“Wait!” Fay cried. “There’s something I need to know. Who was Honeysuckle? She was one of Dominick’s mistresses, I know that much. She might have something to do with one of those deaths. I don’t know of course, just one of the endless possibilities.”
“Thirty years his junior,” Ishtar said. “He was drunk on her. She could get anything she wanted from him. He died lusting after her.”
“Marion knew that?”
“Marion tried to persuade her father to drop the woman. No luck – he was angry, he told me. Look, Marion loved him for all his faults. He taught her puppets. Took on all the roles. He lived them.”
“Hard for Gloria.”
“Gloria had blinders on.” Ishtar raised her voice. “It was Honeysuckle gave Gloria that witch puppet you had in your show Friday.”
“Ah,” Fay said, but not admitting it was Willard’s copy. The police had the original.
“I was shocked to see it.” Ishtar went on, moving back into the room, her face perspiring. “I suppose Gloria thought it was from Marion. At least Marion would have taken the pins out of it. Voodoo doll, you know.” She shut her lips tight as though she’d said too much and already regretted it. “Now I must – ” She stepped back again, her eyes wide as though she’d seen or remembered something that frightened her. The eyes were a deep lustrous brown. Marion’s eyes.
“One more question,” Fay said, holding her back. “Please. It’s important. Who do you think might have killed your daughter?”
Ishtar shook her head. The muscles tensed in her neck; a tiny knot throbbed in her temples. She held on to the door knob.
“Billy Kidde,” Fay said. “Do you know him? He’s been going out with my foster daughter, Chance. She told me that he learned puppetry from Marion. There was more, she hinted, though she won’t say – loyal to Billy, you know. He’s eight years older. She’s young and impressionable.”
“Why wouldn’t I know him?” Ishtar said. “He did shows with Marion early on, he was obsessed with her, but she just toyed with him. When she went to Cedric he wouldn’t accept it. He kept coming to the house.” Her face hardened. “I tried to call him this morning, to find out what’s going on in his head. But no response.” She opened the door and a cold wind blew in. “I’ve talked too much. I just came to get my raincoat, I can’t afford another one. I have this disability, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” Fay said, getting up to see her out. She was curious about the disability, but didn’t want to ask. The door banged shut behind Ishtar.
“Uh oh,” said Glenna, struggling up from her chair.
“Uh oh, what?”
“This.” Glenna held up the raincoat she’d hung on the back of another chair, and started for the door with it.
The door reopened and Ishtar snatched up the coat. “By the way,” she said. “That rose-and-cream ending to the play was a complete bore. Marion would’ve hated it.”
The door slammed again and the woman was gone. Before Glenna could throw in her two cents, the phone rang. It was the beauty salon. “You’re absolutely right, Ms. Hubbard,” the voice gushed, then paused, distracted. Fay heard a half dozen voices in the background. “It was a bluish spot in a brown eye. Kind of a circle, like. Mimi here was fascinated by it, right Mimi?” A tinkle of laughter. “You talk to that lawyer yet, hon?”
“I will. Tomorrow maybe. You have a Samantha down in your books somewhere?”
“Hang on, dear, I’ll take a look.”
“Am I off the hook now?” Glenna asked. “I got Ishtar for you.”
“Good job, Glenna, yes. Excellent! So go watch your program. You’re home free. Take Apple’s cookies with you. I don’t want to look at them.”
“Can’t say for sure, dear,” the beautician said. “No Samantha on this year’s list. But I’ve no time to keep looking now. I’ve got a customer getting a perm.”
“It’s okay. And thanks.” Fay hung up and whooped. “We got her, by God, we got her pegged I bet, that Sammy! Glenna? I’m going to the Co-op to see if she’s left-handed like that witch puppet. Call my cell if you need me.”
* * *
The wastebasket had been dumped when Chance got back to the apartment, but she saw something else in a corner of the cramped kitchen that took her breath. Kindling wood, a pile of rags, a box of big wooden matches. Whoa! Was that what the mysterious note was about? Was he planning to torch something? Some place? Some body? Her heart flew into her mouth. If she had to tear the place apart, she’d find that note and figure out what it was all about.
She was suddenly thirsty. But the cup she’d filled with cold water shook in her hand and she slapped it down before it dropped from her fingers. She pawed through his desk drawers. Nothing helpful. Now the kitchen drawers: silverware, serving spoons, can openers, corkscrews, potholders. A scattering of recipes: whole wheat waffles, Sammy’s tuna and onion casserole – in Sammy’s backward-slanted handwriting.
She stared at the handwriting. Why, that was the handwriting on the note she’d seen yesterday, the one he tore up. She was certain of it! She stuck the recipe in her pocket and searched through all the drawers. Nothing more. Still thirsty, she drank the rest of the water in the cup. She was hungry, too. Hungry to know what was going on with Billy. He didn’t just read that note yesterday, he reacted to it. Now she was late for a four o’clock class at the studio school. One of her frogs was coming out of the kiln.
When the phone rang she picked it up. “Hello?” She tried to sound like Billy’s voice.
“Chance?” Now she was caught. It was Fay. “What are you doing there? You have a class.”
“I’m on my way. Why are you calling here?”
“I’m looking for Samantha. I need to talk to her.”
“She works in the Natural Foods Co-op.”
“Not anymore she doesn’t. She just quit. I’m in the Co-op now – thought I’d try Billy, get her number. I don’t even know her surname! I just know she has a blue circle – ”
“Around the right eye, I told you that.”
“So did the beautician.”
“Who?”
“Never mind,” Fay said. “I just need to see her. Is she left-handed?”
“What? I don’t know. She’s flying out somewhere, I know that much. This week sometime. Maybe that’s why she quit work.”
“We can’t let her do that! Look, I’ll explain later. You don’t know her last name?”
“Um, Rule, yeah. Samantha Rule. Why can’t she leave town? Tell me. Fay?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“I need to know now!”
“I’ll be home for supper, see you then. You get to that class now, Chance. Call if you need a ride home.” The line clicked off.
Chance banged down her cup and it chipped. Shee-it. She was furious at Fay.
Something was wrong and she didn’t know what it was. Not exactly, anyhow. She called Billy’s cell. It rang ten times. Then the signature phrase of rock guitar and his voice: “Billy here, leave a message after the tone…”
“Don’t do it, Billy, please,” she hissed into the phone. “Whatever it is, just don’t do it.”
* * *
Sammy had plans for Billy for tonight, she said. Some woman was to sedate Cedric and then Billy was to take over. When he asked who the woman was, Sammy said, “Somebody who has a date with him.” She was sprawled on his couch in jeans a size too small. Billy could see where the weight she’d gained had gone to her chin and belly.
“You don’t have to snap,” he said. “I can hear you perfectly well.”
“You’re so bloody anal.” She pushed the Stetson hat he was wearing down over his eyes. “You have to know every frigging detail. When it’s better you don’t know. What you don’t know won’t – ”
“Hurt me. I know,” he said. He’d been playing music and eating pizza when she’d walked in a half hour ago. She’d had a key made up – he didn’t give her one.
“Hey,” she said. “I don’t like thi
s anymore than you. But it’s quality of life we’re talking about here. A chance to live in a nice house with a garden and two baths and a big front porch, something we never had before. Right, Billy?”
“For you and him, you mean. That skull guy, Grimes.” He’d met the guy once, up in Vergennes with Sammy. The guy was peddling his ugly paintings, soft soaping the gallery owner. Sammy had that honey-sweet voice. People said she should be on the stage so often she believed it. Billy used to like going places with her but not any longer.
“I’m not doing it,” he said. “You’ll have to get your skull buddy.” He wasn’t going to be her puppet.
“Harley wouldn’t know how. But you do.” She smiled coyly. “I did some research. I know who torched that foster home you lived in. The one up in Cabot? He helped you do it. Jason Outlander?”
He felt like she’d just kicked him in the nuts. He and Jason had lived at the same foster home for just three months. The fire had been Jason’s idea – just to give them a scare, he said. The foster father was a sadist. When he sent Jason to bed without supper for the third time one hot night in June – the wife off visiting a friend – Jason rebelled. The foster father locked the bedroom door at night, and Jason was so pissed about missing dinner again that they climbed down a tree. He gave Billy the candle, along with a ten dollar bill. So Billy put the lit candle in the curtained window. Later he woke up to the smell of smoke and Jason called the fire department. They got the guy out alive but he died in the hospital from smoke inhalation. Twelve-year-old Billy had started having nightmares after that.
“That’s not all,” Sammy said, stretching out her legs in their skin-tight jeans. She was wearing a clingy black top, a necklace with a tiny jeweled skull inside a Wiccan circle. “I mean, a certain e-mail you sent?”
“Huh?” He’d almost forgotten. He’d sent Sammy an e-mail after Marion dropped him, saying he wanted to strangle Cedric. Just like her to print it out. One of those dumb things you said in anger, but at the time he’d meant it.
She lay there smiling, fanning herself with a copy of Rolling Stone. Then there was the yew, he thought. Sammy had made a mountain out of the yew he’d got for Cedric so he could make the controller. And he’d got her the yew, right from the tree – Sammy had convinced Marion that fresh yew was best for the controller. The two women knew each other because of the father affair, though Marion only tolerated Sammy to keep peace.
“I’m not going through with this,” he told Sammy. “You can go to the police if you want, but you can’t prove I did anything. I could tell stories on you. Like what happened to Marion’s sister.”
“It was that ex-con, Wolfgang did it,” she said. “He was there, they caught him with the stuff. Puss walked in on him and – you can guess the rest.”
“Gloria?”
“Natural causes, I expect. You read the papers.”
“That’s not what the cops think. She was all rigged up like a marionette, they said. Chance told me that Fay saw her. The nursing home wanted murder kept out of the papers.”
“Well, I can’t tell you what happened to Gloria. What I do know is Cedric is getting ready to collect a big pile of money. My money he never earned. Thirteen years I spent with old Dominick. My golden years. I didn’t know from beans about the world outside the foster homes. You been through them, Billy, you know how it was. Suddenly eighteen – and no money, no clothes, no job. Tossed out on your butt.”
Billy grunted. He knew. He’d been homeless a while, cleaned trash cans on Church Street in Burlington for a year. The stuff people threw in them! He could write a book.
“It was Dominick saved me. And I was good to him. I didn’t wander, though I could’ve. He loved me, he said – only one who did!” She blew her nose, looked like she’d cry, but she was too angry. “He wanted me to have the money right off, but there was Gloria. And the daughters. I liked Marion. And she hated me. Your Marion, brother dear, was no angel.”
“I never said she was.” Marion was blind to others, too. Like the housekeeper who swept away the cobwebs. Never thought how long the spider’d been weaving them.
“So what should Cedric get from Dominick?” she said. “Nothing! He even cheated on that French woman. And what he doesn’t know is that Mademoiselle’s been making waves at Harley. They were once an item, know that?” Billy didn’t. “Though Harley sees right through her. She was just an aberration with him. Harley Grimes and me, we’re getting out of here this week. You’re smart, you’ll come with us.”
“Grimes can have my ticket.”
“He’s flying separate. A different plane – it’s safer that way. We’re out of the country, no one’ll think. But you better wear gloves, take all the precautions you can. They catch you, you’re alone in this, understand? Nobody told you to do it.”
“I’m not doing it,” he said again.
“There’s money in it for you when I get what I’m owed,” she said, not hearing him. “You get a third, Harley and I get two-thirds. You want a contract? Or do you want to live in this dump the rest of your life? When you can live in style and play your drums? Dominick was practically a millionaire, Billy.”
He imagined himself in a grand house on a lake somewhere, writing and playing music. He’d hire professionals for his band. They’d take it around the country, they’d make a CD. A dozen CDs.
“A million,” she said, like she already owned the money. “Split three ways.”
She was standing over him now, patting his head, pulling on his dreads. “This is the last thing I’ll ask you to do, little brother. Nobody will know. All you have to do this time is set the candle in the right place. I’ve made a map of the house. By the time you get there at two in the morning, he’ll be sleeping like a baby.”
“And where will you be?” he asked, uncertain. He’d been twisting and untwisting a paper napkin in his hands, It was damp and ragged now.
She smiled her Cheshire cat smile. “Around.” She scribbled something on a slip of paper with her left hand, then stood up. “Here. The house plan. And an I-O-U.”
He pocketed it, though it didn’t mean anything, did it? Not with Sammy. “I didn’t say I’d do it,” he told her. He bit into the pizza, but it was cold and tough and he dropped it back on the plastic plate.
“But you will,” she said. “It’s what you been dreaming of.” She kissed him on the back of his neck.
He tried to rub off the feel of her cold lips. “That bomb,” he said. “Cedric’s sick dog. That your work, too? And Grimes’s?”
She just smiled.
Later, after she left, his cell rang, and he grabbed it up in a daze. It was Ishtar. She was always meddling in his life, just because he’d been close to Marion once. Figured he was some kind of substitute now for her daughter. So he let her rattle on. He blinked when she said she’d been to Fay Hubbard’s house. What business did she have there?
* * *
Fay was just plain frustrated. She’d called the Samantha Rule number but got only the answering machine. Probably Skull Man and Sammy were conspirators. She could plant a recording device in Billy’s apartment but she wouldn’t know how to activate it from here. Anyhow, Higgins said they couldn’t just go and bug an apartment without a warrant and tangible evidence of guilt. And she didn’t have that.
To make matters worse, she heard a motorbike whining up the driveway. It meant one thing: Stormy Moon. What now?
“My nightmare again,” Stormy shouted when she barged in, like this was her second home just because she was Willard’s cousin. “That cigarette? The one that killed my daughter?”
“I know,” Fay said. “It was a terrible thing.” A nineteen-year-old university student had thoughtlessly left a burning cigarette by Stormy’s daughter’s bed and later the girl died in the flames. It had happened thirty years before, but almost weekly, it seemed, in the psychic’s dreams.
“It wasn’t a girl in the bed,” Stormy said. “It was a man – on fire. It woke me up. I try to catch them right
off, you know. If you let the dream go five seconds, it’s gone. Pouf! Like I hear my Sibyl breathing in her sleep, but then the flames. And my whole body heats up.” She blew out air to cool her face.
“Drink that,” Fay said, setting a cup of tepid cocoa in front of her. When Chance walked in, questioning, Fay said, “Stormy’s had her nightmare again.”
“A man this time,” Stormy told Chance. “But I couldn’t place him. You know how you try to figure who it is in the dream? It’s scary. Sometimes it goes way, way back. I thought maybe this was my father – he died in World War II, you know. Friendly gunfire – there’s an irony! But it wasn’t him. It was somebody in a bed, alive and young.”
“How young?” Chance said. “I want to talk to you,” she whispered to Fay.
“Couldn’t tell you that, kid,” Stormy said. “Dreams don’t stay with me the way they used to. Whoosh!” She waved her arms to show how they vanished, then swallowed the marshmallow Fay had put in the cocoa. “Gotta go. Got a Tarot reading tonight. You might like a reading yourself, Fay. Take a peek at what’s ahead?”
“I might,” Fay said. “Though the future keeps shrinking on me.” She waved Stormy off to her Tarot reading.
“It might be Cedric,” Chance said when the door shut behind the psychic.
“What?”
“The man Stormy saw who got burned up. Or Billy.” Then she gushed out a whole scenario Fay could hardly make sense of. Chance had seen a gas can in Billy’s kitchen, along with rags, candles and matches. “He’s going to use them somewhere, Fay, I know it. Sammy left him a note, it was her handwriting. I saw it on a tuna onion casserole.”
“A tuna onion casserole?”
“On the recipe card, I mean. That’s how I knew it was Sammy. The note wanted him to do something he didn’t want to do.”
Fay poured another cup. The scene was slowly materializing in her head. Sammy was using Billy to carry out her plan to kill Cedric. “No,” she revised, aloud. “It’s Sammy’s plan to do in Harley Grimes.”
Broken Strings Page 24