I was manufacturing lies out of thin air.
Must be that Catholic school training.
My usual ineptness with keys was my undoing. Instead of blithely turning the key in the lock and slipping unnoticed into Allison’s apartment, I stood there swearing under my breath for several minutes, turning and jiggling the key every which way except the right way.
The apartment door to the right of me opened. A woman not a day under eighty stood in the entryway, a broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other. Little patches of pink scalp peeked through the rigid, tight pin curls of her home permanent. She wore a shapeless housecoat with buttons down the front that women of her generation wore when they “cleaned house.” My grandmother had owned about twenty of them.
“Can I help you?” she asked politely.
I thought I could bluff my way out of this until I met her eyes, sharp and intelligent behind the quarter-inch-thick lenses of her glasses. The lies I’d rehearsed died on my lips. As erect and straight as the broomstick in her hand, her body language had a firmness to it that suggested she belonged there and I didn’t, and I better have a good explanation why I was on her front porch.
The same degree of guilt and dread I’d felt when the nuns had caught me sneaking a smoke in a secluded section of the high-school rose garden washed over me.
“I, uh…” While I fumbled for words, the keys slipped out of my sweaty hands and fell on the concrete with a tinny splat. After I’d bent over to pick them up, I smiled in a futile gesture of respect, as if this would expiate my sin.
Like the nuns, she wasn’t placated.
“Young lady, what are you’re doing at Miss Warner’s front door with her keys?” she demanded, glaring at my hand clutching Allison’s keyring.
She may have been old, but she sure was feisty.
“I’m sorry, Mrs…?” I began.
“Horne. Bridie Horne,” she snapped. “I’m the owner of this building, so don’t try to pull any funny stuff.”
“Mrs. Horne,” I mumbled, half expecting the ghost of twenty-year-old cigarette smoke to waft up between us. “I’m returning Allison’s purse.”
I held up the purse as evidence.
She was not mollified.
“And why are you returning Miss Warner’s purse? Doesn’t she need it?”
She didn’t know.
I guess Allison’s parents were too grief-stricken; they hadn’t called her landlady.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Horne. I thought you knew. Allison had an…accident at work. I teach at École, too.”
A patchwork of worry lines creased her forehead. “Is she all right?” Her voice had lost all its spunk. She sounded every bit of her eighty-plus years and more.
My eyes smarted with tears remembering Allison’s last horrible moments. I shook my head no. Her blue eyes, distorted by the thick lenses of her glasses, also filled with tears. The broom and dustbin fell to the floor with an awful clatter. Looking like she was about to collapse. I stepped forward and cupped a hand under her elbow to make sure she didn’t fall.
Looping Allison’s purse over my left shoulder, I put my right arm around her and led into her apartment. I immediately felt a sense of déjà vu. This apartment was a near replica of my grandmother’s flat. A piano hugged one wall, covered with school photos of grandchildren. All the furniture had elaborately carved legs, polished to a shine. The aroma of Lemon Pledge hung in the air. Spying two chairs parked at an angle in front of the fireplace, I steered her toward a high-back Queen Anne and gently pushed her into it. I placed Allison’s purse on the floor next to her chair.
“Now you stay there,” I ordered. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
She started to protest and then stopped. Pulling an ironed handkerchief from her pocket, she began dabbing her eyes with one hand and waving me in the direction of the kitchen with the other.
I picked up the broom and dustpan, closed her front door, carried them into the kitchen, and put them back into the broom closet. Once I was in the kitchen, Mrs. Horne began barking orders to me from the living room in between loud honks into her handkerchief.
“Tea’s in the cupboard to the right of the sink. The Irish Breakfast. You’ll find a teapot on the shelf above the kitchen table. Don’t use the Blue Willow one; the brown one makes better tea. I like my tea plain, but most people don’t. A creamer and sugar bowl are in the cupboard to the left of the sink, second shelf. You’ll find a tray in the cupboard above the fridge.”
Like most strong-minded people—code for obnoxious, take-charge types—you know when you’ve met your match. In five minutes I’d loaded up the tray with a teapot, creamer and sugar bowl,
two teacups with saucers, and a plate of cookies. I placed the tray on the coffee table in front of the fireplace and sat in the well-worn, brown leather club chair opposite hers.
“Give it a minute. I like my tea strong. Something tells me you do, too. Now what’s your name? No shilly-shallying.” Her eyes were red from crying, but the spunk had returned full force.
“Mary Ryan. Allison and I were old friends. We went to school together at École.”
“Ryan, eh?” She sniffed that little snort of approval when the Irish officially acknowledge each other. “Nice Irish name. My maiden name was O’Sullivan.” I wouldn’t say she beamed at me, but her face lost its look of mistrust. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and peered at me to get a better look. “Allison’s talked about you. You’re the competitive one, right? She told me you were coming back to teach. Made her nervous. She didn’t say so, but I got the impression that she was afraid you’d steal her thunder. You can pour that now,” she ordered, pointing at the teapot.
“I’m not that competitive,” I complained, as I poured the tea. “We had some good times when we were students. I was looking forward to working with her.”
“Oh, she liked you well enough. Just thought you were pushy.”
What could I say?
“How did she die?”
“The paramedics said it was a fatal allergic reaction.” I tried to blank out the image of Allison’s face pocked with welts.
“She was very allergic to crab, shrimp, anything like that.”
“Yeah, I remember that from when we were students. She must have eaten something with shellfish in it.”
Or someone knowing her sensitivity to shellfish slipped some into her food.
“She was good people.” Mrs. Horne’s hand shook a little as she placed her teacup back onto its saucer. “Don’t know what I would’ve done without her when Frank died a couple of years ago. The kids wanted me to move in with them. I got two daughters; one in Tucson, one in Dallas. I told my girls, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ Too hot. Plus I like my independence. I’ve got my church, my quilting group; I didn’t want to start all over again in a new city. Allison was a peach. Got me through the really bad patch. We would have been married sixty-two years next month.”
“This must have been Frank’s chair.” I patted the arm and shifted in my seat. Over the years the chair had molded itself to Frank’s body, and judging by the lump hitting the small of my back, Frank wasn’t very tall.
“Almost threw it away when he died. Couldn’t bear to see it empty.” She gazed out the window for a moment as if to collect herself, then her eyes returned to me. “Allison persuaded me to keep it, that one day I wouldn’t mind. She was right. Now I set my quilting frame in front of his chair and pretend he’s sitting there. Tell him about my day. Neighbors probably think I’m nuts. Any hoo, I’d better call her parents. Give them my condolences. Nice girl. I’m real sorry. Can just imagine how I’d feel if something happened to one of my girls. I don’t know if I have the heart to finish her quilt.” Mrs. Horne sighed and looked at a quilting frame nestled against the wall to my right behind Frank’s chair.
Stretched tight across the quilting frame was a nearly finished Wedding Ring quilt. The quilting was even and fine, the kind of expertise with a needle that takes a lifetime to develop.
“You’re quite a quilter, Mrs. Horne. It’s beautiful.”
“Well, it was appropriate at the time. Don’t know any other young women getting married though.”
Thank goodness I’d just put down my teacup.
“Getting m…m…married? Allison was getting married?” I stammered.
“Sure. Her fiancé had hemmed and hawed for months. Thursday night she told me they’d finally set a date. Have never seen her so happy.” She shook her head.
Thursday night. And Friday afternoon she waltzes into the school kitchen looking like the cat that ate the canary.
“You look surprised, Mary.”
Nothing got by this lady.
“I didn’t know she was engaged. Didn’t even know she had a boyfriend to be honest,” I said slowly. “Did you ever meet her fiancé?”
“Nope,” she said. “Come to think of it, she never even mentioned him by name. Just said that they’d finally come to terms.”
“To terms?” I repeated. That sounded like Nations Bank taking over Bank of America. Not very romantic
“Those were her very words. Sounds odd, I admit. I assumed her fiancé was that good-looking Italian-looking guy who came over sometimes. The chef at your school. You must know him. Looks like Dean Martin in his younger days.”
“Chef de Luca? He’s married,” I protested.
Her lips pursed in disapproval. “Doesn’t seem to bother people these days, does it? I don’t truck with that sort of thing. I thought Allison had more sense.”
Me too.
“I appreciate you sitting with me.” She patted my hand. “I’m okay now. Leave Allison’s purse there on the floor. I’ll tell her folks it’s here.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Horne.” I guess searching Allison’s apartment wasn’t going to happen.
She hoisted herself out of her chair with a little difficulty.
“Call me Bridie. Don’t get old,” she advised. “It’s hell.”
I leaned over to pick up the tray.
“Nope, leave it. I’m going to have another cup of tea with a couple of inches of whiskey in it.”
I pulled a business card out of my purse, scribbled my home phone number on the back of it, and placed it next to the teapot.
“Call me if you need me, Bridie.”
“Will do.” She grabbed my arm. “Should have never have stopped moving. This damn hip of mine is acting up.” Leaning heavily on me, she led me to the front door. “No wedding ring. How come?”
I’d thought I was past the age of blushing, but apparently not. “I’m divorced. My husband couldn’t handle having such a pushy wife.” I tried to sound jocular, but it came out bitter.
She folded her arms across her chest and gave me a long, hard look. “Some men are weak. They need a weak woman to make them feel strong. I’m a pretty good judge of character.” She pointed a finger in my direction. “You, missy, need someone who’ll give it right back to you. Otherwise you won’t respect him. Did you respect your husband?”
I’d never thought about Jim in those terms. I had loved him, but had I respected him? I shook my head.
“I was lucky. Found a man who wasn’t afraid of my intelligence and spunk. Said I kept him young.” She glanced over at a photo on the piano. It must have been taken shortly before Frank died. Bridie was staring straight into the camera, as if daring it to expose every wrinkle and flaw. He was looking at her, an amused smile on his face. “You need someone like my Frank. When you find him, you’ll know. And don’t let go. They’re as rare as hen’s teeth. On second thought, would you mind taking Allison’s purse up to her place? Every time I see it’ll remind of her death. I don’t need those types of reminders at my age. I’ll tell her folks it’s there. She’s above me on the second floor. My hip gives me trouble when it’s damp like this.”
I coughed to hide my glee. “I’d be happy to.” I walked back across the room, scooped up Allison’s purse from the floor with eager fingers, and returned to the front door.
“Lock up when you’re done and put the keys in Allison’s mailbox. I’ll get them later. Remember what I said about finding the right man. He’s out there.” With a gentle pat on my cheek, she shut the door behind me.
Damn you, O’Connor.
Chapter Thirteen
I hated deceiving the old lady, but if I was going to conduct a decent search I had no choice. Unlocking Alison’s door, I bounded up the stairs, counted to ten, and then bounded down the stairs, stomping forcefully on every riser. Slamming Allison’s door shut so Bridie would think I’d left, I untied my shoes, stuffed them under my armpit, and crept back up the sta
irs in my stocking feet. With Allison living directly above Bridie, I couldn’t make a sound.
When I rounded the corner to enter her living room I blinked several times, my eyes on sensory overload. It was like walking into a spread in Apartment Beautiful, the feature article being “Chintzpah—Go for It.” All her furniture, upholstered in fabric emblazoned with large yellow and pink flowers, was oversized, with plump rolled arms supporting gigantic pillows in the same busy fabric. At five-nine I’m rarely overwhelmed in physical settings, but the combination of the large floral design and the sheer size of these pieces crammed into a relatively small space made me feel like Alice in Chintzland after she ate the wrong side of the cookie. If I’d been the slightest bit claustrophobic, I’d have had a panic attack on the spot. Naturally, it was spotless.
Where to start? No checkbook in her purse or locker; hunt for the checkbook. Look for clues to the identity of the commitment-phobic boyfriend. Allison being such a neatnik limited the potential for clue finding, but I had to start somewhere. I doubt whether I’d find any miscellany giving insight into Allison’s past. (I cringed, thinking of last year’s Christmas cards still on propped up on my mantle). But I might find something about her present and what she thought might be her future.
Fortunately, the blinds were drawn so I didn’t have to skulk around under the windowsills. The only piece of furniture that didn’t match was a plain utilitarian desk almost hidden in the far corner of the room.
Eureka.
Allison’s checkbook was on top, flanked by two pens and a roll of stamps. Everything was in order to pay her bills.
The checkbook didn’t hold too many surprises. Allison’s passion for lingerie matched my obsession for shoes. She’d bought something at Victoria’s Secret at least once a month. The rest of the entries were standard, checks to Bridie, the utilities, etc. There were two interesting entries: one was a check written three weeks earlier for $1000 to Garibaldi’s Jewelers in North Beach—the same jeweler whose card had been hidden under her driver’s license—and the other was a check written on the same day to Trips Out Travel for $4000. Her desk drawers yielded a bunch of travel brochures for tours of Tuscany but nothing else. She’d circled a couple of tours coinciding with school break at the beginning of April. It didn’t take a genius to realize Allison was planning her honeymoon.
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