Damn. He had finally said it. And I knew he wasn’t kidding. My chest tightened. I took a long, painful breath before speaking.
“Craig, sometimes I like you. But I don’t love you anymore,” I told him as gently and clearly as I could. “I love Wayne. Wayne and I are going to be married.”
There was a much longer silence than before.
“Oh boy, do I get to be a flower girl?” Craig asked finally, his voice a shrill falsetto.
I knew this was my cue to laugh, to pretend that our whole conversation was just kidding around. So I forced a laugh. It was hard because of the way my chest hurt, but I pushed it on out anyway.
And finally, we hung up. I thought about Wayne, then, counting the days until he’d be home again. And trying my best not to imagine how Craig felt. I tried all night long.
*
I climbed out of bed on Sunday morning tired and cranky but still determined to get some work done on the Jest Gifts backlog. I’d put in a couple of hours when the doorbell rang.
I snuck over to the window to peer out. Who would my visitor be this time? Russell Wu, the Mafia brothers, or my ex-husband? I wasn’t sure who would be worse. But it wasn’t any of them. It was Carrie.
I didn’t even wait for her to tell me why she was there. I just got my purse from the pinball machine and walked to the front door.
“Who do you want to visit today?” I asked once I’d opened up.
“Donna,” she answered instantly. Then she grinned.
Donna had a large house in the hills of San Ricardo with a big green yard that looked like a toy shop had blown up and landed there in pieces. There were swings and slides and brightly colored barrels to crawl through glittering in the sunlight, along with all modes of rolling things including a bunch of phosphorescent tricycles and an assortment of roller blades.
Inside, the house was filled with macrame, soft sculpture and more toys. Children’s art work hung on the walls next to art posters. And then there were the animals. I counted at least four cats, two mice and probably twenty brightly colored fish in a large aquarium, plus a few more goldfish in a smaller aquarium. And two children: Dacia, age eight, who wore earrings and a silk headband to match her dress, and six-year-old Dustin, who wore a polo shirt with a lizard on it.
“I’m into cobras and anacondas,” Dustin told us, “but Mom only lets us have fish and mice and stupid cats—”
“The cats are not stupid!” Dacia shouted. “They’re a lot smarter than you are!” One of the cats took a moment to glance approvingly over its shoulder before returning its gaze to the contents of the smaller aquarium.
“Well, you’re stupid too!” Dustin shot back. “Really, really stupid. And gorpy too.”
“Mom!” Dacia yelled.
She didn’t really have to yell. Donna was only a couple of feet away. So were Carrie and I, unfortunately.
“Remember what I told you two yesterday?” Donna asked, smiling as she knelt down in front of her children.
Neither child responded.
“Be like Mahatma Gandhi,” she said, refreshing their little memories.
Dacia crossed her arms emphatically. Dustin stuck his fingers in his ears.
“Have you both been meditating on cooperation?” Donna persisted, still smiling.
The two children sighed identical sighs and marched out of the room. At least they were unified in their disgust, if not actively cooperating. Maybe Donna’s method of dispute resolution wasn’t so silly after all.
“So Donna,” I said a little too loudly. My ears were still ringing from Dacia’s shout. “Who introduced you to the critique group?”
“Um, Nan did,” she replied, peering into my eyes, her own honey-colored eyes round with question. But she didn’t ask why I was interested. Instead, she asked if Carrie and I would like to sit down.
“Certainly,” Carrie answered and Donna began pulling plush toys and chunks of brightly colored plastic off the nearest couch. Finally we all sat down, Carrie and I on the couch, Donna across from us in an easy chair. All without mishap. Donna didn’t seem so awkward in her own habitat. Maybe it was her clothes. She was wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt today. No floor-length skirts or vests conspired to impede her progress.
“Perhaps you could tell us more about meeting Nan,” Carrie suggested once we were all seated.
“Nan and I took this creative writing class together, um, five or six years ago,” she told us. “It was incredibly liberating, all that energy just flowing and flowing, trauma being transformed into beauty. And after that, Nan and I really bonded. We went to lunch, oh, maybe once or twice a year. And then I told her I was beginning my book and she invited me to come to the group. I was like, really, really honored that she would ask, you know?” Donna tilted her head.
I nodded encouragingly.
“Nan even dated my brother Freddy for a while—”
“Mom!” someone screamed nearby.
Donna jumped out of her seat and sprinted into the next room, grazing her shoulder on the edge of the doorway on the way. So much for grace in her own habitat. She was back within minutes, smiling and rubbing her shoulder with one hand, a long shiny plastic saber in her other hand.
“Aren’t little kids just wonderful?” she breathed as she sat back down. She dropped the saber onto a pile of toys by her chair. “They’re such extraordinarily complex little beings. So full of life, and well, intelligence. But a different kind of intelligence. And integrity.”
“Yeah, intelligence and integrity,” I agreed as enthusiastically as I could. I wasn’t about to ask her about the saber. I just hoped it wasn’t sharp enough to do any real harm. “So what happened between your brother and Nan?”
“Um, you mean Freddy?”
I nodded, assuming Donna only had one brother who had dated Nan.
“Oh, they stopped dating. The energies just weren’t right for them, I guess. Freddy is really incredibly traumatized by his childhood.” She lowered her voice a little before going on. “Wounded, you know? He’s in business with my father. All that dirty money.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I think Freddy’s integrity is really, well, impaired.”
“Donna,” Carrie said. Her hands were folded but I could still see her thumb wiggling. “I want to ask you one more time if you believe your father had anything to do with Slade Skinner’s death—”
“No,” Donna interrupted calmly. “My dad said he didn’t have anything to do with it and I believe him. See, there’s a way my dad denies stuff for the record but you really know he did it. He looks you in the eye, but there’s like nothing there. And then there’s the way he says ‘no’ when he means it. Where he waves his arms around and yells. And he told me ‘no’ that way. In fact, he’s agreed to let me do my book.” She clapped her hands together. “I’m so happy.”
“He doesn’t mind?” I asked in disbelief.
“Not anymore, he doesn’t,” she assured me. “We had an incredibly good talk last night and we came to an agreement. I’m going to use, well, a pen name.”
“So how come Nan and Donna ‘bonded’?” I asked Carrie in her car fifteen minutes later. That relationship just didn’t make any sense to me.
“Donna and her family are wealthy,” Carrie answered as she snapped on her seat belt.
“Money or status,” I murmured, remembering now that Carrie had told me these were Nan’s prerequisites for friendship.
Not that Donna’s relationship to Nan really mattered. Her relationship to Slade was what mattered. And she didn’t seem to have a more definite relationship to him than she had to anyone else. I had even asked her if she and Slade had ever been lovers. She just giggled at that one, and then started in on a rambling explanation about the “incredible kind of integrity” that would qualify a man to be her lover. In short, Slade hadn’t qualified.
“What the hell are we doing anyway?” I asked Carrie aloud. “Are we really investigating Slade’s murder by seeing all these people? They’re not telling
us anything—”
“Not yet,” Carrie interrupted. “Or perhaps they have told us significant facts and we haven’t noticed yet.”
“But Carrie, we’ve talked to everyone—”
“Not everyone,” Carrie corrected me. “We haven’t visited Travis or Vicky individually yet. We may learn something by speaking to each of them privately that we would be unable to elicit in the group setting.”
Ugh. My stomach spasmed. I didn’t really want to talk to Vicky privately. Or Travis, for that matter.
“Kate, we are accomplishing more than you think,” Carrie went on. She turned her serious face in my direction. “We are learning more about the connections between the members of the critique group with every single person we interview. We are learning how they perceive each other, how they perceived Slade.” She turned back to stare out the windshield as she turned the key in the ignition. “And perhaps more importantly, we are stirring the pot. Quite possibly, someone will react soon.”
“Maybe someone is already reacting,” I muttered, thinking of Russell Wu.
“I hope so,” said Carrie as she turned the steering wheel. “I sincerely hope so.”
Carrie was quiet on the drive to Travis’s apartment. This visit had to be hard for her, with its implication that Travis was yet another murder suspect to be interviewed by both of us. Not just a man in love with her.
“Hey, Carrie!” Travis greeted her enthusiastically at his door, a smile lighting up his gypsy’s face. Then he saw me and the smile disappeared. “Hey, Kate,” he said with an inverse proportion of enthusiasm.
Travis’s apartment was just as jumbled as Donna’s house, though there were no toys or animals evident. Unless you counted the video games that were in pieces all over the living room waiting to be fixed. Or the animals that were on the posters, innocent bunnies being tortured to test cosmetics and innocent calves being tortured for the sake of veal. The rest of the jumble was made up of books, tools, magazines and clothing.
But it wasn’t bad for a young man’s apartment. I couldn’t see anything actually rotting, and nothing smelled terrible. In fact, the room smelled rather pleasantly of incense, fried onions and male pheromones. Carrie was apparently temporarily immune to the allure of Travis’s fragrance, though.
“We have some questions for you,” she told Travis with a frown.
He frowned back at her. Their eyes locked. They might as well have been making love. I felt just as excluded, though maybe not as embarrassed.
“Could we sit down somewhere?” I broke in after a few more moments.
Travis looked at me as if I had just now landed on the planet.
“Hey, sure,” he said after a beat. “How about the kitchen? Would that be cool?”
The kitchen was neater than I expected. And I could see where the onion smell was coming from. A massive wok filled with onions and vegetables sat on top of the stove with an industrial-sized rice cooker on the counter next to it, full and steaming. Travis was obviously ready for a snack. It was getting close to lunch time. My stomach churned hopefully. But Travis didn’t offer to share as we all sat down at the wooden table.
“Kate would like to know how you first became a member of the critique group,” Carrie said without further introduction.
Travis looked at me for confirmation. I moved my head up and down ponderously, resisting the urge to kick Carrie under the table. Why was she blaming the question on me?
“I rented a room at Mave’s house a few years ago,” he told us after a moment of thought that drew his dark brows together over his big brown eyes. “And we kept in touch. Mave is one cool old woman. A real activist. Man, she was part of the gay and lesbian rights movement before there was a movement! You should see her scrapbooks. Anyway, she was interested when I told her my idea for the survivalist manual. And she thought the group could help me get the word out better. So she asked me to come to a meeting.”
“How about Joyce? You introduced her to the group, didn’t you?” Carrie led him on. He didn’t resist.
“Yeah, I know her from Operation Soup Pot. I volunteer there.” He sat straighter in his chair, his features animated. “But Joyce is the one that made Operation Soup Pot really happen. She was a cook at this restaurant, see, and she noticed all the leftover soup going to waste. So she started taking it to a local homeless shelter. And then she got other restaurants involved. She saved all this food that would have gone into the garbage. And gave it to the homeless and the elderly and the dying.” Then he frowned. “People think no one is hungry in the United States, but there are plenty of hungry people. All you have to do is look—”
“So you invited her to join the critique group?” Carrie said, shepherding him back on the path.
“Yeah, see the Operation always needs money. Most of us are volunteers, but there are a few paid, full-time folks. And then there’s the rent and all. So I came up with this idea for a cookbook and the board of directors loved it. They wanted Joyce to do it, but she was afraid she couldn’t write it, so I told her to come to the group.”
Carrie nodded somberly.
“So, what’s the deal, Carrie?” Travis demanded. “Do you really think someone from the group killed Slade?”
Carrie just frowned at him. And then their eyes locked again.
“Did you invite anyone else to the group?” I asked loudly. I could almost hear the pop when they broke eye contact.
“Oh, just Vicky,” Travis mumbled. “I found out she was writing, uh…”
His face turned deep mauve.
“Pornography,” I supplied helpfully.
“Right,” he said, still blushing. I felt a nip of affection for Travis. There was a certain kind of innocence in his embarrassment that contrasted well with his handsome face. I just hoped that innocence stretched to acts of violence.
“Where did you meet Vicky?” Carrie asked.
“Oh,” he mumbled. “At a meeting.”
“What kind of meeting?”
Travis looked down at the floor in silence. Suddenly, he didn’t look innocent to me anymore.
“Travis,” Carrie said, her voice deep with command. “Tell us where you met Vicky. It may be important.”
“I can’t,” he replied and crossed his arms.
When he raised his big brown eyes again, they were scowling.
- Seventeen -
“Travis,” Carrie growled. There was a real note of menace in her deep-throated growl. And in her frowning face too, her brows sharply angled together in a shape that might have been drawn by a cartoonist to represent anger.
But I could have told her that no amount of auditory or visible menace would do any good. Travis sat there scowling just as deeply, his arms crossed over his chest. He was going to be as stubborn as Carrie herself. Was it pure obstinacy that kept him from telling us where he’d met Vicky? Or did he have something to hide?
My mind explored the possibilities as the two glared at each other. Did the secret of where Travis and Vicky met have anything to do with Slade’s murder? Try as I did, I couldn’t come up with anything that made sense of that theory. Maybe a meeting of a revolutionary society dedicated to killing established writers? No. I shook my head to clear it. And found that I could imagine Travis and Vicky meeting in some kind of kinky sexual context, something that he was now unwilling to admit in his new role as suitor to Carrie. But I have a dirty mind. So did Travis apparently.
“Nothing sexual,” he muttered, his skin coloring again. “Vicky’s kinda strange, you know?”
Carrie’s face relaxed a little.
“Listen,” I said to Travis, feeling as if I were mediating a game of Twenty Questions. “Does where you met Vicky have anything to do with Slade’s murder?”
Travis thought for a moment, then shook his head.
“Fine,” Carrie said brusquely, rising from her chair. “If you find that you have anything you can share regarding Slade’s murder, please call me.”
Travis got up too. “Carrie?�
�� he said. His voice had taken on a pleading tone. He wasn’t scowling anymore. “None of this has anything to do with us, you know.”
“I hope not,” Carrie answered seriously.
“Well, it doesn’t,” he persisted, throwing his arms out in frustration.
She looked into his eyes. He returned her gaze and his arms drifted back down. Their eyes were locked together once more.
“Okay, Travis,” she concluded after a few more heavy breaths. She jerked her head back, breaking eye contact. “I find you innocent of bad intent until proven guilty.”
She smiled as she said it, but I had a feeling she wasn’t joking.
When we got back to her car, I asked if she was serious.
“Yes,” she said shortly as she pulled away from the curb.
“Carrie, talk to me,” I ordered.
She sighed heavily.
“You’re afraid Travis killed Slade,” I said for her.
She whipped her head around to look at me. “Am I that obvious?”
“More than that obvious,” I said with a smile, trying to lighten the tone. Trying not to worry about Carrie’s eyes being on me instead of the road.
Despite the direction of her gaze, I don’t think Carrie even noticed my smile before she turned her head back toward the windshield.
“Why do you think it’s Travis?” I asked softly.
“I don’t actually believe he murdered Slade,” Carrie corrected me. But her voice didn’t have much spirit. “I just don’t know for certain that he didn’t. And Kate, I have to know for certain. That’s the only way our relationship will work, if it works at all.”
“All right.” I tried again. “Why don’t you know for certain that Travis didn’t kill Slade?”
She sighed again, but then spoke. “Travis was extremely hostile to Slade. You were present when the two men interacted. You saw how they were, like dogs sniffing and growling to protect their territories. And Slade was very patronizing in his critique of Travis’s work. Very hurtful. And Travis is so young. He saw how Slade kept trying to date me. And he’s so…so…”
“Hotheaded,” I offered.
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