Killing Thyme

by Leslie Budewitz

  My chest wanted to explode.

  “Yeah. I keep meaning to ask Zak to look at it—I can’t tell if the problem is the lock or the hinges. And when your rent’s a dollar a month, you hate to call the landlord.”

  The voice. The tension flooded out of me, and I collapsed against a mop—judging by the shape poking my back and the stringy things brushing my neck.

  “What was that?” In the hallway, Tory spoke sharply, on alert.

  “It’s me.” I lifted one leg over the vacuum and shoved my way out. Blinked against the sunlight streaming in the back door. “Where were you?”

  Tory glanced at the closet, then burst into laughter. The woman beside her was not Hannah.

  “Sorry,” Tory said, wiping her cheek with a knuckle. “I was out back, helping Jade load up for a show.”

  “What if Hannah came and went while you were messing around outside? What if—?” My temperature rose as anger and irritation flared through me. Just as quickly, it plummeted. My knees buckled, and I collapsed against the wall.

  “Pepper, chill. I was outside three minutes max. If she isn’t here by now, she’s blowing us off.”

  “This is serious, Tory.”

  “Hey, I get it. Remember? I’ve been through this. I get what you’re doing and why it matters. Oh.” She jerked her head backward in surprise. “You thought—you were afraid—Pepper, I’m fine. We’re all fine.”

  That pissed-off, post-adrenaline jittery mash of nervous energy pulsed through me. “I know you do. I know you are. I’m sorry.” I ran both hands through my hair, wondering where I had left my tote. Tory hugged me, then introduced Jade, who made the clay masks and Japanese stoneware.

  “We used to show in the same gallery,” Jade said, “so when Tory asked me about Hannah, I tracked her down. I guess she can’t go back to her studio yet—because of the murder. ’Course, she’s not sure she wants to—”

  Tory shivered visibly, and I remembered how we had all felt last fall, knowing what had happened outside the Spice Shop.

  So the artist network didn’t know that Hannah had moved out. Been kicked out. But if she’d killed Bonnie to get the space back—and get back at Josh—would she care that a woman had died there?

  Only a psychopath wouldn’t be bothered by reminders of violence, even by their own hand.

  “Tory suggested we offer her work space in the basement. She said she’d come look, but then . . .” Jade extended her hands, palms up, in a “who knows?” gesture.

  “I texted her,” Tory said. “Don’t worry, Pepper—I’m sure she’s fine. You know artists. We get caught up in our work, and all of a sudden we’ve lost half a day and don’t have a clue.”

  I was embarrassed to admit I hadn’t worried about Hannah’s safety. Who would be after her?

  Bonnie’s killer, that’s who. If Hannah knew something . . .

  “I heard she’s unpredictable,” I said. “That she’s—”

  “Off her rocker?” Jade laughed. “You talked to Josh. They’re both great, but too intense. They blow up, get back together, then blow up again. They’d be better off if they could just walk away, but—well, you can’t ever tell what’s going on in other people’s relationships, can you?”

  And sometimes, not even your own.

  What was I doing here? I should be in my shop selling spice, not gallivanting around the city, asking questions. And certainly not shutting myself in closets at the slightest unexpected sound.

  But for reasons I hadn’t yet fully grasped, Bonnie Clay’s murder affected my family and other people I love. And that mattered way more than marjoram.

  “Sounds like this time, he really meant it, but she wasn’t convinced,” I said. “Tory, tell me you have lunch stashed somewhere and I’ll forgive you for scaring the parsley out of me.”

  “I can do that, but let me talk to this customer,” Tory replied, nodding toward a woman who’d just walked in.

  Before Jade left, I asked if she’d known Bonnie Clay.

  “Sorry, no. There’s so many potters in Seattle. And I’ve never sold in the Market. That’s a lot of work.”

  “Bonnie seemed like she’d rather hang out alone than make small talk with customers all day.”

  “A lot of artists feel that way. Me, I spend so much time with the clay that it’s nice to get out among real humans now and then.”

  At the law firm, we’d brought in a consultant who ran Myers-Briggs tests on the lawyers and staff. Easy to tell the introverts from the extroverts, the thinkers from the feelers. There ought to be a category for ambiverts—people like Jade who draw energy from both solo activities and social interaction, at different times and in different ways. It’s too easy to put people in narrow categories that don’t fit.

  Jade jangled her car keys. “Great to meet you. If I hear from Hannah, I’ll call you.”

  I wished her well, then headed up front. Bonnie had been part of a group years ago, then walked away and made herself into a loner. I was convinced the Strasburg incident had been the trigger.

  But it wasn’t the whole story. And that showed how much I know about people.

  Then I remembered the newspaper article in her locker. Had she chosen to sell her work in the Market because it was the best place to make a living?

  Or to keep an eye on me?

  I watched the gallery while Tory dashed into the tiny communal kitchen—the third of the doors I’d seen in the back hall—to rustle up lunch. And music.

  “Zappa Plays Zappa,” Tory said. “I turned it off so I could hear customers when I went outside. Don’t know how I missed you. Sorry we scared you.”

  We settled onto two bar stools behind the sales counter and tucked into turkey-and-provolone on croissants. “Thish ish prrfct,” I said through a mouthful. “Investigating makes me hypoglycemic.”

  A few minutes later, after Tory had sold a woman a blue picture agate necklace and lunch had me feeling like myself again, I told her about the sublease. “Why would Hannah want the space back? To mess with Josh?”

  Tory held up a hand, signaling me to wait while she swallowed. “Might be as simple as not finding another place. Not everyone wants to rent to artists. We spill paint, use turpentine, keep crazy hours.”

  Maybe that was why Bonnie had jumped at Hannah’s rental offer. I didn’t know where she’d been all these years, but according to my friends in the Market, she’d been on the move.

  Tory continued. “We’re going to have to move soon, too—our building sold, and they’re going to replace it with some micro apartment garbage.”

  “What? I love your place. So much character—all those old tiles and moldings.” Tory and Zak rented the lower unit of a four-plex on Capitol Hill, a century old and suffering from age, neglect, and the rise in property values. A deadly triad. Tory painted in the attic, and their metal sculptor neighbor worked her welded magic in the decrepit garage out back. “What about Keyra?”

  “This co-op thing’s worked out so well that we’re all hoping to find a place together. I’ve got some insurance money from my dad. Owning a building will give Zak and me some security.” Her golden brown eyes turned serious. “Artists always fear being one step away from failure. Can you support yourself without a day job? If you get a day job, can you make time to make art? Are you’re giving in, giving up—wasting time you should be painting?

  “And then, if people like your work”—she gestured toward her own paintings, a bloom of color against the faded redbrick—“are you a success, or have you sold out?”

  I tilted my head, squinting.

  “My gallery mates are all great.” She sipped her iced tea, the Spice Shop blend. “But the art-for-art’s-sake crowd thinks if you consistently create work that regular people buy, you must be sacrificing an essential element of your artistic soul for popularity.”

  “Sounds like jealous
y to me. Or a head game.”

  She let out a wry laugh. “Artists. Head cases, all of us.”

  “Nah. Just human.”

  “Anyway, I get why Hannah might have freaked out. Short on money, short on options. Maybe Bonnie freaked out back. Maybe they argued and fought.”

  I drained my tea. “That would explain the lack of forced entry. But there was no sign of a struggle. And why confront her late on a Friday night?”

  A trio of women came in, reminding me that this was a working gallery and that I had a business of my own to tend. Tory promised to call if Hannah showed up, but I wasn’t betting on her appearance.

  A block away, Yesler Way, the original Skid Road, separates the first platted claims in Seattle from the streets to the north, which other pioneers laid out to follow the shoreline. I stepped into the street.

  Shouts pierced the air, and a hand jerked me back. Tires squealed. I landed on the curb, on my butt and elbow.

  “What were you doing?” a man asked. I scrambled to my feet, my right knee already complaining. “You stepped right in front of that car.”

  My head swung right, then left, as I tried to orient myself. “What car? I never saw—”

  He pointed as a white SUV rounded the corner and disappeared from view.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” a woman said. “The driver came flying down Yesler and changed lanes at the last minute. Almost like she wanted to hit you. It was crazy.”

  Images zipped around in my brain, forming no discernible pattern. I couldn’t think in complete sentences, let alone speak them. My pants were torn, and my elbow hurt to high heaven.

  “The plate started AL, and I think it ended with a 2.” She scribbled on the back of a parking lot stub.

  “Thanks.” I took a deep breath and took the ticket. The street, the buildings, my rescuer, the witness—everything seemed normal.

  Except the sidewalk, where my frosted cookies lay shattered, bits of pink, blue, and yellow covering the dark gray concrete like a mosaic. A pigeon landed with a squawk, zeroing in on a broken teddy bear.

  Another white SUV? They were everywhere.

  Had the driver truly wanted to hit me?

  Talk about crazy.

  Twenty-one

  Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.

  —Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

  By the time I got back to the shop—carrying a bag of biscotti from the Italian market, in place of the broken animal cookies—my fear had sharpened into anger. I could not believe anyone had tried to hit me on purpose, but it didn’t matter. The incident fueled my determination to get to the bottom of things.

  The first step is knowing where to start. I had two options. I picked the easy one.

  My mother could wait.

  “C’mon, dog.” Arf obeyed.

  “You’ve got the samples they asked for?” Sandra asked. It had taken her about two seconds to suss out that I’d been rattled, not once but twice, and that I would not be deterred. “Be safe, boss.”

  Business before investigation. But as I drove down First Avenue South to meet a prospective customer—a butcher ready to spice up his sausage business—I considered my theories. And the holes in them.

  Hannah Hart might have flailed out in anger at Bonnie. She was the only person I knew who wanted Bonnie gone and had access to the building and studio. Josh had keys, but I’d seen his shock at the discovery of the body. But Hannah might have been wound up enough to confront her tenant, even late at night.

  Her former neighbors might know if she burned the night oil. Whether she was likely to rage at anyone other than Josh. What she drove and where she might be now.

  She was reportedly a small woman. Hard to imagine her attacking Bonnie viciously enough to kill.

  And she had no link to Kristen or the stolen bracelet. But I had to agree with the police: Odds were that the two crimes were connected. We needed to figure out how.

  I signaled and switched lanes. By that logic, I couldn’t rule Hannah out until probing a little deeper.

  Brian Strasburg, on the other hand, had an obvious tie to the bracelet—a family heirloom that went missing the night his father was killed.

  But while Kristen and I believed Bonnie had been involved in the Strasburg incident, how would Brian have made that connection?

  If he had, then all bets were off. Despite his reported personality transformation, I could imagine him harboring a deadly grudge. It’s one thing to control your moods around your kid, another to let a potential accessory to murder slip away. Again.

  Lawyers know how to track down facts and people.

  I steered the Mustang into the butcher’s small parking lot and sat, pondering. How would Strasburg have known the bracelet had surfaced, let alone its link to Bonnie-Peggy?

  Unless some piece of evidence—known to Detective Washington and the victim’s family, but never publically revealed, like the missing bracelet—put her in the loop. Something they knew, and she knew, that was the reason she left Seattle.

  And the reason she came back.

  Maybe she thought she could hide in plain sight. That the passage of time would protect her. In a city, we run in circles that barely touch. Now that I live blocks from my work, my experience has changed, but when I worked downtown and lived in Greenwood, work and home were worlds apart. I never ran into a coworker in the grocery store. If Tag and I went out for Sunday breakfast, we didn’t run into the bank teller I chatted with every other Friday.

  A secret big enough to send a woman on the run for thirty years didn’t just lose its power.

  Had she come back to make amends?

  The absence of signs of a break-in or a search for valuables in the studio ruled out my final option, random criminal violence.

  Arf stuck his head over the seat and poked my neck with his nose. I reached up to stroke his bearded chin. “Okay, you’re right. No more woolgathering. And I’ll bring you a treat, promise.”

  Inside the butcher’s shop, a glass-front cooler dominated the retail space up front. Swinging double doors led to the workroom and giant coolers and freezers in back. The butcher had given me a tour, and I rubbed my bare arms to warm up.

  “So here are the samples we talked about. And some of our smoked black peppercorns,” I said.

  Once upon a time, butchers were big men with broad chests, full bellies pushing out their spattered white aprons, beefy arms bulging out of white T-shirt sleeves. No longer. The modern food entrepreneur can be anyone. Inspired by a love of backyard grilling, this one had left computer programming for meat cutter’s classes, then bought this shop from an old-school butcher ready to retire.

  “For the first year, I bought my spices from the same people he did. But then you called, and I thought, yeah, check it out. I’m ready to move beyond the basics, offer customers a little more.”

  He had a good palate and a good nose. We talked spices for sausage—red and black peppers, sages, fennel, oregano, garlic. We talked salami, the popular cured meats, and wild game variations. We talked salt.

  He placed a respectable opening order, and I gave him a gift bag of our grilling rubs to try. “Your customers will love these. They’ll think you’re a brilliant butcher—”

  “Which I am,” he said, a dimple forming in his left cheek.

  “Which you are,” I agreed. “Because you give your customers what they need to make their friends and family think they’re brilliant cooks. We’re working on a cocoa and pepper blend, and one with hibiscus flowers that will knock your socks off.”

  He raised a finger and disappeared through the swinging doors, emerging with a small white insulated box. “Two pork loins and a small roast, and our sweet Italian sausage and maple breakfast sausage. Love to hear what you think about the flavors. And I put in a treat for your dog.”

  �
��You just made a friend for life. I like you, too.”

  Business accomplished, my copilot and I headed for Beacon Hill and Wedding Row. My intention was to chat up the tenants and find out more about Hannah and Bonnie, their habits, and the tensions. I had a hunch that in a building full of artists and retailers, little escaped observation.

  The parking spaces out front were roped off to make room for a fleet of art cars. Need a distinctive way to arrive at your wedding or reception? Search no further! While it’s hard to ignore the Yellow Cab repurposed as a shark or the Chinese dragon stretch limo, my personal fave is the Barbie Dream Hearse—billed as “Seattle’s only hearse for the living.” Several young women in short dresses and long legs, champagne flutes in hand, ogled its charms and giggled over the prospects of a bachelorette party cruise around the city in a star-speckled white Cadillac Brougham hearse with a pink-and-white interior.

  Gotta love being part of a city where weird as a way of life meets geek computer culture, creating our own brand of Northwest nerd cool.

  But I don’t love prowling for parking. I turned left, made another left, and another, back to where we’d started. Nothing. I drove south another block and went left again, wondering if I should go back home. I get nervous leaving the Mustang too far from my destination.

  “What say we cross our fingers and double back?” I glanced in my rearview mirror as if expecting Arf to reply.

  And that’s when I saw it. Wedged between a red Camry and a dented blue pickup sat Bonnie Clay’s van.

  I found an alley to pull into and made a call. “I ought to have you on speed dial,” I told Detective Spencer.

  “You’re sure it’s hers?”

  “Yep.” I hadn’t paid much attention to the van when we dropped Bonnie off Friday night, but the bumper sticker removed any doubt. Next to an earthy brown handprint were the words “I make art from mud.” I read Spencer the van’s New Mexico plate number and waited while she ran it.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Then why is it registered to Elena Sophia Istvanffy?”

  I inhaled sharply.