Murder Crops Up

by Lora Roberts

  Hoping I wouldn’t make enough noise to draw Webster’s attention, I tried to slither across the bin. My cheek met something slimy, which stuck there. Finally my swollen fingers brushed against the far wall. I moved my hands as best I could, up, down, in a frustratingly small arc. Nothing. I inched up in a different direction, my fingers questing across the hard plastic of the bin.

  At last I felt the edge of a ventilation slit. I stuffed one, two sausagey fingers into it, letting them hang down outside the bin below the edge of the slit. I could feel a breeze move along my skin, so I knew the fingers were visible. I hoped they were smellable, too. I did my feeble best to move them enticingly.

  Nothing happened for a long, agonizing moment, while the shovels worked together and I waited for Webster to begin to hurt Amy. The breeze intensified, sweeping my pheromones toward the garden gate—toward Barker’s sensitive nose. He was probably picking up other rich smells in the immediate area, so I wasn’t sure he’d be able to scent mine.

  Then Barker whined, softly, and again more loudly. His whine sounded closer. He was on his feet. I pictured him, straining at the leash, his nose pointed in my direction.

  Webster’s shovel stopped, then started again. He spoke in a loud voice.

  “So, are you visiting your aunt for Thanksgiving?”

  “Just for a while.” Amy’s voice held reserve.

  “Aren’t you in school?” Webster moved a little farther down his plot. I redoubled the motion of my fingers, afraid that at any moment he would leap on Amy and we’d both be goners.

  Barker whined again, and then, bless him, gave voice to his signature noise. It wasn’t his danger bark, at least not yet. It was his let-me-go-I’ve-got-something-to-check-out bark, the one usually caused by squirrels or cats.

  “Barker. Stop it. Do you see a squirrel? Do you want to chase a squirrel?” Amy sounded indulgent. “You didn’t like the leash all the way here, did you? Want to chase those squirrelies, don’t you?”

  Barker agreed enthusiastically with the tone of the comments, if not with the content.

  “Dogs are supposed to be on a leash in Palo Alto. It’s the law.” Webster sounded edgy. Amy’s footsteps went down the main path. The gate creaked.

  “I’ll put him back on the leash after he has one dash. It’s not like he ever catches them.”

  Letting Barker off the leash, except in places with lots of running space and no leash laws, was strictly forbidden. But I wasn’t going to give Amy a hard time over it. I was going to hug her, assuming we both got out of this with whole skins.

  I redoubled my wiggling, ignoring the pain in my fingers. Suddenly Barker’s rough tongue was licking them. Tears welled up in my eyes.

  “What are you eating? No, boy. Bad dog. Garbage.” Amy rattled the leash, but Barker kept licking.

  “Get him out of my compost,” Webster growled, dropping the matey act.

  “He’s just found something hanging out of your bin.” Amy’s voice came closer. “What in the world—wait a minute!”

  Webster’s shovel struck against something nearby, hard enough to give out a twang and send a jolt through the bin. “What are you trying to do?” Amy, breathless and indignant, was retreating toward the parking lot, from the sound of her voice.

  “Stop right where you are.”

  “Is that—do you have a gun?” She was incredulous. Barker abandoned my fingers. I could hear his low growl, deep in his chest. It’s the only time he’s dangerous, when he lets out that growl.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot you. And your damned dog.”

  “What is going on?” Amy sounded more impatient than frightened. “Look, if you try to shoot me, a million people are going to come out of the library and find you.

  “Library’s not open yet.” Webster was unruffled. “Now come back through the gate. Slowly. Don’t try anything.”

  “I don’t know anything to try.” The gate creaked. “What are you going to do? What’s this about?”

  “It’s about a parcel of meddling busybodies,” Webster muttered. Amy might not have heard him. Beside me, Barker’s growl went on and on. Maybe Webster thought he was safe because of the fence between him and the dog—the fence only a little higher than my picket fence at home.

  “Don’t touch me, you creep. I’m pregnant!”

  Webster laughed. “So? What’s that supposed to mean to me? You’re in my way. That’s all that matters.”

  “Let go. Let go—that hurts!”

  Barker loosed his most fearsome growl, a horrible slavering thing he usually saves for the mail carrier. The sound went right over the bin as he jumped. I could feel the thud of his landing—at fifty pounds, he’s solid.

  “Stupid dog.” Webster’s voice was shaken.

  “Don’t shoot him! No!” Amy screamed.

  “Bitch. Call him off! Call him off!”

  I strained against the bond of the jean jacket, and the knotted sleeves loosened and gave way. It was hard in the spongy mass to get purchase for my legs and straighten up. I got my shoulders against the lid of the bin and heaved up, knocking it off.

  A frightening sight met me. Barker had fastened his jaws deeply into Webster’s forearm, rendering the gun he held in that hand useless. Webster was trying to raise his arm, shake Barker off, but a big dog isn’t easy to budge. He couldn’t turn the gun enough to shoot Barker. In his preoccupation, he’d let go of Amy. She was behind him, yanking his shovel out of the dirt.

  Amy swung the shovel, missing Webster’s head and back, but landing a good clout on his elbow from behind—probably right on his funny bone. The gun flew out of his hand and landed in among his raspberry canes. If I hadn’t erupted out of the compost just then, she might have managed to take him out, and it would all have been over.

  “Aunt Liz! My God!” Amy flung the shovel away—it landed in Tamiko’s garden—and ran to me. Barker was distracted, too. He still gripped Webster’s arm, but his ears were no longer flattened against his head, and his eyes rolled back toward me.

  Webster shook his arm again, and this time Barker dropped off. He had broken the skin; blood seeped through the sleeve of Webster’s trendy barn jacket.

  “Damn you all!” He looked around for the shovel, but it was out of sight among Tamiko’s fava beans. Barker lunged at him again, getting him in the thigh.

  I held Amy’s gaze, unable to talk with the gag in my mouth, and jerked my head toward the library. She nodded and swung one leg over the chicken-wire fence.

  Webster lashed out with his other foot at Barker, who yelped and skittered back. “Barker!” Amy swung back around.

  Balked of his weapons, Webster spotted the wheelbarrow loaded with heavy bags of soil conditioner. He grabbed the handles, and with a spurt of maniacal strength, drove it in a rush straight at Amy.

  Her mouth formed a disbelieving O, her eyes wide. The wheelbarrow rammed into her, mashing her against the chicken-wire fence.

  Webster ran across Tamiko’s plot, through the gate and out through the trees toward the parking lot. Moments later, an engine roared to life and drove away.

  I was frantic, unable to help Amy with my wrists still imprisoned behind me and my mouth stopped with Webster’s leather glove. Amy’s eyes lost their glazed look, though her face was very white. Slowly she pushed the wheelbarrow away, and then collapsed against the fence. Whining anxiously, Barker licked her face.

  “Oh, Barker.” She put her arms around his neck and let him drag her toward the compost bin. When she was close enough, she managed to pull herself up the side of it.

  “Aunt Liz.” Her fingers fumbled with the knot of bandanna, and finally freed me to spit out the noxious glove. “My God. Are you okay?”

  “Are you?” I had a hard time forming the words—my mouth was dry and felt misshapen.

  “Yeah.” She didn’t sound okay. She was working now at the wire that held my wrists together. “Your hands. My God.”

  The bond loosened, and my arms fell to my sides with painful relief.
I tried to raise them, to look at my hands, but I couldn’t make them work. At the ends of my arms were obscene-looking purple appendages.

  “They’ll recover.” I looked around anxiously. “We’ve got to call Bruno right away.” I put one hand on the edge of the bin to climb out before I realized that wasn’t going to work. “Run and call him, use that pay phone. Wait, be careful, make sure Webster’s gone before you go.”

  Amy didn’t move. She leaned against the bin, and then slowly slid down until she was sitting on the ground. “I can’t,” she whispered. “Something is wrong. You’ll have to go, Aunt Liz.”

  I managed to sit on the edge of the bin next to the fence, swing my legs over, get down on the other side of the fence without falling. I have no clear recollection of how I managed to find a coin in my pocket and use the pay phone.

  My fingers were still bloated when the ambulance arrived minutes later. By the time Bruno got there, as the EMTs were putting Amy into the ambulance, the tingling in my hands was intensifying into exquisite pain, a good sign, one of the EMTs told me.

  “You get in there, too.” Bruno wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I didn’t want to leave Amy anyway. He put Barker in his car and followed us in the ambulance. I held her hand in one of my throbbing ones and watched her grow paler and paler.

  At the hospital, an intern examined the lump on my head and my lacerated wrists with great interest, assuring me I’d live and be healed up in no time. A nurse sponged off my face and hands, getting an incredibly dirty basin of water in return. I noticed that people wrinkled up their noses when they first came within sniffing distance of my redolent atmosphere. Bruno and I had a large clear space around us in the waiting room while I told him what had happened and we waited to learn how Amy was.

  “Thanks, by the way.” I smiled at him, glad it was Bruno who sat with me in my unlovely state, and not Drake.

  “For what?” He was polite enough not to hold his nose while we talked. His laptop had received much information, and he’d made several calls on his cell phone, while we waited.

  “For getting them to treat Amy without insisting on calling her parents. They’ll have to know about the attack, but maybe they won’t have to know about—the rest of it.”

  “Do you not think she’ll tell them?”

  “She might. But I sure wouldn’t in her place.” It was going to be bad enough to tell them about what she’d gone through in the garden.

  He looked at me with great sympathy. “She will lose the baby, you know.”

  “I guessed as much.” I didn’t know how she would take this abrupt ending to her dilemma, whether with relief or sadness. “As long as there’s no permanent damage.”

  “We will hope that is so.”

  I shifted position, trying to balance the tub of ice that the nurse had insisted I keep my hands immersed in, and heard a crackling in the front pocket of my overalls. “Oh, there’s that.” I indicated the pocket with my chin. “Can you get that, Bruno?” It was the sealed plastic bag, which I’d tucked away before the ambulance had arrived.

  Bruno examined it with interest. “And it was Emery he mentioned?”

  “He thought I’d tell Emery, which would be bad for Webster.” I didn’t want Bruno to get the wrong idea. “It must have to do with industrial espionage. Emery had a patch of that not too long ago. I guess Webster was involved, and with some of the other companies he worked for, too. The only thing that puzzles me is why he’d use the garden as a drop spot. Why not just copy everything electronically and send it along?”

  “Those transmissions are easier to trace than you might think.” Bruno looked up from the screen. “But the garden was a stupid choice. An arrogant choice, rather. Mr. Powell liked thinking that everything fell into his plans. But sooner or later at a place like the garden, someone was bound to notice something.”

  “Rita must have.” I lifted my hands from the ice, letting them drip. “I’ll get frostbite if I keep this up.”

  Bruno didn’t pay attention. “Rita actually went out with him for a while, didn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Somehow she figured out what he was up to. Maybe he even said something, bragged about his secret life. I don’t think he could keep things to himself, not when they showed how clever he was.”

  “You are probably right.” Bruno took out his cell phone again and dialed. “Did you find him?” He listened, and after a moment said, “Well, keep on it. We may have to enlarge the perimeter. And make sure they are staying on it at the airports and emergency rooms.”

  “He said something about South America to me.”

  Bruno passed that along and then put the cell phone away.

  A doctor came purposefully toward us. “Ms. Sullivan?” He ignored Bruno, who typed away on his keyboard. “Your niece is asking for you.”

  I abandoned the tub of ice thankfully, and he led me away. Bruno walked with us through the corridors. They had admitted Amy to a room—a double, not a ward, and the other bed was unoccupied. Bruno stepped back so I could go through the door alone, though I noticed he left it ajar.

  Amy was propped up in the bed, wearing a hospital gown, the covers pulled up around her waist. “Did you hear?” She blinked at me, her eyes moist. “I lost the baby.”

  “I heard.” I went up to the bed and put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “I’m not.” Amy sat up straighter. “I feel like a creep for that, but I’m glad. The doctor said the fetus had a problem anyway—” She thought for a moment. “A neural tube defect, I think it was. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have miscarried, even with major gut trauma.”

  “Poor Amy.”

  She waved off my sympathy; her thoughts were still on the baby. “It could never have lived long. I would have gone through all that, torn my family up, just to provide some childless people with a baby, and then the baby wouldn’t have been the kind anyone wanted.” She slumped back. “It’s dumb to do things for other people’s reasons. You should figure out your own reasons and do what’s best for you.”

  “That would work most of the time.”

  She didn’t really hear me. “I don’t mind the pain so much, because it’s reminding me never to be so stupid again.”

  “Will you be able to have children later?”

  “They did MRIs and stuff, and they said nothing was permanently injured, just bruised. Because the fence behind me gave, you see. If I’d been up against a wall or something, I might have really gotten hurt.” She sniffled into a tissue. “The way I feel right now, I’m going on the pill and never going off. This isn’t a good world for babies. What was it about, Aunt Liz? Why did that guy have to rupture my guts?”

  Bruno came in. “I will answer your questions, Miss Amy, but first, are you able to answer a few of mine?”

  Amy asserted that she was suffering more from curiosity than anything else. A nurse brought her a little white paper cup of meds and she swallowed them down without question. I wondered how much pain medicine she had already gotten, and how long she’d have to be in the hospital. And how I was going to pay for it.

  I sat in the chair by the window, half listening to Bruno’s questions and Amy’s answers. I would have to call the senior center and tell them I couldn’t do the workshop that day. I would stay with Amy until she succumbed to her medication, and then I could go home. I could smear a liberal amount of comfrey salve on my abraded wrists, get together some home comforts to take back to the hospital for Amy, and give thanks that we were both alive.

  Chapter 26

  “So Webster was behind that contract we lost a few months ago.” Emery was still stunned, even though a full day had passed since Bruno had spoken to him. “I didn’t even think of him. I figured it was some hacker lifting our files, not someone I knew.”

  “Your company wasn’t the only one.” I scrubbed the radishes and sliced them into long ovals for the salad I was composing.

  Bridget pulled a couple of big pans of lasagna o
ut of the oven, and put in several foil-wrapped loaves of garlic bread. “If I had a double oven,” she muttered, “the lasagna wouldn’t get cold while the garlic bread cooked.”

  “Maybe my company will do better now that Webster’s been arrested, and we’ll finally be able to remodel.” Emery popped the top off his beer bottle. The hum of conversation from the living room was punctuated with frequent laughter. Claudia’s deep voice boomed, telling a joke. She’d been properly “surprised” by finding a living room full of friends, instead of Emery and Bridget ready to leave her with their children. I had been glad to escape all the hearty conviviality to help finish dinner preparations in the kitchen.

  “So where did they find him?” Bridget threw the question over her shoulder while she dove into a drawer for aluminum foil.

  “Waiting with his arm in a sling at the San Francisco airport for a plane to South America. It turns out he has another identity already established on an island off the Venezuelan coast. They think they can recover some of the money. You should put in a claim, Emery.”

  “Make it enough to remodel the kitchen,” Bridget said. “How’s Amy doing?”

  “She’s better.” I fell silent, washing cherry and golden pear tomatoes. Amy was physically okay. She’d been discharged from the hospital with a supply of sanitary pads and instructions to take it easy. I had given her my bed for the duration, and she was no doubt immured there with her headphones and CD player, her stack of CDs— and Jane Austen’s Emma, which she’d expressed an interest in reading after finding it on my shelves.

  It grieved me to see the dimming of her sparkle, the bruised look around her eyes. With time, she could surely get back that self-confident trust in her own abilities and in the world’s recognition of them. I hoped she hadn’t gone too far along the road that leads to closing off parts of yourself to avoid hurt. Those doors are the devil to open up again.