by Judith Ivie
The latch on the Law Barn’s big front door rattled promisingly, and we leaped to our feet as Margo arrived, lugging the usual quota of paraphernalia required for a stint at Vista View. We expected May to be right behind her, but we were disappointed.
“Where’s May?” I demanded and hurried over to the door to check out the parking lot. Strutter peered over my shoulder. No May.
“Why, I’m just fine and dandy, thanks for askin’, and how are y’all this lovely afternoon? Yes, I’d appreciate some help with this stuff,” Margo huffed, “thanks again.”
I shut the door with a bang, and we hustled to help Margo with her burdens. “Is May coming in her own car or something?”
“How did it go?” Strutter asked at the same time, unable to help herself.
Margo regarded us both with amusement. “Why do I get the feelin’ I am not the belle of this ball? Somebody bring me a cup of that tea you’re sittin’ here slurpin’ down while I’ve been toilin’ away at Vista View all day, and I’ll fill you in.”
She flopped down on the sofa in the lobby and crossed her legs. Wordlessly, Strutter and I ran into the copy room, threw together another mug of tea and raced back to the lobby.
“Here,” said Strutter, thrusting the mug at her.
I handed her a spoon and a napkin. “Now give.”
We resumed our seats and stared fixedly at Margo while she stirred her tea thoughtfully.
“To answer your first question, May is, in fact, drivin’ her own car today, and I have no idea when or if she’ll be joinin’ us here. Nor do I have much of anything to report about how things went between her and Izzy Marchand, since most of their conversation, if you can call yellin’ conversation, took place behind Izzy’s closed office door.”
“Ooohh, they were yelling?” I looked at Strutter, aghast.
“Right there in the middle of the administration building?” Strutter seconded my agitation. “Just remember, May is your relative, Margo, not ours. They can’t hold her against Kate and me. So then what happened?”
Margo stuck out her tongue at Strutter. “Well, I heard some bangin’ noises as if one of them was slammin’ a fist on the desk. Then there was more hollerin,’ and then …” She paused, as if trying to recollect every detail.
“Then what?” Strutter and I demanded on top of each other.
“Then nothin’. All the noise stopped. I have to tell you, I was a little worried there for a minute, thinkin’ Auntie May might have gone off the deep end and done Izzy physical harm. So I tippy-toed over and put my ear up against the office door and listened real hard. It was tough to hear with people goin’ by on their way to the dining room, though.”
“Oh my god, there were residents and staff in the lobby, and they saw you blatantly eavesdropping on Isabelle Marchand?” I massaged my temples.
“Never mind that now,” Strutter hissed. “What did you hear?”
“For a while I couldn’t hear a thing with all those people yakkin’ and laughin’, so I pressed my ear harder against the door and held my breath. That really helps, did you know?”
“Margo, don’t make me come over there,” Strutter warned her.
Margo laughed and took her out of her misery. “I heard the sound of genteel conversation between two civilized women. I couldn’t make out what they were sayin’, but I recognized both of their voices, so I knew Auntie May’s homicidal tendencies were back under control. She blows up now and then, but then she’s done, you know? She never was one to hold a grudge.” She took a sip of her tea and looked pleased with herself.
Strutter and I exchanged worried glances. “What time did all of this take place?” I asked.
Margo considered. “Let’s see. May blew past the sales desk on her way in at about ten o’clock. The loud part started right up, but it didn’t last too long. Things settled down, and I reassured myself they were both alive shortly after eleven. After that I had some looky-loos come by and demand the ninety-nine cent tour, so I had to drive them all over the complex. That takes a good bit of time, and they had a ton of questions, so it was around twelve-thirty when I finally got back to the administration building. Whew, what a mornin’.” She blew her bangs off her forehead and slugged back more tea.
“Had May left Izzy’s office by that time?” Strutter wanted to know.
“They both had,” Margo stated flatly. “Her door was open, and the lights were off. I went over and stuck my head in, but there was nobody home. So I went back out to the parkin’ lot and looked around, but May’s car was gone. I don’t know what Izzy drives, so I can’t tell about that. I just figured the two of them had hashed things out, and May had come back to the Law Barn. I didn’t see Izzy at all, and at three o’clock, I packed up and left. No sign of May, huh?”
Strutter and I shook our heads. “Should we be concerned, do you think?” I asked.
“Doubtful. Auntie May’s probably just tuckered out from all the fussin’ and fightin’ and gone home to take a nap. I know she’s feisty, but she’s not a young woman anymore. I’ll give her a call when I get home. Now,” she plunked down her mug and grinned at the two of us. “What have you two been up to today?”
Eighteen
Margo’s report on the meeting between May and Isabelle had been somewhat reassuring, but it raised more questions in my mind than it answered. May was clearly convinced that Isabelle and Desirée L’Amour were one and the same person, but I still had my doubts. It seemed too pat, somehow, and if they were not connected, the accusations May had leveled at Izzy would be beyond insulting. They might even make it impossible for Mack Realty and Vista View to maintain our business relationship.
Even if May’s assumptions were correct, I reasoned muzzily as sleep eluded me in the wee hours of Saturday morning, how could confronting Isabelle improve anything? Surely she would be even more humiliated by being out-ed for her cowardly act of revenge than she had been by May’s original rejection.
I turned over my hot pillow and punched it after squinting at the clock on my bedside table. A few minutes after one. Thank goodness I didn’t have to pull myself together and go into the office today, but I knew Margo had an open house this afternoon, and Strutter’s son was playing in a regional tournament. I hoped for their sakes they were getting more sleep than I was.
Inevitably, my thoughts turned to Emma, who would be rising in a few hours to finish packing and hurry to Bradley International for her early morning flight to Las Vegas, then on to Oregon. She had declined my offer of a ride, preferring to leave her ancient Saturn in one of the parking facilities that surround the airport and provide passenger shuttle bus service. I knew I was thinking like an old fogey, but the prospect of my daughter entering into a bi-coastal romance filled me with dread. Relationships were difficult enough to sustain when both parties lived in the same state. How could this possibly work?
I thrashed for the better part of another hour, my mind whirling with dire possibilities and unanswered questions, until Gracie, ever alert to the possibility of an early breakfast or perhaps a snack, leaped onto the bed.
“Mraow?” she said hopefully and purred loudly. She reached over with one paw and patted my nose in case I hadn’t gotten the message. As if. I threw off the covers with resignation and peered at the clock again. It was after two a.m. now, a totally crazy hour to be brewing tea, but if I stuck to an herbal variety, it might lull me to sleep. I padded, barefoot, down the hall to the kitchen behind Gracie, who was obviously delighted that her tactics had worked.
I filled the kettle, searched out a tea bag and was struggling with the pull ring on a can of Gracie’s favorite food when the phone rang, never a welcome sound in the wee hours. Immediately I thought of Emma and snatched the receiver off the wall phone’s base before the ringing roused Amando.
“Kate!” Margo’s voice vibrated with fear. I dropped the cat food can onto the counter and gripped the phone with both hands.
“What is it? Tell me.”
“It’s Auntie M
ay,” she wailed, and I could hear a thrum of hysteria in my usually unflappable friend’s voice. “She’s gone, just disappeared. I tried and tried to reach her all evenin’, but she didn’t answer her cell phone or her house line. When it got to be past midnight, John and I drove over to her house. When we got here … oh, Kate.”
Margo’s fragile self-control was rapidly unraveling, and my heart sank.
“Just spit it out. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”
Sniffling audibly, Margo choked, “The garage door was open. Her car was parked inside, but we couldn’t raise her when we rang and knocked, so we went around to the door leadin’ in from the garage to see if maybe it was unlocked.” She gulped and blew her nose. “It was, but May wasn’t in the house. We searched it from top to bottom. She wasn’t anywhere, but her purse was lyin’ right there on the stair landing in the garage. Her wallet and keys and her cell phone with about a dozen messages from Judy Holloway on it were there, too. Oh my god, Kate, Auntie May has disappeared.”
After scribbling a hasty note to Armando and anchoring it to the counter with his coffee mug, I scrambled into jeans and a sweater, plopped Gracie’s breakfast dish unceremoniously on the kitchen floor and raced to join Margo and John at the Wheeler Road house. I parked my car on the street to avoid blocking their car and a police cruiser, already in the driveway, and hustled to the house. Lights were on in the Peterson house, as well as several others around the cul-de-sac, despite the early hour.
In the kitchen Margo and John both spoke urgently into their cell phones, so I busied myself brewing coffee and putting out mugs and spoons for whatever sleep-deprived visitors might appear.
Margo ended her call first, and I went to give her a quick hug.
“Thanks for comin’, Sugar.”
“Where else would I be? If Strutter didn’t have kids to get organized, she’d be here, too. Even so, you know she’ll be over as soon as it’s daylight, and she can get J.D. up to speed.”
John, having trouble hearing, clamped a hand over his free ear, so I pulled Margo into the living room. “What do we know so far?”
Margo sank into the sofa cushions and kicked off her leather flats. She, too, was in jeans and a sweater, but hers were well cut and color coordinated. Leave it to Margo to be stylishly turned out even in these circumstances.
“Mostly, we’re just tryin’ to eliminate possibilities. The last person I saw with May was Isabelle Marchand, so that’s who I was on the phone with. I’m pretty sure she’s as clueless as the rest of us, even though she and May were together until nearly eleven o’clock. Izzy admitted May had correctly figured out that she and Desirée are the same person, and when May barged into her office and called her on it, they had a real old-fashioned cat fight. I don’t believe they got around to the hair pullin’ stage, but it was nip and tuck there for a while.”
I made get-on-with-it circles with my index finger. “And?”
“And they settled their differences and kissed and made up,” said Margo tersely, “at least, that’s how it went accordin’ to Izzy. She says when they left Vista View, they wound up drivin’ down to the beach and walkin’ for miles up and down the boardwalk. By then they were starvin’, so they treated themselves to dinner at Abby’s Place in Essex, complete with coffee and dessert. That’s easy enough to check on, and John will get Joahansson and MacNamara on it as soon as he gets off the phone, and I can tell him.” She closed her eyes in exhaustion.
I looked out the window at the lighted windows of the Peterson house. “The same two officers who were here the other night?”
Margo nodded. “They’re on nights this week, and since they have background on Auntie May’s situation, they came right over when John called the station. They’re talkin’ to Carla Peterson and her kids right now.”
I looked out the window again. “Really? I can’t believe those two adorable kids could be connected to this.”
“Probably not,” Margo agreed, “but don’t forget the Myron Lifschitz connection. He’s old enough to have some bad-ass buddies, and if he got mad enough about bein’ caught … well, even though Auntie May didn’t press charges, and it looks as if he and T.J. will get off with probation and some community service work, we don’t know how far off the rails these kids might really be. Johansson and MacNamara will be wakin’ both of them up shortly for some conversation.”
Margo opened her eyes and straightened up, shaking herself into alertness. “Anyway, after their late dinner, Auntie May drove Izzy back to Vista View. May told Izzy she planned to drive straight home and jump into bed, which is what Izzy herself did. She sounded as if she’d been sound asleep when I called.”
Something about the story bothered me. “What on earth could they have been talking about all that time? If what Isabelle said is true, they were together yesterday for more than twelve hours. That’s a heck of a lot of conversation over a falling out, even a major one, don’t you think?”
Margo nodded, acknowledging the strangeness of the prolonged encounter. “You’re right, and I’m just speculatin’ here, but I know Auntie May pretty well. She was my second mom, my older sister, whatever you want to call it, the whole time I was growin’ up and actin’ like a damn fool and gettin’ into scrapes. I tested her with everything I had, but she never once let me down. She’d be furious with me and yell and stomp, but then it was over, you know? She never laid a hand on me, although I’m sure she was just itchin’ to clobber me on more than one occasion, and she never held a grudge. She cooled off and forgave me every time. No matter how angry she was, I always knew she loved me.”
Margo laughed a little, remembering. “In fact, she’d tell me that’s why she got so mad. If she didn’t care about me, she’d say, she wouldn’t give a hoot what kind of terrible person I grew up to be, and you know what? That made sense to me. I believed her, and I believe that’s what’s goin’ on between her and Isabelle Marchand.”
I arched a skeptical eyebrow. “You think May cares about Isabelle Marchand all that much? I’m going to require some serious convincing.”
Margo regarded me patiently. “You were there when the two of them first met. They really hit it off. They talked their heads off, remember? At first I thought May was just kind of lonely for a friend closer to her own age. She had lots of them back in Atlanta, but up here, she hadn’t even met her neighbors. Anyway, Izzy isn’t that much older than we are—okay, than I am. She’s maybe in her early sixties, near as I can figure. Still, May opened right up to her, told her all about Romantic Nights, even though she’d sworn us to secrecy on that topic, and Izzy was chatterin’ away like a magpie. They connected.”
“They connected at first, maybe, but after they ate lunch together, Isabelle turned off like a lamp,” I reminded her.
“And now we know why. She was all hurt and rejected when Romantic Nights declined to publish her romance novel. When she found out that May is the publisher, she did a mean, spiteful thing that totally lit May’s fuse, which is a sight to see as you witnessed Thursday afternoon. May blew up, stormed into Izzy’s office on Friday morning and yelled some. I was there, sort of, and I heard it. Then, true to form, May got over it. I believe in my heart she never would have been that angry if she hadn’t been so disappointed in Isabelle.”
“Because she really liked her,” I finished the thought. “So they made up and spent the rest of the day and evening together, and that was the end of that.”
Margo nodded. “That’s my best guess.”
“So where is May?”
“I might be able to answer that. At least, I have an idea,” said John. He was punching a speed dial number on his cell phone as he came into the living room to join us. “Listen in while I make this call.”
We waited for a moment for his call to go through. “Johansson? Harkness. I’m still at the Farnsworth residence. After listening to the messages on Ms. Farnsworth’s phone, I returned the call of a Mrs. Judith Holloway of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. My wife informed me t
hat Holloway is under contract to Romantic Nights Press, which is owned and operated by Maybelle Farnsworth.
“Holloway writes erotic romance novels for Romantic Nights. She told me her husband Bob, who had been unaware of the explicit sex in her books, recently learned the truth and went off the deep end. He went on a two-day drunk, threatening to put the fear of God into her smut-mongering publisher, his words,” John clarified with an apologetic glance at Margo. “Yesterday evening, Holloway and his car disappeared, and Mrs. Holloway was afraid he might try to confront Ms. Farnsworth. She’s been trying to reach Ms. Farnsworth to warn her, but she couldn’t connect. She didn’t want to get the police involved, since she wasn’t sure he was really headed this way; but when I told her about the disappearance, she gave it all up. Says he’s driving a gray Toyota Camry with Pennsylvania plates, RBH1478.”
He listened for a minute, then said, “I agree. Those kids aren’t involved in this thing. We have a better lead to focus on, so let’s do it. Put out an APB on Robert Holloway, emphasizing the area between here and Doylestown. It’s hard to say what he has in mind, but Mrs. Holloway says he doesn’t have a gun. He has no history of violence of any kind. He’s just stupid drunk and dangerous because of it. If nothing else, we need to get him off the road. Keep me informed.”
He disconnected and came over to sit next to Margo. Her face was bleak, as I felt sure mine must be.
“Now what?” she asked wanly.
He put his arm around her shoulders. “Now, we wait.”