If She Should Die

by Carlene Thompson

“I’m sorry. I didn’t even offer you one.”

  They both reached for the chocolate-covered. “You take it,” he said. “Chocolate makes me hyper.”

  Christine bit into the doughnut, which was light and sweet and tasted as close to heavenly as food came. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. “I guess I just never thought of Jeremy marrying,” she said. “Not that he doesn’t pay attention to girls. Well, not obsessively, just naturally, like any young man would do. There’s nothing abnormal about his interest in women—”

  “Miss Ireland, you’re doing it again. Making excuses for him. I’ve told you already I understand.”

  “And I’m doing him a real disservice by all this overexplaining.” She smiled. “And after all we’ve been through—the rat and all—I think you should call me Christine.”

  “In honor of the rat, I will call you Christine. Except around other people. Then you’ll be Miss Ireland or we’ll set the whole town talking. And I’m Michael.”

  “When we’re in private.” Which sounded like she planned to spend a lot of private time with Michael Winter. In embarrassment she took another gigantic bite of doughnut and felt chocolate smear across her lips. Honestly, she was acting like a thirteen-year-old, she thought.

  “About this key situation,” Michael went on smoothly as if he didn’t notice her hastily wiping away chocolate, “you say both Tess Cimino and this friend Bethany have keys.”

  “Yes. Bethany Burke. Her husband, Travis, is a biology professor at the university.”

  “So that gave four people access to your house while you were in the hospital.”

  “Four? You mean Rey and Travis? Why on earth would they come here? Tess came very early to get clothes for me to wear home from the hospital. And I suppose if we hadn’t arrived when we did, Bethany would have come in to leave the groceries she’d brought. But neither of them would have put a rat in my refrigerator. The idea is absurd. I thought Bethany was going to have a stroke. You should have heard her screaming.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t scream.”

  “Well, no, I didn’t. But why would you assume that?”

  “Because you seem to have nerves of steel.” He picked his second glazed doughnut off the plate. “Most people would be wrecks after what you’ve been through, but you’re sitting there as calm and collected as the queen at high tea.”

  “You’ve been to high tea with the queen, I take it.”

  “We move in different circles, but I’ve heard stories.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I mean it. About your being so calm. It’s amazing.”

  “I’m not at all calm.”

  “Then why don’t you show it?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “You mean, you won’t.”

  “All right. I spent a lot of years learning to appear strong for my brother’s sake. I’m not going to throw all that mental training away now. But I am scared.” She paused. “You don’t know everything that’s happened. Last night at the hospital I got a phone call. No one said anything. But Dara was singing.”

  Michael looked at her expressionlessly. “Dara called you and sang to you?”

  “No, of course Dara didn’t call me. You think I was dreaming, don’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “I wasn’t. Someone called and played what was obviously a tape of Dara singing.”

  “Singing what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard it before. But afterward, I wrote down most of the lyrics I could remember. The paper is in my purse.”

  She retrieved a piece of paper from her purse on which she’d written the words she’d heard on the phone the night before.

  Michael studied them carefully. “I don’t recognize this, either.”

  “The call came around one-fifteen. No one said anything. They just played the song. Then they hung up. This morning a nurse told me the hospital switchboard doesn’t put through calls to rooms after eleven o’clock. Someone did put through a call, but when I called the switchboard before I left this morning, the operator was adamant about not having put through any calls.”

  “And this was the same person on duty at one-fifteen?”

  “Yes. She works from midnight until eight A.M. After eight, two people operate the board.”

  “Then the woman you talked to lied,” Michael said flatly. “Maybe someone paid her to put through the call.”

  “I don’t know anything about her—how long she’s had the job or what she worked at previously. I wrote her name on the paper with the lyrics. She sounded really young and not at all flustered as if she were lying.”

  “Some people are very good at it, Christine. I’ll try to find out more about her. But more important, we need to know who thought you needed a good scare last night. And who would have a tape of Dara singing? Did you know she sang?”

  “Oh yes. She thought she was great.”

  “And she wasn’t?”

  “I heard someone tell her once she had a ‘sweet little voice.’ She was furious, but that phrase perfectly described her singing. It wasn’t a bad voice, but there was no great range, or timbre, or emotion. She loved to sing, though.”

  Michael frowned. “I remember something from her diary. She said at the party given by your friend Tess she drank too much and sat on Caldwell’s lap and she sang.”

  “Oh lord,” Christine groaned. “Not getting any encouragement from voice coaches didn’t put a dent in her ego. That night she sang about five songs. The first couple no one minded. Then she got louder and rowdier. She even climbed up on the coffee table for one unrequested number. Something she’d written. It was pretty bad, but she was carried away with it and herself. I honestly thought she was going to strip or something. She was totally out of control that night.”

  “How many people were at that party?”

  “About twenty to twenty-five.”

  “So anyone who was around that night knew how obsessive she was about singing.”

  “Anyone who was around her at all knew she loved to sing. I used to get so annoyed with her in the car because something I loved would come on and she’d drown out a great singer with her own voice. The only person who seemed to really appreciate her was Jeremy. Of course, he thought everything she did was wonderful, but he thought she was a fabulous singer. She just ate up his admiration and sometimes she did him the great honor of letting him sing with her.” Christine paused. “I was a total bitch at the hospital this morning and I’m turning into one again. I didn’t mean to sound so sarcastic. It’s just that—”

  “She annoyed the hell out of you.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And you didn’t like that your brother cared so much about her.”

  Christine drew back. “I’m not sure how you mean that.”

  “You felt that she used him. Sort of leeched on to him for veneration but had little use for him otherwise.”

  “Yes,” Christine said slowly, relaxing. “That’s exactly how I felt. Maybe you should be a psychologist.”

  “No, I shouldn’t. No talent for the field. I just saw a couple of people do the same thing to my cousin. No one else respected these people, but he was eager to like and be liked, and easy to impress. So they used him to feed their egos. Maybe Dara wasn’t as secure as you think if she needed that kind of reinforcement all the time.”

  “Maybe not. And you still sound like a psychologist.”

  “Thanks. I take that as a compliment. But I’m just a simple cop.” He paused. “A cop who would like another doughnut but is embarrassed to wolf down three.”

  “Please have another one. The more you eat, the less I do. And believe me, I would have finished off the entire half-dozen by myself if you hadn’t come.”

  Michael selected a doughnut with sprinkles as Christine refilled his coffee mug. After chewing, sipping coffee, and taking a second bite, he said, “When I came in the store the other day to tell Mr. Prince about the body washing ashore, you
told me you never believed Dara had run away. In her file I read that at the time she disappeared you said that things she would have taken with her if she had run away were still in her room. What things?”

  Christine tapped her fingers on the tabletop, her gaze drifting to the huge fern hanging in front of a kitchen window as she thought. “Well, probably most important, a ring of her mother’s was left behind. The ring was hematite. It’s an inexpensive metal, really the mineral iron oxide. It used to be called bloodstone. It’s important to a lot of people who practice the Craft because it’s considered close to the earth.”

  “The Craft?”

  “Wicca. Witchcraft.” Michael’s expression suddenly turned wary. “Are you going to bolt?” Christine laughed.

  “No. I just had a flashback of my childhood terror of witches.”

  “You know Dara’s mother, Eve, died before Jeremy and I came to live at the Prince home, but Eve dabbled in Wicca. She dabbled in a lot of things, so I don’t know how serious she was about it. Ames didn’t really approve, but from what I’ve heard, Eve did as she pleased. Apparently her interest in Wicca became much stronger after she got sick. I guess that’s understandable. She thought she could heal herself.”

  “May I interrupt for a second?” Michael looked at her closely. “Are you into witchcraft?”

  Christine smiled. “No, but I think it’s interesting. And you must know we’re talking about white witchcraft. It teaches harmony with nature and doing no harm to others because if you do, that harm can act like a boomerang. What you send out returns times three.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to rid myself of the image of the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. Back to the hematite ring.”

  “Eve had large hands and she wore the ring on her middle finger. Naturally, she left the ring to Dara. Dara had small hands, but she never wanted to have the ring cut down to fit because she thought cutting might lessen its power or something, so she wore it on a chain around her neck. I found it on her dresser after she supposedly ran away. But I don’t believe she would have left it behind.”

  “Unless she was in a hurry and just forgot it. Or maybe dropped it.”

  “Dropped it off her neck?” Christine frowned. “The clasp on the chain wasn’t broken. She certainly wouldn’t have taken it off, put it on her dresser, then left it.”

  “I see what you mean. Anything else?”

  “On her dresser Dara kept a five-by-seven framed picture of her with Eve. It was taken just months before Eve got sick, and she was still beautiful. Dara cherished that photo and kept it in an ornate silver frame. She wouldn’t have left it.”

  “The frame would have been too heavy or cumbersome to lug around with her if she was traveling light.”

  “So why wouldn’t she just take the photo out of the frame?” Christine countered. “Finally, Dara had certain outfits, pieces of clothing she always wore together. She was fanatic about it. For instance, a pair of black wool slacks she paired with a gray cashmere turtleneck sweater. The pants were gone, but the sweater was still in the closet. She also had a tan suede jacket she adored. The weather was cool, but we found the jacket flung on the back of a chair in her bedroom.” Christine paused. “There were a couple more things left behind that made me doubt she’d done her own packing—favorite lip glosses, earrings, a few other small items—but I’ve given you a sample.”

  Michael stared off, rubbing a finger up and down beneath his chin as he thought. Finally, he said, “I’ll grant you it seems pretty odd she’d leave those things behind, but not impossible if she was in a hurry.”

  “Maybe, but there’s one other thing that has always had me stumped. Dara’s mother had a crystal ball. Real crystal. It was about the size of a large grapefruit and it must have weighed close to twenty pounds. It was missing. Now I wonder why she didn’t take the ring or the photo, but she took the heavy crystal ball.”

  “You’re sure she didn’t just lose it?”

  “Lose it? You would have thought it was the Hope Diamond to her.”

  “Maybe she kept it at the creek like her diary.”

  “No way. It could have gotten broken. She kept it in her bedroom in a black velvet bag. I saw her lying on her bed and holding it up to the light coming from the window the day before she disappeared.”

  “Well, now that is a puzzler,” Michael said thoughtfully. “You know, it would have been the perfect thing to help weigh down a corpse, but no crystal ball was found with the body.”

  “But the plastic was torn. It could have fallen out. And speaking of things found in the plastic, there’s another thing bothering me. The killer bashed out all her teeth and cut off her fingertips, clearly so that if the body surfaced, it couldn’t be identified. But why go to all that trouble, then leave her ruby ring wrapped up with her in the plastic? A ring especially made for her with her initials, for God’s sake!”

  “I don’t understand that,” Michael said. “At the stage when the body was retrieved, fingerprints would no longer be a problem. Not even the heel print that’s recorded on her birth certificate. The teeth would have identified her, even three years later. But our killer thought of that. But the presence of Dara’s ring baffles me.”

  “Unless the body isn’t Dara’s. Maybe someone wanted to throw off the police, have them identify the body as Dara’s because of the ring.”

  “If someone thought that, they wouldn’t know much about formal identification procedures,” Michael said. “A body is identified by the body itself, not by a button or piece of jewelry or something else found with the body.”

  “So the killer wasn’t knowledgeable about identification.”

  “Either that, or he was careless,” Michael said. “I vote for careless.”

  Christine looked at him closely. “You have no doubt that the body is Dara’s, do you?”

  Michael hesitated, then shook his head. “No, I don’t. But please don’t quote me on that. I’m not supposed to say anything until the official identification has been made.”

  “I won’t say anything, but I’m sure it’s Dara, too. She wouldn’t just vanish for three years. She was too pampered, too dependent on her father’s money and influence. No matter how mad she got, no matter what was bothering her, she wasn’t the type to go knocking around in the big, bad world for three years. She just couldn’t have taken it.”

  “And suicides don’t swathe themselves in plastic and seal it before jumping into a creek,” Michael said. “This was a murder. And the murderer is still out there, Christine, only now he has you in his sights because of that diary. He’s already attacked you once. We don’t know when he might do it again. And worst of all, so far we don’t have one clue about who he is.”

  2

  Reynaldo Cimino shoveled sand into a burlap bag. A man with salt-and-pepper hair glanced at him and grinned. “I’m old enough to be your father, Cimino, but I can shovel twice as fast as you.”

  “Maybe that’s because I’ve been here since five this morning. You got here half an hour ago.”

  “Forty-five minutes, but who’s counting? Why don’t you take a break?”

  “I don’t need a break,” Rey said, although his black hair hung wet with sweat over his forehead and his arms had begun to tremble from hours of shoveling heavy sand. “I’m good for at least another hour.”

  The older man looked up. “Your wife might have something to say about that. Here she comes.”

  Rey halted the shovel in midair and spun around. Tess marched through mud and debris with a resolute air and eyes focused intently on him. He was the only person in the world, her gaze said, and he wanted to cringe. Tess was a wonderful woman—intelligent, funny, selfless—and utterly, wildly, possessively in love with him. Sometimes he felt as if he were smothering to death in that love. At other times, like now, he felt as if he were being stalked, never allowed more than a few hours to himself before she came to hover, comfort, dote, nag, and generally mortify him with her lack of pride and decorum.

>   “Sweetheart, I’ve been searching for you for nearly an hour! You look exhausted!” she exclaimed loudly, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and planting a smackingly loud kiss on his dirty, sweaty cheek. “I insist that you come home this minute.”

  Rey glanced at his friend, who directed extreme concentration on his work. “I want to work at least another hour.”

  “Why? There are tons of people here. You won’t be missed.”

  “Thank you, cara mia. It’s nice to know my efforts amount to so little.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean.” Tess’s sharp gaze sliced to the right. “Is that Jeremy over there?”

  “Yes. He’s been working for hours and doesn’t seem at all tired.”

  “Is that Danny Torrance from the fitness center with him?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Who’s that other guy with the white hair?”

  “I don’t know,” Rey said, stabbing his shovel into the sand.

  His friend looked up. “It’s Streak Archer.”

  “Streak Archer !” Tess blared. Reynaldo shuddered. Had her voice gotten louder and harsher since their marriage, or did it only bother him more now than two years ago? “I thought he never went out in daylight!”

  “Guess he made an exception for an emergency,” the man said. “He’s a good guy, Mrs. Cimino. Just a little odd.”

  “That’s what Christine Ireland says, but I have my doubts about him.”

  “Which you’ve just announced to everyone within a fifty-foot radius,” Rey muttered.

  “Don’t be silly. No one is paying any attention to me.” If only that were true, Rey thought. “Come home, Rey. You didn’t feel well yesterday and you’re going to catch cold out here. I’ll fix you some coffee and rub your poor, tired feet.”

  Rey’s face flamed. “Rub my feet!” His friend ducked his head too late to hide a burst of amusement. “Tess, I do not need to have my feet rubbed. God!”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Then come home. You’ve barely slept for two days and now you’re out here working yourself to a frazzle.” She took his arm and tugged. “Don’t be so stubborn!”