Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “Remember the Patersons’ party last week where . . . And then she looked embarrassed. “I guess you weren’t able to make it that night.”

  Especially since I hadn’t been invited. “You know how busy things get this time of year.”

  She nodded. “Well, when I went upstairs to use the phone—I wanted to make sure Danny was okay with the new baby sitter—I found Pepper spread out on the Patersons’ bed. At first I thought she might be asleep, or drunk, but then I saw she was just lying there, staring up at the ceiling. It was kind of embarrassing really. I didn’t want to intrude, but I did need to use the phone, so I asked her if everything was okay. She looked at me like I had two heads. ‘Everything okay? That’s a good one. How about nothing’s okay, everything sucks.’ Then she got sort of hysterical, half laughing, half crying, and started pounding the pillow with her fists.”

  Mary Nell was opening and closing the clasp of her purse as she spoke, but I couldn’t tell if it was finding Pepper so distraught or having to repeat Pepper’s language that made her uneasy.

  “Did she say what was bothering her?”

  “No, and I wouldn’t dream of prying. But I’ve never seen her like that. She’s usually so cool. I mean was.”

  “Well, we all have our moments.” Although I wasn’t actually sure Mary Nell did.

  She set her purse down on the bench between us and folded her hands in her lap. “Pepper was nice to me. Nicer than a lot of the women around here. And now I feel so bad that I didn’t do something to cheer her up.” Her voice got all shaky, and I was afraid she might become hysterical herself. “I’ve never known anyone who was murdered before,” she confided. “Things are different in Kansas.”

  “Murder isn’t exactly commonplace in Walnut Hills either.”

  “No, I guess not.” But she didn’t look convinced. “Oh, by the way, I have something for you.” Retrieving her purse, she pulled out a photograph and handed it to me. It was a picture of Anna and Kimberly, with me and Pepper standing behind them. Mary Nell was always taking pictures and making copies for people. If there were ten people in the picture, she made sure she got ten copies. “It’s from the Easter party. I’ve been meaning to give it to you for weeks. I made a copy for Pepper too. Only now it’s too late to give it to her.” Then she reached into her purse again, pulled out a little white handkerchief edged with pink rosebuds and dabbed at her eyes.

  FIVE

  While Anna played near the wading pool, I sat in the shade under the mulberry tree, sketching a clump of blue and yellow iris. I had filled the pool that morning so the water could warm in the sun, but Anna chose not to set foot in it anyway. Somehow, she had talked me into letting her bring outside my entire collection of plastic bowls, funnels and strainers, and now she sat on the grass beside the pool in her new pink bathing suit, happily pouring water from container to container and chatting with herself in a language I couldn’t make out.

  I had always assumed I would have children, even as a girl when no boy would be my partner at dancing class. But it wasn’t until I had Anna that I stopped being able to imagine my life any other way.

  To this day I can recall, so vividly it takes my breath away, the sensation of holding her for the first time—a tiny, warm bundle with bright blue eyes and breath that was soft and moist against my cheek. After all the hours of Lamaze training and the months of talking nonstop about “the baby,” you’d think I would have known what to expect, but nothing had prepared me for the rush of love I experienced when it finally dawned on me that the tiny, soft form in my arms was, indeed, real.

  Andy was there too, taking pictures and grinning like a cat with its own secret supply of warm milk. In those first few weeks after we were home, he continued to take pictures, sometimes a roll a night, and he would make reprints to send to friends and relatives, even people we hadn’t seen in years. It was about six months later that she finally became real for him. I think that was when it dawned on him that Anna was not some new toy which could be conveniently stashed in the closet as soon as the novelty wore off. And I know it scared him. As much as he loved her, which I’m certain he did, it terrified him to think his life had so irrevocably changed.

  Now there was another tiny, warm bundle growing inside me. Another pair of eyes to gaze with wonder into my own. Another mouth to laugh at my silly antics. I tried not to think in those terms of course, but it wasn’t easy. And every time I looked at Anna I got a hard lump in my throat.

  There was a date circled on the calendar—my self-imposed deadline. The day by which I would have to decide.

  I’m not sure what I was waiting for really. A sign from the gods perhaps, or a fortune cookie with a particularly insightful bit of advice. Or maybe part of me was still hoping that Andy would waltz back into my life, reappearing as the man I wanted him to be rather than the man he was—generous, fun loving, not a mean bone in his body, but definitely not the sort of man to willingly embrace the demands of familial life.

  Daria said Andy’s only problem was that he got stuck at eighteen and refused to budge. But of course her perspective is slightly skewed, given that Jim has been forty since the day he was born. A mellow, kind-hearted forty I’ll concede, but you’d never catch Jim spending the night camped out in the rain with hundreds of others just to buy tickets to a Stones’ concert. Or planning his own birthday party at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, then showing up in a black tux with fifty helium balloons tugging at his wrists.

  It always struck me as funny that Andy and Jim were friends in the first place, but then men’s friendships are very different from women’s, and the two of them shared an interest in golf, which seemed to outweigh everything else.

  Although I’d heard about him for years, I never actually met Jim until after we bought the house in Walnut Hills. He and Daria had us over for dinner one night, before we’d even moved in. Jim grilled steaks, mixed margaritas, fetched chips and jumped up with a smile on his face every time Daria said “Honey, would you . . .” but he’d never get out more than a sentence or two before he’d grin, shuffle his feet and grow quiet again. And although he laughed heartily at all the appropriate intervals, I wasn’t sure he really found anything very funny.

  “Jim’s not what I expected,” I told Andy as we drove home that night.

  Andy laughed. “Don’t be fooled by that shy manner; he can be as wild and reckless as the best of us.”

  While I never saw anything the least bit wild about Jim, I’d grown quite fond of him. There was an unaffected steadiness about him which I found reassuring. A steadiness that was decidedly lacking in Andy.

  ~*~

  “What are you drawing, Mommy?” asked Anna, coming up to peer over my shoulder. “It’s pretty. It looks just like the flowers in the garden.”

  She clapped her hands and several drops of water fell onto the page, smearing the pastels. The corners of her mouth fell, and she started to cry. “Oh, no. It’s ruined.”

  “It doesn’t matter, I was just playing around.” I hugged her and gave her an Eskimo kiss, which usually makes her laugh, but she continued to whimper. “I’ll do another one tomorrow,” I promised, “just for you. Would you like that?”

  She nodded and the tears finally stopped, but she looked as though they might start again at any moment.

  “Let’s go see if Kimberly wants to play, shall we? There’s something I’m supposed to do at her house this afternoon, but it won’t take long. Afterwards, Kimberly can come back here with us. I’ll make ice cream cones.” The prospect of examining Pepper’s room filled me with enough trepidation that I felt as in need of such a treat as the girls.

  ~*~

  I had met Robert’s sister, Claudia, only once before, but she welcomed me as though we were old friends. “Kate, it’s been ages,” she said as she gave me a quick hug. “I’m so glad to see you again.” Then, growing suddenly solemn, she added, “I only wish it were under different circumstances.”

  Despite a strong family resemblance thro
ugh the eyes and mouth, Claudia and Robert are about as different as two people can be. Whereas Robert is slight, with almost delicate features, Claudia is tall, big boned and angular. She’s at least twenty pounds overweight and not at all refined. Looking at her, you would think she was someone’s maiden aunt rather than an anthropologist who’d “gone through”—Pepper’s words—four husbands and several lovers. Adventure fascinated her far more than money, and although she and Robert were on good terms, she was quick to distance herself from his affluent lifestyle, which I think she found morally offensive.

  Following her into the kitchen, I explained that Lieutenant Stone had asked me to look around. “Do you think Robert would mind?”

  “Not at all.” She called to Kimberly and then gestured to the stack of bills and papers on the kitchen table. “I’m trying to help out,” she explained, “but I think I may just be adding to the confusion.”

  She gave each of the girls two big cookies and a can of soda, then threw in a bag of chips too, and sent them out back to have a picnic.

  “How’s Robert doing?” I asked when we were alone.

  Claudia shrugged. “You know him,” she said. “He’s a hard one to read. From outward appearances he seems to be holding up remarkably well, though I don’t see how he’s going to manage on his own.”

  I nodded agreement. I couldn’t see Robert making peanut butter sandwiches without crusts, or taking time off from work to drive the car pool. I wasn’t sure he even knew the name of Kimberly’s school.

  “I just wish I could stay longer. Unfortunately it’s the end of the term. There are papers to grade, and I have three graduate students taking their orals next week.”

  “What about Pepper’s family?” I suggested. “Would any of her relatives be able to come stay for a while?” I’d never heard her talk much about her family, although she’d once mentioned a brother she hadn’t spoken to in years.

  “Apparently not. I asked Robert that same thing last night, and he passed it off so quickly I asked him a second time just to make sure he’d heard me.”

  Standing, Claudia walked to the window to check on the two girls. “Kimberly tells me she’s never even received a birthday card from her other grandparents, so I guess theirs is not exactly a close family.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t sound that way.”

  “I never really got on with Pepper. We’re different sorts of people. But she was good for Robert, and he adored her. This is going to be hard on him.” She gave a resigned, little laugh. “Of course he’d never admit it. If you ask me, he puts too much weight on propriety.”

  I offered again to help out, and she promised to relay the message. Then, rather reluctantly, I headed upstairs to the bedroom.

  Even in the bright afternoon light, with Claudia puttering around downstairs and strains of girlish laughter drifting in from the yard, I experienced a moment of panic. Less than forty-eight hours earlier a maniac, a cold-blooded killer, had walked these same steps, perhaps stopping at the landing as I did to gather his bearings. What had he been thinking that night? What had he been looking for?

  The bedroom door was closed, and I opened it cautiously. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting—a scene from Friday Night Massacre, or maybe something more clinical, like the silhouette of a body outlined in red paint across the spread—but it looked pretty much like any ordinary empty bedroom. Messier than Pepper liked, but even in its present state, neater than my own.

  The dresser drawers had been dumped, their contents heaped in an almost orderly fashion next to the chaise, and the clothes in the armoire were in disarray. But an arrangement of fresh daisies still adorned the chest under the window, the two club chairs in the corner looked as though they had been readied for a house tour, and a framed photograph of Kimberly smiled up from the bedside table. Nothing about the room suggested murder.

  Once, many years earlier, my own apartment had been burglarized, and although the thieves took very little— there was little worth taking—they knocked all my pottery onto the floor and slashed the upholstery. But that was San Francisco and this was Walnut Hills. Maybe better class neighborhoods attracted more genteel thieves.

  And more deadly, I thought with a shudder.

  ~*~

  For half an hour I forced myself to study the scene, going through drawers, shelves and boxes, searching for some sign of the killer. I closed my eyes to picture the room as I had last seen it, then opened them abruptly, looking for The Big Clue. Nothing. I wasn’t even able to find the rough spot in the bedpost where the silk threads had snagged.

  It was a stupid exercise. Was I supposed to somehow uncover a bloody, sharp-edged object the police had overlooked? Or maybe the killer’s driver’s license, complete with photo and home address? And even though I was sure she would want me to help find her killer, it felt wrong to be poking about Pepper’s empty room, fingering her silk nighties and cashmere sweaters.

  I was getting ready to call it quits when the girls came upstairs and stood in the doorway. “Are you cleaning Mommy’s room?” Kimberly asked.

  “No honey, not really.” Although that clearly would be something I could offer to do. I made a mental note to mention it to Claudia when I went downstairs. “The police asked me to look through a few of your mother’s things.”

  Kimberly’s eyes filled with tears. Kneeling, I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her tightly.

  “I miss her,” she whimpered.

  “I know you do. She loved you so much, Kimberly. Don’t ever forget that.”

  “But I’m never going to see her again, am I?”

  “Not in the way you used to. She’s with you, just the same, though. I’ll bet if you close your eyes you can see her now—smiling at you the way she did, so proud. If you try hard enough, I’ll bet you can carry on a conversation, just the two of you.”

  “But it’s not real. It’s all pretend. And when I open my eyes there’s nothing.”

  Suddenly I had idea. I didn’t know what the police needed still from the bedroom, but I knew that Pepper kept some of her out-of-season clothes and other items she didn’t use every day in the guest room. “Would you like some things of your mother’s?” I asked. “Things just for you, to keep in your room?”

  Kimberly nodded, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.

  We crossed over to the guest room at the end of the hallway, and I opened a bureau drawer filled with purses. “How about one of these?” I asked.

  While Kimberly made her selection I looked for something else she could have. The closet was full of winter wools, all zipped up tight in garment bags, and an assortment of satin and beaded evening gowns. Finally I found a box of scarves and was starting to dump it out on the bed when I noticed a shiny, white plastic case at the bottom of the box. I knew exactly what it was the minute I saw it, because my own diaphragm came in a case just like it. And there next to it was a tube of Ortho jelly, rolled up neatly from the bottom.

  Intent as I was on whisking these particular items from the girls’ questioning eyes, it took a moment to sink in. Why would a woman who wanted another child, a woman with a husband who was practically sterile, have a diaphragm? And why would she keep it hidden away instead of someplace convenient like the bathroom or her dresser drawer? Unless, of course, Pepper was sleeping with someone other than Robert.

  While Kimberly examined the scarves, I wondered if I should mention my discovery to Lieutenant Stone. It wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind when he’d asked me to look around, but it might be important to the investigation. And it would give me an excuse to talk with him again, something I was surprisingly eager to do.

  When I got back downstairs, I found Claudia studying her reflection in the hallway mirror. “What do you think?” she asked, turning her left ear toward me and pulling the hair back away from her face.

  “You mean the earring?”

  She nodded.

  “I like it. Is it new?”

  “It was
Pepper’s. The police found it in the upstairs hallway. Just the single earring. The intruder must have dropped it when he was making off with her jewelry.”

  “I thought it looked familiar.” It was an unusual looking, a triangle of pounded silver overlaid on gold and edged in bronze. The kind of thing I never manage to find in stores, only on other women.

  Claudia turned back to the mirror. “I don’t usually wear large, dangly earrings because I’m so large myself.” Here she laughed self-consciously. “But maybe I should. There’s a fine line between looking exotic and looking silly.”

  “Pepper didn’t usually wear large earrings either, and you certainly don’t look silly.”

  She removed the earring and set it on the library table under the mirror. “Well, one earring won’t do me much good anyway. Did you find that incriminating bit of evidence up there?”

  For a minute I thought she knew about the diaphragm and I glanced sharply in her direction, but then I realized she was speaking generally. “Nope, not that I really expected to.”

  She nodded. “It was good of you to try nonetheless. Say, does the name Tony Sheris mean anything to you?”

  “No, why?”

  “Pepper wrote a lot of checks to him. Two or three hundred dollars at a time. I thought maybe he was tied in with the school or something.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” But the name did sound vaguely familiar. “Wait a minute. She had a gardener named Tony, I think. I remember because she told me I should talk to him about doing our place, too.”

  Frowning, Claudia turned and walked to the table where she’d spread out her paperwork. “That must be it then, although I must say, he certainly wasn’t cheap. She’s paid him quite a bit just in the last couple of months.”

  “I guess that’s one advantage to having a small yard, I can do the whole thing myself.”

  “I’ll go you one better,” Claudia said with a chuckle. “I live in a condominium, and the African violet on my kitchen window sill satisfies all my gardening instincts.”