“Not your style, Lieutenant,” Ketcham answered with a grin. “Save your money. Take it from me, the lady’s not worth it.”
Think of icebergs, Fred told himself, but the relentless warmth rose to his cheeks. He glowered.
“Just joking, Lieutenant,” Ketcham said hastily. “That’s the top of the line. Rear end like a Rolls. Mrs. Wade has a new one. So does Dr. Henshaw’s wife.”
Great. Busting Ethel Cykler to second bassoon would be a picnic compared to coming up with iffy circumstantial evidence that linked Sam Wade’s wife to a murder. Still nursing his wounds from the morning’s explosion in Altschuler’s office, Fred retreated to the comparatively safe territory of the courtroom.
23
The bridge players were long gone, the last covered dish from the noonday carry-in had been tucked away for its absent-minded owner to retrieve, and only one of the adult day care participants was still waiting to be picked up. Sitting on the sofa, feet propped on a chair, Joan yielded to weariness.
“Where’s Henry?” old Mrs. Skomp asked querulously for at least the fifteenth time in as many minutes.
“He’s bringing the car around,” Joan answered automatically, reaching over to pat the hand on which veins stood out like fat strands of overcooked spaghetti. “He’ll be here soon.”
She hoped it was true. Henry Skomp was effusively grateful for the respite the center provided him from the constant care of his mother. He was also usually late when the time came to take her home again.
Hearing the door open, Joan stood to help the frail woman. To her surprise, the man who entered was not Henry Skomp but Elmer Rush.
“Well, hi, there,” she said.
Already halfway across the floor, he scowled at her, or was it at Mrs. Skomp? Surely not, Joan thought. He didn’t answer, but turning his back on them both, he suddenly began pushing chairs aside, throwing their cushions onto the floor, and slamming cupboard doors in the craft area.
Joan could hear him muttering under his breath. She stayed where she was, wondering whether to speak again. Mrs. Skomp stared into space. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Did you forget something?” Joan finally asked inanely.
He whirled on her, not the man she had begun to think of as a friend, but an angry stranger.
“Did I ask you?”
“Hey, Elmer, it’s me. Remember?”
Almost as soon as the storm had begun, it subsided.
“Looking for Julie’s loom,” he muttered, standing still in the middle of the room.
“Henry, come over here,” came the voice from the sofa.
“It’s not Henry, Mrs. Skomp,” Joan said.
“Where’s Henry?”
“He’ll be here soon. Would you like me to turn on the television while you wait?”
“Don’t like television.” Mrs. Skomp snapped her pocketbook open and began searching its depths. “I wish he’d hurry up.” With trembly fingers, she folded and refolded an unsullied white handkerchief.
“Dammit,” Elmer muttered. He picked up a cushion.
“I hope you find it,” Joan said, sinking back down. “I’ll keep my eye out for it tomorrow. Tonight I seem to have run out of spizz.”
“What’s she doing here so late?” It felt like an accusation. “You should have closed up half an hour ago.”
“We did, actually, but I couldn’t walk off and leave Mrs. Skomp all alone, now could I?”
“Where’s Henry?” This time it was Elmer who asked. Mrs. Skomp folded the handkerchief again.
“On his way, I hope. This is the third time he’s been late like this since I’ve worked here. He always shows up eventually. It’s hard on his mother, though. She manages all right during the day, but she’s been ready to go home since the first person left at four, and here we still are at five-thirty, with nothing to hold her interest.”
Elmer exploded.
“Irresponsible, that’s what it is! I’d like to teach him a thing or two!”
His color was rising as high as his voice and he jabbed his finger at her. Joan tried to calm him down.
“Elmer, I’m sure there’s some good reason for his being late.”
“Then he should have called. He’s using you and abusing her, that’s what he’s doing. I won’t have it! I’ll take her home myself.” He started toward the sofa, his face a thundercloud. In the cocoon of her own world, Mrs. Skomp didn’t respond.
“Elmer, he wouldn’t know where she was.” Neither would Mrs. Skomp, but an inner voice told Joan not to say it.
“Give him a taste of his own medicine! He ought to realize that losing your marbles doesn’t mean losing your feelings, too!”
Something clicked.
“Elmer, has someone been hurting Julie’s feelings?” Joan asked.
He looked startled.
“How did you—?”
“Where’s Henry?” asked Mrs. Skomp.
“Here I am, Mother,” he said coming in the door with a jaunty step. “Sorry I’m so late. One last customer was in the store and I didn’t have the heart to shoo her out when we locked the door. She was buying a gift for her first great-grandchild.”
Joan shot a quick look at Elmer. He was still frowning.
Henry’s smile was disarming.
“I’m grateful to you both for waiting with her. I don’t know what we’d do without this program. It came along just in time to spare her a nursing home. I’d hate that. She’s all I have.”
“We’re glad to have her, Mr. Skomp,” Joan said carefully. “But if you really need someone here past five, and I think you do, we should arrange it formally instead of leaving your mother here after hours day after day. It’s hard on her and hard on the staff.” Meaning me, she thought. “I’ll be happy to arrange an extra half hour with one of the regular day care program people. There might even be others who could use the service.”
“That would be grand,” he said, flashing that smile again. “And of course I’d want to pay for the extra time. It’s well worth it to know that she’s happy. Please, let me at least drive you home.”
That should make Elmer feel better, Joan thought, but when she turned again to look, he was gone.
“Thanks, but I think I’d rather walk tonight,” she told Henry Skomp.
The walk home revived her. She could smell the promise of frost in the cool evening air. Counting back, she remembered seeing her first firefly more than three months ago—frost was overdue. But that hadn’t been in Oliver. She supposed it didn’t count.
Andrew was hard at work, books and papers spread all over the kitchen table. He’d already made himself a sandwich and was holding it in one hand while scribbling notes with the other.
“D’you mind eating in the living room?” he asked. “Three tests tomorrow.”
“Sure. What do you want?”
“Nothing.” He looked down at the sandwich and said sheepishly, “Well, nothing fancy. I’ll just take care of myself, okay?”
“Okay.” Far be it from me to get in your way, she thought. What a familiar refrain that was at the center, at least among those who had all their marbles, as Elmer put it. She thought of the others, the Mrs. Skomps. Which would be worse, to be afraid to visit the children you loved for fear of intruding on their lives, or to be so lost that you couldn’t control what you did, or what they did to you?
For all Henry Skomp’s sweet words, she wondered how his mother fared at home. Was he as casual about her needs there as he was about letting her wait at the center? Still, she seemed hardly to know where she was much of the time. Wouldn’t it be even harder to be overworked and over-worried at that age, as Elmer was?
Joan ate her own sandwich thoughtfully. In the corner, the box of music reminded her mutely of things left undone. Well, it would have to wait. She’d practice Tuesday night, after Andrew’s tests. On the other hand, she supposed marking the parts for Yoichi was unlikely to disturb his studying.
She sharpened a number 2 pencil with the butcher
knife and set to it, copying the little vees and staple shapes that would tell all the violas to bow up or down at the same time. She was delighted to see that the orchestra had ordered an extra part. It meant a little more copying, but it also meant that she could probably keep one to practice most of the time. Making quick work of the violas, she reached for the second violin parts still in the box.
Then she saw the familiar prescription bottle that had been hidden beneath them and all at once she knew.
She knew how George had died.
She knew why Wanda had been murdered.
She knew who was now in greatest danger.
Choking back the impulse to tell Andrew, she reached with amazingly steady fingers for the telephone.
24
Joan scrubbed at her fingertips, feeling like Lady Macbeth. Now on cardboard, her spots would be compared to those on the prescription bottle labeled with the name of George Petris, but she couldn’t wash away her guilt or her fear.
Fred had met her at the police station. She watched him seal and initial the plastic evidence bag. He laid her print card in a drawer marked To Be Classified, pulled up a swivel chair for her, and tilted his own back at an alarming angle.
“We’ll test for latents in the morning,” he said. “There’s not a chance in a thousand we’ll find anything usable, but we’ll never know until we eliminate your prints. I don’t know how tricky it is to detect that poison, either.” He sounded bored by the prospect of sifting through the new evidence.
An inarticulate sound of misery began in Joan’s throat. She was beginning to shake. He leaned forward and touched her hand.
“Joan, are you all right?” he asked, his voice a little more human.
“No, I’m not all right!” she snapped. “I’m scared, and I keep thinking that if I’d seen the reeds Thursday or Friday, Wanda would still be alive. It’s all my fault, and next time it could be me.”
She heard the wild note in her own voice. I’m not going to be hysterical, she told herself. I’m in control. She shut her eyes, inhaling one long, slow breath and letting it out just as slowly.
“How do you figure that?” Fred asked quietly. She opened her eyes and saw support in his.
“Once we were looking for a way George could have been poisoned, I should have thought of the reeds right away. Oboe players spend half their lives sucking reeds unless they bring water to rehearsal, especially the way Alex rehearses this orchestra. We didn’t have an A from the oboe to tune by for the second half, but George had a solo after the first few bars of music. He was sitting there sucking on a reed, all ready to play, when Alex stopped us strings to work over the pom-poms.”
“The what?”
She found a faint grin somewhere. Good, she thought. I must be calming down.
“We keep the beat, pom-pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom-pom, and the cellos do a little dum-de-dum-de-duh-um, dum-de-dum-de-dum before the oboe comes with duh-um, de-dum-de-dum-de-duh-ump, dum-dum-duh-um-duh-um.” She sang the little tune from the second movement of the Schubert, beating pom-poms against his desk with her hand.
“You’ll do Bernstein out of a job.” Fred was smiling now.
“Funny man. Anyway, George didn’t even make it that far after he sat there with the reed in his mouth while we ran through the pom-poms.”
“Nobody could count on that but the conductor.”
“No, but it’s a long solo and the oboe plays all through the movement. It would have gotten to him sooner or later.”
“Anyone would know that?” he asked without enthusiasm.
“Yes. We played through it the week before. The overture has a big oboe solo, too, for that matter.”
“What about the first half? Did he play then?”
“Yes. We read through the last movement first. He had a fat part and he sounded fine. We sat out while Alex worked over a bad spot with the violins and then we all took a break.”
“So whether it was the reeds or the Kool-Aid, the poison was administered during the intermission.”
His matter-of-fact tone was helping, but Joan was sure.
“You know it was the reeds. If I’d found them sooner, the killer wouldn’t have gone to Wanda’s looking for them and ended up killing her, too. It took a while for the word to get around that you thought George was murdered. At first they all thought he was just sick. I thought so, too. No one took Yoichi seriously. And Fred, that’s why the oboe disappeared. The murderer had no way of knowing the reeds weren’t in the case with the instrument.” A thought hit her. “That means at least Nancy didn’t do it. She saw me pick up the bottle.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.” He held up the bag and peered through it at the bottle. “We don’t know what happened to the reed that was on the oboe when Petris collapsed. If it was packed in the oboe case, then it wouldn’t matter when you found these.”
Maybe she hadn’t been harboring a murder weapon in her living room after all. She wasn’t comforted.
“If you could figure that out now, you’d have figured it out then, too, and gone after it in time.”
“That’s funny,” he said slowly.
Not very, she thought, disappointed in him. He thrust the bag under her nose and tilted it.
“Look at that. Isn’t that a bassoon reed?”
It was. Joan remembered Elmer’s embarrassment.
“You’re right,” she said. “While Alex was drilling the violins, George was holding forth to Elmer on the only right way to wrap a reed. She shushed them. Elmer was so embarrassed that he stuck his reed in George’s bottle.” She put her hand on his arm. “Oh, Fred, I feel better. What if I’d seen that first and given the bottle to Elmer instead of you? He might have died, too.”
Relief swept over her. It didn’t last.
“He might have been perfectly safe,” Fred said. “Suppose I wanted to poison Petris’s reeds. What could be easier? I grab my chance when the conductor distracts him, lean forward, and drop my reed in his bottle. A little white powder on it and I’ve set the trap.”
“You don’t mean it.” Joan shifted uneasily and hugged her elbows.
Fred leaned back so far that she thought he would surely topple over until she saw the toes hooked under his bottom drawer.
“How much do you know about Elmer Rush?” he asked finally.
“Fred, you can’t imagine that sweet old man would do such a thing!”
“Have you ever seen him angry?” Fred tilted still farther back, cradling his head in his crossed hands.
“Well … once.” She didn’t want to consider it. There had to be a world of difference between a murderous rage and stomping around because you’d lost something. Besides, Elmer hadn’t really been that angry about the lost loom. It was some slight to Julie, though he’d left before saying what it was.
“And what would you say is his chief concern?”
That was easy. “Julie. He’s wonderful with her, Fred. You should see them.”
“I have.” Fred brought his feet down on the floor and looked her in the eye. “Tell me, what do you think would happen if he recognized George Petris as the lifeguard who nearly let Julie drown?”
“That’s impossible!”
“Is it? The accident happened in California,” he said. “We know Petris grew up in California. Daniel says he was a strong swimmer. If he was over eighteen, there ought to be a record.”
“He wasn’t, but she was,” Joan said, remembering. “The babysitter he was drinking and making out with when he should have been watching Julie. Elmer said she served some time. You could find out.”
It was still unthinkable. She could no more imagine Elmer poisoning George, much less cutting Wanda’s throat, than she could imagine herself doing it.
“I can’t believe it, Fred,” she insisted. “Not Elmer.”
The words echoed hollowly in her mind. Hadn’t she imagined a whole town saying them about the man who had tried to force himself on her? Wouldn’t she have been the first to say them abou
t him if she had heard him accused by another?
Suddenly she could feel the letter opener in her hand again, cool and heavy. How close had she been to murder that day in the church? Close enough not to trust herself to go back, she knew. She had fled all the way to Oliver instead.
I wasn’t afraid of him, she thought, even when I should have been. I was afraid of myself. How could I even wonder what Elmer might be capable of?
“You haven’t talked to him,” Fred was saying.
“No.”
“I don’t need to tell you not to. Just remember, we’re a long way from proving it. We’ll give you some protection until the next rehearsal. Then you’ll give the reeds to me in front of the whole orchestra.”
“But I don’t have them anymore.”
“Only you and I know that.”
“Oh.” Oh.
“I’ll return the bottle to you Wednesday, before the rehearsal. It will look the same, but it won’t be the same. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”
“And Elmer? Will he be fine?” It came bursting out of her. “Look at Julie! What George did to her was murder, too, in a way. But the law couldn’t touch him. Is it so terrible if Elmer took it upon himself?”
Immediately, guilt assailed her. Who was she to value George’s life so lightly? She fought back. Who was George to value Julie’s so little?
“I don’t want to argue that with you,” Fred said quietly. “But how do the Borowskis come into your rough justice? What’s their crime?”
She had forgotten Wanda, and remembering brought back her fear. Wanda’s crime had consisted of being in the way. She’d known that the minute she’d found the reeds.
“Do you … do you think he’d really kill anybody else?”
“Anybody who gets in his way.” He might have been reading her mind. “Even if you think killing Petris was an execution of sorts, it was planned. He didn’t just happen to have that poison in his pocket, you know. I don’t think he expected to have to kill Mrs. Borowski, though. That smacked of spur-of-the-moment improvisation. Military training, too, possibly—that silent throat cutting from behind. Has Rush ever talked about the war?”
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