"Just as well," I said. "That project may go on indefinite hold."
In fact, I was wrong about that. Tony and I sat around the cottage after Carol left and tried to figure out who the victim was and what she'd been doing there. Tony asked if I wanted something to eat, but I declined. My stomach already had a rock in it. You fire a bullet, be it from a rifle or a pistol, and you're supposed to think about all the possible targets downrange. I knew that.
I went out to the porch to drown my sorrows in some early Scotch. My cell went off. It was Sheriff Walker.
"Need me to come in?" I said, wondering if I was over the limit to drive.
"We have preliminary results," he said, "thanks in part to the forensics crew up from Manceford County. Those guys are pretty good."
"She's dead, right?"
He grunted, not amused. "Yes, she's dead. Single bullet wound to the head. Time of death estimated to be coincident to your little hide-and-seek exercise last night. Plus, we have an ID, from AFIS of all places."
"She was in the system?"
"Yup. One Elizabeth Craney. Know her?"
"Nope."
"Charlotte cops do. Biker connections. One DUI, a couple of drunk and disorderlies, and one conviction for assault with a deadly weapon, namely a Doberman, which resulted in a year in jail and a euthanized Doberman. Apparently some of the meth mobsters are into having savage dogs around, and she was the supplier, as well as the duty punch for a crew over in Charlotte."
"She looked the type," I said. "Dried up and used up."
"Yes, she did. Here's the important part: You didn't do it."
I sat up in my chair. "I didn't?"
"Not unless you went behind the barn, pulled out a silenced Glock nine, tapped her on the shoulder, waited for her to turn around, knelt down, and shot her in the face. You do all that?"
"Nope."
"Right. Your weapon squares with the four holes we found in the buildings, plus one intact round retrieved by the squad from a support pole. Our guys noticed the angle of her wound, couple of other inconsistencies, said you didn't do it. I waited for the Manceford forensics crew to have a second look. They came up with the same thing. She was shot by someone standing behind her, and probably by someone for whom or with whom she was working, in that there were no signs of a struggle or an attempt to avoid the hit."
"Wow."
"Feel better?"
"Much."
"Thought you might. Take the weekend off. Come see me Monday morning, with your sidekicks, human and otherwise."
"Sounds like changed circumstances to me."
"There's good news and bad news," he said. "The good news is you now are going to have some official help with your stalker."
"The bad news?"
"You now are going to have some official help with your stalker."
"Meaning we're gonna do it your way."
"Bingo."
"That actually sounds good to me, Sheriff."
"You don't have a reputation for being much of a team player, Lieutenant."
"That was then. I'm older and wiser now."
"For now, I'll believe half of that. See you Monday."
I put a call in to Carol Pollard and told her my good news. She was very relieved. She'd made it clear before that she didn't have a problem with my shooting someone who was laid up in a back barn with a rifle at night, but she knew that the legal hassle would be onerous. I told her that the restoration project was still on hold until we resolved this problem, and she understood. She invited me to come over to her place later and said she'd burn something in the kitchen for me.
I went over to the shop to look for Cubby. He was, as usual, working on some machinery, this time a riding mower.
"How does one get an appointment with the grande dames up in the big house?" I asked.
"You tell me, I tell Patience, and she tells Ms. Valeria. By'n by, word will come down from the throne."
"You can't go direct?"
"I don't go in that house," he said. I waited for him to amplify that, but he didn't.
"Okay," I said. "If you would start that process, please."
He crawled out from under the machine with a handful of crimped fence wire and threw it into a barrel. "You gonna let me in on what happened over there last night?" he asked while wiping grease off his hands.
I gave him a quick rundown, and he nodded solemnly when I was finished. He told me that was what he had heard in town, all except the fact that I hadn't shot the woman in the barn. That was news. I asked him to keep that news to himself, because the sheriff might want to use it to catch this killer. "Finding this guy's important, Cubby, and not only to me."
"Meanin', don't stand too close to you once the sun goes down?"
"Yup. Although you may not have to worry about it, once the ladies hear the story. They'll probably ask me to find somewhere else to stay."
He shook his head. "That ain't their style," he said. "You'll see."
He tossed the greasy rag into the barrel and then stopped for a moment. "You know," he said, "there's something about that place over there, draws blood. Ever since them Georgia boys threw down on all those soldiers up there at the bridge. There's been other stuff, too."
"Like Abigail and Nathaniel."
He looked surprised but nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Like that. Sometime, if you can, get Ms. Valeria to talk about all that. You may want to reconsider buying that place."
"I'll be at the cottage until about seven," I said.
He looked at his watch, nodded, and then went up the walk toward the big house.
I found my way over to Carol's house a little after seven. I took Kitty with me, as well as one of Tony's many guns, since my SIG was still in lockup over at the county. He'd gone back to Triboro for the weekend but said he'd be available if anything came up.
Carol appeared in the doorway when I drove up. She was wearing a loose, knee-length flowing skirt, topped with a long-sleeved, modestly low-cut peasant blouse. The lights from the house backlit the skirt, revealing that she was, indeed, a very shapely lady. I was going to leave Kitty in the Suburban, but she insisted that I bring her into the house. Her own dog, a Heinz 57, took one look at Kitty and slunk off to the back of the house. Kitty went into the living room and lay down by the fireplace as if she owned the place.
I sat in the kitchen with a glass of wine while she worked on a primavera. There was warm French bread, some Port Salut cheese, and a small brick of pate on offer. I asked if she cooked like this all the time.
"There's a Whole Foods down the road in Hillsborough," she said. "If I did this every day I'd be two hundred pounds."
"Well, obviously you don't," I said. "I've been letting my own exercise program lapse, and damned if my clothes haven't started shrinking."
"Clothes do that," she said. "Okay, we're there."
After dinner we sat out on the side screened porch in deference to the mosquitoes of spring. She'd produced a bottle of single malt, much to my delight. I can drink wine, but I'm not a big fan. She switched to Scotch to keep me company, and I noticed she drank it neat, as I did. Kitty joined us on the porch, calm as always.
"She keeps you in sight, doesn't she," Carol said.
"That's her job," I said. "She's not as aggressive or knowledgeable as Frick and Frack, but she's learning."
We talked about the shepherds for a while, and then about the restoration business. I finally asked if she'd ever been married.
"Almost," she said. "How about you?"
I told her about my marriage history, how it had ended early in my career, when my wife, an up-and-coming trial attorney, had stepped out. Then I described how we'd restarted, with my ex now a state judge, and then how the rematch had ended with a boom in Triboro one night when someone put a bomb in her car.
"Jesus!" she said. "What was all that about?"
I told her the story of the cat dancers, and how it had ended in professional ambiguity. She asked if that case could be the origin of my
current stalker.
"It's possible," I said, "but what he says, that I killed his wife, doesn't track. I haven't killed anyone's wife. I've got one of my guys going through records to see if anyone we put away could be connected to known suicides, things like that, but that's a real long shot."
She was sitting on the porch swing, legs crossed, and rocking the swing just enough to make me notice. She wasn't overtly flirting, but she was definitely letting me know what was possible in the great scheme of things. I was sitting in a large wicker chair that looked big enough for two people, and the view was enticing.
"I lived with another cop for almost a year," she said. "Until our sergeant found out. He pulled me in one day and told me what a bad idea that was, and why. How relationships between cops usually blew up, and all the subsequent problems with discipline, watch assignments. You know all this, I suppose."
"I do," I said. "He was mostly right. Even the marriages between cops often blow up."
"Well, after that some of the guys thought I was just stuck-up, you know, here I was, on street patrol with a college degree. Then that terrible night, after which none of this mattered anymore. Since then I've just been-lazy, I guess, is the best word."
"I've met too many women who are out there husband-hunting," I said. "They're kind of scary."
"I think it just has to happen. At my age, anyway, I think we'd have to be good friends before anything else could develop. I'm forty-two, by the way."
"I've got eleven years on you, and you don't look forty-anything."
She smiled, and she really didn't look forty-anything when she did that. There was a period of comfortable silence. She rocked, and I tried not to look.
"Don't you just love it?" she said. "Beginning the dance. Pretending we're talking about other people, or just people in general."
I laughed then. That was exactly what had been going through my mind. "This is the point where I clear my throat and say I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow, and thanks for a lovely dinner."
"Or," she said, reaching for my glass, "you could have another Scotch, and then you'd be over the legal limit, and then you'd have to stay for a while. Maybe go for a walk or something, work off all that alcohol."
"Work off."
She tilted her head and smiled again. "Said the spider to the fly."
"Well, shucks," I said. "If I really don't have any choice here, I guess I could go for just one more."
"Scotch?"
"That, too."
I got back to the cottage at midnight, feeling much better. Carol had had her moves pretty much all planned out, and the whole thing had been delightful. She'd gone back into the house with the glasses, then come back out onto the porch, stood next to my chair for a moment while she let her hair down, and then slipped onto my lap and gave me a long, lingering kiss. After that we made love right there, as if we'd been doing it for years. She dozed for a half hour or so afterward, opened one eye, and then told me a really funny joke. A married couple was in bed after dinner, watching TV. The wife was surprised to feel her husband's hands start in on her body, surreptitiously at first, but then with a lot more purpose. It had been a long time. She was enjoying all the sensations when he suddenly stopped. She opened her eyes, told him that that had been lovely, and asked why he'd stopped. Found the remote, says he.
After that she'd sent me on my way with a go-cup of black coffee and an invitation to come see her again whenever I was ready to start that exercise program. I'd driven back to the cottage, trying to analyze my feelings. Then I gave up and just savored the evening. There didn't seem to be any strings or subplots, just two grown-ups enjoying each other's company. Said the fly to the spider.
I let the rest of the mutts out when I got back and then took that nightcap that had never made it to the porch down to the swing set by the pond. The resident owl greeted me from across the still water, and Kitty whoofed back at it. We hadn't had owls in Summerfield, and I wondered what she thought it was. Then she whoofed again, and I turned around to look. There, along the driveway, came Valeria, carrying a tiny handbag over one arm, a small lantern in one hand, and a dainty parasol in the other. She looked like a ghost coming soundlessly down the gravel drive, dressed all in white. I stood up as she approached the swing-set.
"Ms. Valeria," I said in greeting.
"Mr. Richter," she murmured. "May I join you, sir?"
"Absolutely," I said. "Should I go in and get another glass?"
She sat down primly in the long swing and said that that would be very nice. I was back in a flash. She had put the parasol down now that she was under the canvas cover of the swing and safe from the evening dew. She was sitting back, her long black hair in a twisted coil over the front of one shoulder and her legs out in front of her, barely touching the ground. That's when I noticed what she was wearing: It was a long-sleeved dress made of what looked like layers of thin white gauze that reached all the way to her ankles. In terms of womanly flesh on display, it was modest in the extreme, except for the fact that sometimes, if the humidity is just right, gauze clings. That old rule about less being more applied in spades, as every aspect of her decidedly lush body was on perfect if circumspect display in the starlight. I felt guilty about even looking, especially considering the earlier part of the evening. We clinked glasses, and I waited to see what she'd come down for. At that moment I would have been content to just sit there and look at her.
"Cubby informs us that you wished to confer?" she asked. The royal "we" came through loud and clear.
I said yes and then told her in broad terms about the events across the road of the night before, and how the major issue had been resolved. I admitted that I was worried they might want me to find accommodations elsewhere and said that I'd completely understand if that was the case.
"Nonsense, Mr. Richter," she said. "You are now the rightful owner of Glory's End?"
"Actually, not yet. I've put down some earnest money, and we're waiting for a survey and a title search."
"A title search? I heard Mother mention that. What is it, exactly?"
I told her.
"How interesting," she said, sighing. "Mother's right. Defining the legal title to Glory's End may be more than you bargained for, Mr. Richter."
"So people keep telling me," I said. "I keep wondering why."
She was silent for a moment, but then she answered me. "A title search sounds like a history of power," she said. "An effort to identify those with the power to claim and hold a property, as opposed to those who either can't or who lost it."
"Or sold it," I reminded her. "Ownership of property is not always about a power struggle between the strong and the weak."
"It is here," she said, "and in most of the South, I would expect. The Recent Unpleasantness was all about property."
"I thought it was about slavery."
"Precisely," she said, sipping some Scotch and then exhaling in pleasure.
Whoops, I thought as I caught her meaning. Good thing Cubby wasn't around.
"In any event," she said. "It is outrageous that someone would come onto your property in the middle of the night with guns and vicious dogs and expect you to just run away. Of course you would fight back. We would do the very same, I assure you."
"I guess I have to warn you, this isn't over. In police parlance this guy is known as a ghost, as in someone who comes back to haunt you because you took some law enforcement action against him. I believe he'll keep trying until one of us is in the ground."
"Ghosts are nothing new to this part of the county," she said with a wry smile. "There have been people living, loving, fighting, and dying around here for three hundred years. Of course there are ghosts. What's one more?"
"Well, I'm relieved. The cottage will be a perfect base of operations, but I'll try to keep any real warfare across the street."
"Do not do that on our account, Mr. Richter," she said. "We have weapons in the house, and anyone who tries conclusions with either of us will find out w
hy the Recent Unpleasantness took four valiant years to resolve."
"Not to mention the major," I said, not wanting to point out how the Recent Unpleasantness had been resolved, with the utter destruction of southern society and all its many twisted mores.
"Indeed," she said.
Our glasses were empty, so I did the honors. She managed her whiskey very well, without any signs of intoxication.
"Must you stare so, Mr. Richter?" she asked, again with just a hint of a smile.
"You are quite a sight in the starlight, Ms. Valeria. That dress is-something." I felt weird-an hour away from Carol Pollard, and this very strange woman was turning me on. Plus, she was absolutely doing it on purpose.
She arched her back slightly, finished her Scotch, and then stood up in front of me. She ran her hands down the opposing sleeves of the dress, smoothing the fabric while tightening it at the same time across her front. "This dress," she said, continuing to run her long, elegant hands over the fabric, "takes about an hour to get right. There are forty-eight buttons on the back alone, can you believe it? Velvet buttons, which are difficult to manipulate. One requires help, you see."
I almost hadn't noticed, but she'd moved directly in front of me and close enough that I could catch a trace of her perfume. She definitely wasn't wearing lilac water tonight. Then she did a graceful pirouette, extending the hem of her dress out with one hand while placing her other on her hip. The extension of all that fabric rendered her body in a lovely silhouette. She executed another one, and then I realized she was moving away from me now, out into the lawn in front of the swing set, not dancing exactly but just wheeling to the soundless memory of a waltz somewhere back in time.
"Come calling, Mr. Richter," she said from about thirty feet away as she turned to go back up to the house. "I've lots to show you."
"Count on it," I replied, trying not to squeak. That's the thing about the country: When it rains, sometimes it pours.
We met the sheriff in his personal office at ten, as requested. Horace Stackpole, Pardee, Tony, and I sat on one side of his conference table. Frick and Kitty guarded the underside of the table at the end nearest the doughnuts. Sheriff Walker had all three of his detectives present. Horace had gone to school with one of the detectives, so we had an immediate in with the gold shields.
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