"Your turn." I had had enough of finding bodies.
She swallowed and nodded. I held my breath as she waded toward the telltale scrap. I even looked away, so I was startled when she gave a short yip of laughter.
"Shit. Some other birds have been nesting."
I walked over and peered down. A plaid stadium rug lay rumpled in the hay. Further probing revealed a couple of empty beer cans and three used condoms.
"Yuck."
"Have you no romance?" Bianca swept her light around the immediate area. "Jason holding court, no doubt. The kid's a stud, or thinks he is."
Reaction made me cranky. I bit back a comment about the other candidates for stud-dom at Meadowlark Farm. The blanket was thick and looked expensive. The beer, on the other hand, was a cheap brand sold at every twenty-four-hour market.
Bianca snorted again and went back to her methodical probing.
I worked slower, and I uncovered nothing more harrowing than an ancient gunnysack. It was empty. "I'm finished."
Bianca did not reply. I turned around. She was sitting on a bale near the ladder, face in her hands, shoulders heaving.
I will confess my first feeling was exasperation. I stood there flat-footed, telling myself that she had a right to be upset, that she was not manipulating me. Then I went over and gave her a pat on the shoulder. "Need a Kleenex?"
She drew a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. "I'm sorry. I was thinking of Hugo."
"You said he liked the old barn."
"Yes." She gulped and blotted her eyes. "It was September when we bought the place, after the harvest was over. The autumn weather was wonderful that year. The first thing we decided to do was clean out the barn. We were looking for pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and we found some, not a lot. The previous owners had kept horses, so there was old tack down below. When we finished clearing that out, we climbed up here--Keith and Hugo and I, and the three kids. It was great, full of fresh loose hay. Hugo..." She blew her nose again. "He climbed up on that beam and did a perfect double flip off it. We were all laughing."
I looked at the beam, impossibly high overhead, and tried to imagine Hugo doing acrobatics.
"I can't cancel the workshop," Bianca said with real desperation. "Don't you see? I have to salvage something."
Lost innocence, perhaps. I did see, unfortunately, and never mind that Hugo had refused to attend the opening night celebrations. Bianca was trying to save an ideal.
I sat down on the bale beside her. "Okay. It'll be a media circus, though. What do you want me to do? Extra, I mean."
"Oh, God, just back me up."
"That I can do."
We drove down the rutted lane in a fair state of understanding. When we reached the broccoli fields, she said she was going to have to harvest the first crop while the workshop was in session. Otherwise, it would start turning yellow. The Vietnamese crew had agreed to come Monday.
The ice house was still officially off-limits behind a yellow tape barrier, but we got out together and looked in the door. The ice had melted from the bin. The place stank of mold and something less tolerable, but it was empty. So were the two sheep sheds I had watched Jason and Bill enter the day before I found Hugo.
Keith and Angie reported that they hadn't seen any sign of Mary either. Angie was calmer. I suspected Bianca had done the search to calm Angie down. Marianne fed us coffee and cookies in the kitchen. She said Del and Mike had driven in to town. It was only four-thirty, so I decided not to wait for Dale.
As I drove home I began to think about backup strategies, in case the worst happened and Dale arrested Bianca as the workshoppers arrived. But I didn't really believe Bianca had killed Hugo. Her grief, however theatrical its outward signs, seemed honest. Besides, I couldn't think of a motive. Hugo's death was a disaster for her. So who had killed him? And how was Mary Sadat tied to the killing?
If the Vietnamese crew were eliminated, the suspect list was short. Dale had excluded transients for obvious reasons. Hiding the bicycle and burying the body under a load of ice required knowledge of the farm. That meant Hugo had been killed by one of the interns, by Mike Wallace, or by one of the staff.
Del, Keith, and Bianca were my favorite candidates, but Marianne had been there that Sunday, and she had demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the farm. And there was Angie. Angie was ambitious and opinionated. It was clear she coveted at least some of Hugo's territory. And, if I had doubted her ability in a knock-down drag-out fight, that afternoon had dispelled my illusions. She was hot-tempered and lethally able, but would she harm Mary?
Del, Keith, Bianca, Angie, and, of the interns, Jason and Carol Bascombe. Jason because Hugo might have threatened his academic future, and Carol because she was the only one who had expressed hostility to Hugo directly. The others were dark horses. I had no clear picture of the Carlsens. Bill seemed too much the follower to initiate action, but he might have collaborated with Jason. And Mary was missing.
A log truck passed me going the other way. The Toyota shuddered in its wake, and I gripped the wheel. A pair of killers. Bill and Jason, Jason and Bill. The two had gone to Seaside. Had they offered Hugo a ride home, and quarreled with him on the way back? If so, how had the bicycle got to the farm?
And what of Mike Wallace? I didn't want to think negative thoughts about Mike. He was not an intern, not part of the team, but he was more disturbed by Mary's disappearance than casual acquaintance warranted. I doubted that Mike would have collaborated with Jason, but he might have abetted his father. Mike seemed to take Del's opinions seriously. And Del was a dominant baboon. He could have fought with Hugo, killed him, then gone to the house and demanded his son's help.
I reached the turnoff for Shoalwater and drove through the tiny town at a sedate twenty-five. What was true of Mike was even more probable of Marianne. Del could have intimidated her into helping him dispose of the body. I wound out of town on the beach road, drew up at our garage, and set the brake. My head ached, and it was my turn to cook dinner.
It was a comfort to discover that my marriage wasn't going to rise or fall on my cookery. I fixed scrambled eggs and pancakes, and Jay didn't seem to notice. He was preoccupied by a tall stack of reports he had to mark by eight a.m. the next day.
When Jay first set up the program at Shoalwater C.C., he startled his wannabe cops and the English Department by requiring formal reports in all of the police science classes. They were technical papers, for the most part, and not exercises in creative imagination, but he demanded literacy, attribution, and organization. A surprising number of the first year students changed their major to P.E. and Recreation by the end of the second term. It was the end of the second term.
Between papers Jay told me of Dale's efforts to find Mary. Mary's two large brothers had showed up at the Dean's office. Jay had rescued him, an experience Jay said made him nostalgic for his old hostage negotiation days in Los Angeles.
Then Dale had called all the interns to Jay's office and grilled them about Mary there. Nobody had a hard and fast alibi for the period in which she had gone missing. It interested me that Carol Bascombe had showed up on campus. She was supposed to be suffering from the flu. Dale had also taken Jason and Bill through their statements about Seaside. They stuck to their story. They had not seen Hugo the day he was killed. Dale thought they were hiding something but couldn't figure out what.
The interrogation and the Dean's hand-wringing had occupied most of the afternoon, as predicted. Jay thought he'd put in an all-nighter with the reports. I made him a large pot of herb tea and went to bed.
The next day, which was Thursday, both press coverage of Hugo's death and the search for Mary Sadat heated up. I noticed the press first, because a reporter from the Oregonian was camped outside the bookstore. Kayport is off the beaten track, and the first police report of Hugo's murder--sans mutilation, a detail Lisa Colman withheld--had been insufficiently sensational to attract metropolitan coverage. Now Mary was missing, our grace period was over
. I wondered whether television crews had yet reached Meadowlark Farm.
I gave the reporter a couple of platitudes and a lot of blank incomprehension. He finally left. Since Bonnie had gone off with Tom in search of a travel agent, I was alone. I hid in the back room and played the telephone answering tape. The little red light was blinking like a lizard in a sand storm.
The first three calls were from reporters, one of whom was enrolled in the workshop. Her I called. She wanted to know whether the workshop would go on as scheduled and, when I admitted it would, asked about Hugo's death. I told her Bianca would make a statement. The reporter didn't let it go at that, of course, but I managed to disengage without outright rudeness.
Two customers had called to order books--Danielle Steele's latest and a tome devoted to poultry-rearing. The second sounded more interesting. I noted the phone numbers and the books' titles and looked the poultry book up on my database. It was out of print. I had Steele in stock. I called the customers.
The next-to-last message was a breathy female voice, rather garbled. I had to play it twice. It was Carol Bascombe. She said she had to talk to me and asked me to call her back as soon as I could. I would have, but she forgot to leave her number.
I stared at the telephone in exasperation. I had not the faintest idea why Carol was picking on me, but I knew I wouldn't be able to concentrate on my inventory until I had at least tried to reach her. Perhaps she had called back with the phone number.
I stabbed the play button and picked up a pen, but the last message was from Bianca. She asked me to call her when it was convenient. Her voice was in plaintive mode. It wasn't convenient, so I didn't call her. Instead I called Jay, got the building secretary, and explained about Carol. Nancy, bless her heart, said she'd try the registrar's office.
I sat at the desk entering ISBN numbers into my inventory program until the phone rang. Nancy with Carol's home number. I thanked her and hung up. When I tried the number, though, I got another answering machine. The message was brief and to the point, but the male voice sounded familiar. I left a short, and possibly short-tempered, message and hung up.
It's not uncommon for women living alone to ask a male friend to tape the message for their answering machines. The sound of a male voice eliminates some of the heavy breathers. As I turned back to the monitor screen my mind made the connection.
The voice was Jason's. Interesting.
I sat in my padded office chair, staring at the monitor until the screen-saver pattern came on. Jason and Carol. Mike thought Carol was an airhead. Jason might be more susceptible. He probably preferred airheads. Carol had disliked Hugo, Jason had had a grudge. Had they conspired to kill Hugo? Had Carol called me to confess? Why me?
I tried to reach her again and hung up when Jason's voice came on the line. It was half-past eleven. Jay was still in class. Disgusted and worried, I went out for a sandwich.
Between shelving books and fiddling with my inventory, I kept trying to reach Carol all afternoon. At three I called Bianca and got her answering machine. I was about to give up and leave for the day--after all I was still on vacation--when the phone rang. It was Jay. He said that the police had found Mary's car.
My stomach knotted. "Where?"
"Astoria. It was parked behind a dumpster in the Baylor lot."
The Baylor was an historic hotel that was being renovated. I swallowed. "Do they think--"
"They're sifting through the debris right now."
I thought of Mary, shy and pretty. I thought of Carol, too. "I hate this."
"So does the Dean," Jay said.
Chapter 10
The memorial service for Hugo was scheduled for Friday evening. I woke on that thought after a restless sleep troubled by nightmares.
Dale had come over after dinner Thursday night looking exhausted. Mary's body was not in the dumpster, nor did the Astoria police find other signs of her there, and there was no evidence of a struggle in the car, which was locked. Dale had spent the day interviewing her family, the interns, and the farm staff, without result.
"They're lying!" he burst out when he finished his second cup of coffee.
Jay yawned. He'd had only two hours of sleep the night before, but he had finished marking the reports. "Of course they're lying. Crime suspects always have irrelevant secrets to protect, and that farm is bound to be full of secrets. It's an unnatural set-up."
"Unnatural!" I scowled at him.
Jay said patiently, "People who work together don't usually have to live together, too. If I had to live in the same place as the Dean I'd wind up strangling him."
I contemplated living in the same household as Bianca.
Dale sighed. "Somebody's guilty as sin."
Carol. I had not yet reached Carol. I opened my mouth to mention her call then thought better of the idea. Carol had called me, not Dale and not Jay. Maybe she wasn't going to confess to murder. Maybe she just wanted to know whether I had the latest Danielle Steele in stock.
Jay was rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I don't like this business of Mary Sadat. She must have seen something." He dropped his hands. "And probably not at the farm. She was supposed to be in Kayport working at the restaurant when Groth was killed. Did you verify that?"
Dale's mouth tightened. "I asked her folks. She waited tables."
"What time does the place open?"
"It's popular for lunch as well as dinner. I assumed..." Dale yanked out his notebook, reached for the phone, and dialed. A voice responded, and he asked what the restaurant's Sunday hours were. "Thanks." He hung up slowly. "It doesn't open until four-thirty on Sundays."
Jay whistled.
"Yeah. Lots of time." Dale slammed his hands on the table. The mugs jiggled. "She was lying to me. I just asked her parents if she worked that Sunday, and they said yes, but I damned well did ask Mary Sadat what time she went to work. She lied." He rose, energized. "I'm off. Thanks for the coffee, Lark."
"Don't mention it."
Jay said, "Look at all the times, Dale. She wasn't necessarily out with another student."
Dale nodded. "I'll look, but I want a crack at those interns tomorrow. Did I tell you they were lying?" He left with a bang of the back door.
I got up and gathered the mugs. "Maybe Mary lied to her parents, too."
I caught Jay in mid-yawn. He blinked at me.
I was chasing a small idea. "Her brothers came to confront the Dean?"
"Yes. Two of them."
"Sounds like a traditional family."
"So?"
"Women in traditional Middle Eastern families are traditionally deceptive. They have to be if they want any kind of independence. She was probably seeing somebody her parents wouldn't approve of."
He got up, eyes on me. "That's a shrewd observation. I doubt that they'd allow her to go out with a man at all. Her brothers kept harping on her virtue. At the time, I thought the concern was irrelevant, that they ought to be worrying about her life."
"Poor kid."
"Yeah. Hell, I can't think." He rubbed his eyes again. "I'm beat, Lark. I'll talk to Dale tomorrow."
When he had gone up to bed, I picked up the telephone and tried to reach Carol. My mind was on Mary, so I was startled when Carol answered my ring.
I identified myself.
"Where are you?"
"At home, of course." Where else at nine-thirty on a week night?
"Is your husband there?"
"Yes, but he went to bed."
Long breathy pause. I could hear an unfamiliar rock group thumping in the background. At last she said, "Uh, I need some advice. I need to, like, talk to you alone."
Girl talk. How sweet. I was losing patience. "If the phone won't do, I'll be at the bookstore all morning."
"Can I come by around noon? I work at the farm Friday mornings."
"Okay. We can go get a hamburger or something."
"I don't eat that junk. It's unhealthy," she said with conscious virtue. "See ya."
Oh,
Carol. I sat in the nook for a while speculating about Carol's problem, but I didn't have a clue. My mind drifted back to Mary Sadat. Now there was a woman with problems.
So I went to bed early and had a double dose of nightmares, this time featuring women in peril, not my favorite fantasy pattern. I wouldn't even watch Silence of the Lambs, and here was my head creating horrors. After the second nightmare, I got up and drank a cup of warm milk. It tasted awful, but I did fall asleep again.
Jay's first class was at ten, so he hung around making phone calls Friday morning. Bonnie came over and showed me a bunch of brochures and a "French for Travelers" tape. I fled to the bookstore in self-defense, though I had little left to do before my re-opening. At eleven, Bianca called to ask if I could pick Trish up at the bus depot at four. I could, though it was going to be inconvenient to shuttle Trish to the farm, dash home for Jay, feed us, change clothes, and dash back out. Bianca wanted me at the farm at half past six.
It was idle to suppose Carol would show up at noon. I didn't expect her to be on time, and she wasn't. I took out the feather duster and settled in to a good, thorough dusting. Then I began rearranging the fiction. Alphabetically by categories is the best way, but placing a book in the wrong category is embarrassing, and unfair to the writer. I removed Danielle Steele from Romance and placed her in Best-Sellers. And Toni Morrison from Best-Sellers to Literature. And so on. I probably created chaos. Finally, a scratching at the front door announced Carol's arrival. It was one, and my stomach snarled at her.
When I let her in, she looked around. "Gosh, have you read all these books?"
She was in airhead mode. I thought of saying, "I don't read 'em. I just sell 'em," but that was too unkind. I said, "Some. What did you want, Carol?"
"Well, like I said, to talk." She wriggled. "I'm hungry." I led her to the back room and began closing the place down.
"That a Mac?" She indicated my computer.
"A PC." I blanked the screen and grabbed my purse and jacket.
"Cool." She wriggled again. "Do you keep your inventory on disk?"
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