I almost let out with a sarcastic, Thanks a lot, but actually, I did owe them gratitude for picking me up. Without warning, their prowler stopped behind a row of cars exhaling plumes of exhaust. We weren’t quite up to the turnoff for our street. I craned my neck to see, but could only surmise that law enforcement had the road blocked off at the traffic light.
“You can’t just let me out here,” I protested. “Isn’t it possible to get me closer to Tom?” I was trying to sound innocent, but I wasn’t sure it was working.
“They’re not going to allow you near the falls,” Armstrong warned. “They will not permit you to go near that body. So don’t try to get through, okay?”
“I will not try to get through,” I promised. “As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I can walk to our house from here,” I assured them. “It’s only a block and a half.” I got out of the car. “Thanks for the ride, fellas. And for helping me.”
They said I was welcome, turned on their lights and siren as they pulled into the empty left lane, and passed the line of stopped cars.
I actually sort of did intend to go home. What did I care about Larry Craddock? I mean, the guy had attacked me, and he’d threatened Arch. And of course there was nothing I could do for him now. But something was bothering me and preventing me from slogging up to the house. What was it?
Before turning up our street, I climbed the snowy set of steps to the Grizzly Saloon, until I reached their covered porch. I sat gingerly on a bench that was flanked by Christmas trees adorned with blinking colored lights. Country music throbbed from inside the saloon. This didn’t help my thinking any, nor did my newly shorn scalp, which was freezing. Plus, I suddenly realized, I was hungry. So I had no coffee, no food, no warmth…and no insight into what it was that was giving my accident-addled brain trouble.
Sandee. That was what was causing my mind to malfunction. Sandee, Sandee, Sandee.
So she was here after all. I hadn’t been wrong about that, despite all the joking from Tom and his cohorts. And she was protecting her assets? What in the world did that mean? And even though trouble and violence had enveloped local map collectors in the last week—everything from glass-breaking snowballs to sudden death—somehow, Sandee didn’t impress me as being the map-collecting type.
I pulled the torn fur around my shoulders in a wretched attempt to warm myself up. What did I really know about Sandee Brisbane, in the final analysis?
She’d drowned her mother for not protecting her from a predatory father, whom she’d probably also murdered. She’d shot and killed the Jerk for raping her when she was a young teenager. She’d threatened me and my son. And of course she’d just come racing away from a crime scene. That was the second time in three days she’d been near a murder. Had she killed Drew Wellington and Larry Craddock, too? If so, why?
I heard law enforcement officials calling to one another. From my vantage point perched above Main Street, I could see them unrolling yellow crime-scene tape. Up ahead, the road was indeed blocked off. In the right lane, frustrated motorists were making U-turns and heading back down the canyon.
I couldn’t see a trace of Larry Craddock.
But if I could have, what good would that have done? What was it that was making me feel I needed to see the crime scene, if indeed it was a crime scene?
Because I wanted reassurance. I wanted, I suddenly realized, to believe that Sandee had not killed Larry Craddock. In spite of everything, I felt sorry for the former stripper. Yes, six months ago she had murdered two people. Not that I approved of vigilante justice. But you could at least make the case that both of those acts of violence had been well-thought-out acts of revenge.
So would somebody please tell me what kind of vengeance she could possibly be seeking on a couple of map dealers?
I had no idea. I looked again across Main Street and the parking lot that abutted Cottonwood Creek. Steam was rising from the creek and mixing with the falling snow. Think, think, think, I told myself.
Sometimes, Tom had told me, you could determine motive just by looking at a crime scene. If a single woman is killed and her tires are slashed, you look for a jealous wife whose husband had been having a fling with the victim. Ditto with a jealous husband. Signs of torture usually indicate a sicko. If indeed Larry Craddock had been murdered, could the scene up the street inform me on the subject of motive?
Okay, I told myself as I rapidly crossed Main Street, I was going to keep my promise to Boyd and Armstrong. Technically, I was not trying to get through to the crime scene. But I had traipsed with Arch and the Cub Scouts along lots of paths abutting Cottonwood Creek. I knew how to get around the boulders, and I was aware that I might be able to get above wherever Larry Craddock lay. In fact, I was relatively sure I could manage to get a pretty good gander at the creek, and maybe the body, without screwing things up.
The snow was still falling fast. I traversed the parking lot, which only held a few cars, each of which sported a thick hat of white stuff. When I reached the creek, I blinked and tried to make out where the stepping-stones were that Arch and I had shown the Cubs when we’d gone across. Unfortunately, every single boulder in the creek was completely covered with snow, and the icy water flowing around them looked as if it was going awfully fast. Finally I spotted the place below the parking lot where Arch and I had used a meandering path of small boulders whenever we fished as a way to get over to the other side.
The water looked awfully cold.
Go, just go, I told myself. So I did. I tried to think of myself as nimble as I hopped across, and I worked to dispel the word slippery from entering my thoughts. When I made it, I thanked God in heaven and all the saints I could think of. Episcopalians weren’t very big on saints. Maybe we should be, I mused as I trod carefully along the path that was actually fairly easy to make out, as it was the only smooth area of snow leading up the creek toward the falls.
Ahead, I could again hear sheriff’s-department officers calling to one another, something about video. Okay, so the fellow from the crime-scene unit had his video camera pointed at the scene. With any luck, the sheriff’s department hadn’t yet moved anything. Now I just had to get about twenty yards or so above where they were.
Right.
To my left, the ground rose steeply. There was no beach to speak of, just those big boulders—in the stream and along the bank. That’s what made the fishing good. The trout liked to hide away from the open water, and people couldn’t get through easily to catch them. The problem was, it was a lot easier to walk along the path undetected when there was full foliage from deciduous bushes and cottonwood trees. Now I felt exposed. I knew I had to start climbing up the hill pretty quickly and take cover behind evergreens or risk being spotted by the police on the scene.
I took a deep breath, tried to pick out where I was going to head through the pines, and began to ascend through a soft, slippery blanket of snow covering pine needles. Branches slapped my face, and I tried not to gasp. Snowflakes chilled my scalp. I cursed Sandee. Here I was trying to help her…and she sure hadn’t been very nice to me.
Finally I stomped through to a slight clearing. I was about twenty yards above the cops swarming around the creek. As far as I knew, nobody had seen me. I looked down and tried to make out Larry Craddock.
It didn’t take long. His egg-shaped head and stocky body lay almost exactly at midstream. Blood darkened the snow on the rocks near his corpse. Somebody had hit or attacked him with a gun or knife, then dragged his body to midstream. Which seemed very odd.
But Sandee’s hands had been completely dry. Even if she’d had gloves on, if she’d dumped Larry midstream, her sleeves would have been wet. When she’d held my head back with one hand, her forearm had not even been moist.
So she couldn’t have killed him. At least not in my unscientific estimation.
I blinked as I looked down at the creek again, and turned my head to the right. Downstream from Larry Craddock’s body, beyond the place where the cops had strung
yellow crime-scene tape, wrapped against a rock, there was a square of paper with red stains on it, probably blood. It was the wrong shape for a newspaper. I craned my head around to get a better look.
Was it a map?
I was so excited I reached for my cell phone, and that was my mistake. I lost my balance and began tumbling, hard, through evergreens and cottonwoods. I slid, grabbed for branches, yelped, and tried in vain to get a purchase on the hill. But the slick, soft surfaces made that impossible.
Down at the creek, I could hear cops hollering at me. “Halt!” they cried. “Stop moving!”
Great idea, if only I could do it. I let loose with a long, loud string of curses as I continued to hit rocks and trees, and to bounce along a thick blanket of snow-covered pine needles.
“She’s trying to get away!” a cop shouted. “Head down the creek!” This was followed by splashing noises.
My body thudded onto a spit of gravel, then rolled into the creek before I could get any traction with my feet. I tasted blood and prayed I hadn’t lost any teeth. My purse strap was wrapped tightly around my body, which lay half in and half out of water. My neck was in agony. I spat, cursed, and awkwardly put my hands up. Three policemen surrounded me, their weapons drawn.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” one of them said. I couldn’t see who it was because I was blinking creek water out of my eyes, which I was desperate to rub. “Stand down,” the cop ordered the others. They grumbled, but holstered their weapons.
Finally I got my eyes open. I was staring into Armstrong’s disgusted face. He spoke into a radio.
“Somebody go tell Schulz his wife is here, will ya?” This was followed by crackling noises. “Where? Right here with me.” Armstrong looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “In the water.” He shook his head. “How? I don’t know.” Another pause. “No, I don’t know why either. Just tell him she fell in the creek.”
Armstrong asked if I needed a stretcher. I spat out more creek water and told him no, I just needed him to help me get up. The frigid water stank and I seemed to be lying in a pool of muck. Marla’s beautiful fur coat was streaked with dirt and half soaked, and now felt like a suit of lead weights. My back hurt and I had scratched up one side of my face where it had dragged across some gravel. Otherwise, I assured him, I was okay, just embarrassed. His look said, Which you should be.
Tom appeared almost immediately and lifted me to my feet. Once he had me on firm ground, he brushed off some of the debris I’d accumulated in my roll down the hill. Then he held me at arm’s length for an assessment. His eyes were filled with a grimness and fear that scared even me.
“Goldy, I’m taking you home.”
“No, I’m okay, really.” Icy water streamed down my legs and I began to shake. Tom took a blanket another officer handed him and wrapped me inside it. “Just have somebody take me home,” I begged. “You stay here and do your job.”
“I know you mean well,” he said right into my ear. “But you are making my job very, very difficult.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I do have to tell you something.” He started to interrupt, but I said, “I saw something downstream. I’m afraid it’s going to float away. Your guys haven’t gotten that far. I mean, their tape isn’t around it. Anyway, I think it might be a map.” I pointed. “About twenty, thirty yards. It looked as if it had blood on it.”
“All right, let’s go.”
At first I thought he meant “Let’s go search for the map,” but of course he didn’t. We half walked, half stumbled up to the walkway on the other side of the creek. The cops had put up an orange tarp that completely surrounded the area where Larry’s body lay. But I didn’t even try to get another look.
On the way home, I told Tom about seeing a woman, the same lady whom I’d suspected was Sandee, racing down the canyon, away from Aspen Meadow. I’d followed her and wrecked Marla’s Lexus. The woman had come back and confronted me. Actually we’d had a not-too-pleasant interchange. And she was, in fact, Sandee Brisbane, whom I’d suspected all along had been in town for at least a month.
“She told you she was Sandee Brisbane.” We were sitting in Tom’s warm Chrysler at the base of our street. Outside, sheets of snowflakes washed over the neighborhood. “Did now-we-know-you’re-Sandee happen to tell you where she was staying? ’Cuz we could use that address.”
“No, but she gave me this haircut.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. So you had a conversation that wasn’t friendly. What did she have to say?”
“That I should stay out of her way.”
“Yeah, a lot of people think that.”
“Please don’t joke. I asked her if she killed Drew Wellington.”
“What’d she say to that one?”
“Oh, well, she didn’t answer. I also asked her why she was here, I mean, here in Aspen Meadow.”
“She reply to that one?”
“She said she was protecting her assets.”
“What assets?” He wrinkled his brow at me. “No, she didn’t tell you that either.”
I shook my head. “I told her that you all would find her. She said she wasn’t lost and I shouldn’t come looking for her.”
“You get a make and model on her car? Or a license plate?”
“A dark green Volvo station wagon. Sorry, it was snowing, so I couldn’t make out the license plate, which was covered with dirt anyway.”
“Okay, Goldy, but after trashing the Lexus, and seeing Sandee, why didn’t you just go home? Boyd and Armstrong told me they saw you, and that you were in bad shape. They didn’t take you home because of the traffic, and because you promised them you’d just walk up to our place.”
“I swore to them that I wouldn’t try to come through the taped-off area. And I didn’t. What I did was cross the street, the parking lot, and then the creek—”
“What are you, a lawyer now? You didn’t come through the crime-scene tape, you just went around it?”
“Wait. I went higher up to see Larry’s…remains…because I wanted to believe that Sandee hadn’t done it.”
Tom gazed out the windshield at the rapidly falling flakes. “Uh-huh. This must be what they call women’s intuition, which isn’t logical and doesn’t make any sense. What were you going to do, check out Larry’s body for Sandee’s skin under his nails? Look for fingerprints on a murder weapon we haven’t found yet?”
“I saw the blood,” I said firmly. “I saw him in the middle of the stream. Sandee had rough, dry hands. Her sleeves weren’t wet. And,” I added feebly, “the knife she used to cut my hair didn’t have any blood on it.” Tom gave me such a skeptical look that I added plaintively, “I feel sorry for her.”
“She killed her mother and maybe her father and definitely your ex-husband, she makes threats and cuts off your hair, but you just can’t wait to clear her of being a suspect in the killing of Larry Craddock. This is making more and more sense.”
“Tom, please. How was he killed?”
He exhaled and looked up at our house. “I’ll tell you if you’ll go right up and shower, and promise me you won’t leave our place until I call here.”
“Okay. But please. I told you about the map, or what I think is a map. Just give me some information, okay?”
“He was bludgeoned with something, and then, looks like, he drowned. Held underwater. He probably was barely conscious at the time from the blow to his head, and his hands fell in the water, so there’s no way we’re going to get skin samples from underneath his fingernails, if there was any there in the first place. We haven’t figured out what was used to hit him yet. Now go.”
I thanked him, trudged up our sidewalk, and rang our bell.
“I know you’re checking up on me,” Marla trilled as she opened the door, “but I took good care of your son. I didn’t take him snowboarding yet because he’s not done—” She looked me up and down. “Good God, what happened to you? What happened to my coat?”
“I wrecked your coat, and I wrecked your car
.” Marla looked at me and blinked, then blinked again. “I am really, really sorry.”
“Arch?” she called up the stairs. “C’mere so I can bash your head in, do a little quid pro quo for your mom here. You just took your Latin exam, you know what quid pro quo means, don’t you?” Arch yelled back something unintelligible. “She wrecked my mink and she totaled my Lexus, that’s what!” Marla hollered.
“Come on, guys,” I said wearily, “please. I’ve had a really hard time this morning, okay? I am sorry about your car. I’ll pay the fur repair and cleaning bill, and the deductible for your car, all right? I promise.”
“Deductible, hell. I’m getting a new coat and a new car.” Marla took hold of my shoulders and turned me around. “Ah, now I see. You wrecked my mink and my Lexus in a desperate attempt to get away from a crazy hairdresser.”
“Let me take a shower and I’ll explain everything.” I dropped my purse on the floor and shrugged off the fur coat.
“This should be good,” Marla grumbled as I traipsed up the stairs. “Can you just tell me where my car is so I can call a tow truck?”
I called down the location of Don’s Detail Shop, apologized again, and headed to the bathroom, where I peeled off my clothes and turned the water on as hot as it would go. And it felt good, even on my shorn head and scrapes. My neck pain was down to a dull throb.
Marla rapped on the door when I was through with the first lathering of shampoo. “Don’t blow-dry your hair!” she called. “Just towel yourself off, throw on some clothes, and come downstairs.”
I’d just wrecked her five-thousand-dollar mink coat and her sixty-thousand-dollar sports car, so I was not in a position to argue.
Down in the kitchen, Marla had spread a sheet on the floor, and she’d put a chair in the middle of it. On the table, she’d laid out three things that didn’t seem to go together: a pile of towels, a pair of scissors, and a wineglass filled with a dark, steaming drink.
“Sit,” she commanded.
“What are you doing?”
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