Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04

by Susan Wittig Albert

  "Let the kitchen know when you've got some," Matt said. "Featuring local products on the menu is good business. Oh, and on your way out, take a look at the back corner of the patio. We're installing a new fountain — artesian, runs off a spring, with the help of thirty feet of pipe." He grinned. "And since the Herb Growers and Marketers Association saw fit to honor our little country-hotel by having the conference here, Jeff thought we ought to plant an herb garden. He got Wanda Rathbot-tom to send over a bunch of plants from Wanda's Wonderful Acres. The garden crew is complaining that the heat is bad for the plants, but they aim to have everything in the ground by tomorrow."

  "They're right," I said. "Heat's a killer for young plants. But it was nice of Jeff to think of putting in a garden. He actually took a few days off?"

  "High time." Mart's pleasant laugh had an edge. "He's had the temper of a polecat lately. If this trip doesn't improve his state of mind, the staff s threatening to stage a lynching party." He paused. "No offense, but you look pretty done-in yourself. Bet you'll be glad when this conference is over."

  "I had a nasty surprise this morning," I said, and told him about finding Rosemary. The news brought a cry from Lily.

  "Rosemary! Oh, no!" Lily's face blanched and she sat down hard in her chair.

  Matt stared at me, his jaw fallen. "You're kidding. Rosemary Robbins? Omigod!"

  I looked from one to the other. "You knew her?"

  "She's been working for us the past few months," Matt said. "I hired her to do an audit." He shook his head in disbelief. "God, poor Rosemary. Who could've done it?"

  "I know who," Lily burst out furiously. "It was that ex-husband of hers. Curtis Robbins."

  "Curt?" Matt pulled his eyebrows together. "He's a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Why would he-"

  "Because he's a wife beater, that's why." Lily's face was puckered with anger. "He was here a couple of weeks ago, the day their divorce was final. He wouldn't leave her alone. She said he was always hanging around. Stalking her, was what she said."

  "Oh, come on, Lily," Matt said soothingly. "Curt's a regular guy. Very pleasant, always a nice word for everybody. He's not the type to beat his wife."

  I didn't say the obvious: that most men wouldn't know a wife beater from their brother. But Lily wasn't backing off.

  "How do you know what he did and didn't do?" she demanded angrily. "Men don't beat their wives in public. They wait until nobody's looking."

  "How come she didn't call the police?" Matt asked.

  "She did." Lily hunched her heavy shoulders and blew her nose into a tissue. "But she didn't press charges. She didn't want people knowing her private business." She wiped her nose. "If fact, she wouldn't have told me anything if she hadn't been so upset the day he showed up here. She just couldn't hold it in. Afterward, she acted like she hadn't said a word about it."

  "It might be a good idea to phone the police department and tell Bubba Harris about Robbins coming here," I said. Bubba could add that bit of information to what he already knew about the husband's behavior. The outlines of the case were becoming clearer.

  "You bet I will." Lily was fierce. "Robbins isn't going to get away with this." She darted an angry glance at Matt, as if he were a wife beater, too. "Chamber of Commerce or no Chamber of Commerce!"

  Matt reached into his pocket, pulled out a slim address book, and turned the pages until he found what he wanted. "I'd better let Jeff know about this," he said, punching in some numbers on Lily's phone. "He and Rosemary were pretty good friends. He'll want to know that she —Pedro?" He slipped into a slurry Tex-Mex. "Hey, Pedro, compadre. Matt Monroe, up in Pecan Springs. Yeah, say amigo, my brother-in-law, my cunado, went out with Charlie on the Sea Lion this morning. I need to leave a message for him. SC, Clark. C-l-a-r-k. First name's Jeff. Short, not a lotta meat on him, kinda pinched nose, glasses." There was a pause, the flicker of a frown, then: "Well, okay. If he didn't make it this morning, he'll show up manana. When he does, tell him to get back to me right away." He paused. "Yeah, sure, bueno, you too. Gracias. Hasta luego." He put down the phone and stood with his hand on it for a moment.

  "He didn't go out on the boat?" I asked curiously.

  He looked up. "What? Oh . . . no." He rubbed his bald spot as if he were polishing it. "Not yet, anyway. But he left pretty late last night. Probably checked into a hotel to get a few z's. Where's he staying, Lil?"

  "I have no idea," Lily said numbly. "He didn't say."

  "Well, Pedro works at the dock," Matt said. "He'll make sure Jeff gets the message." He pulled at his lower lip. "God, I can't believe she's dead. You say she was

  Mrt"

  "In the face. Whoever did it was standing beside the door of the truck."

  "In the face!" Lily took another tissue. "It was him, I tell you." She wiped her eyes. "Robbins. You read about it all the time, men killing their wives."

  Old hab its die hard. I hate to hear somebody condemned without benefit of jury. "It could've been somebody looking for drug money," I said. "Or a couple of kids playing Rambo. Even a drive-by." But drive-bys don't happen in Pecan Springs, and the kids' pranks are still mostly kid stuff. Robbery hadn't appeared to be a motive, either. I had to wonder whether Curtis Robbins had an alibi.

  Matt was scowling at Lily. "If you ask me, the guy's got a right to his day in court." He turned as a pale, pimply young man wearing a white apron came into the office. "What d'ya need, Skip?" he asked, transferring his scowl from Lily to Skip.

  The pale young man cleared his throat nervously. "Sorry to charge in like this," he said, "but there's a gross of Cornish game hens just come for the Saturday night banquet. Cook's out for the afternoon and the walk-in freezer's locked. What are we supposed to do?"

  Matt started. "Oh, yeah," he said gruffly. "Yeah, well, I'll come and unlock. I've got the key."

  "The key?" Lily asked. "Since when has that freezer been locked?"

  Matt was fishing in his pocket. "Since this morning," he said. "We've been having trouble with it staying cold. I locked it to cut down the traffic in and out."-

  Lily was perturbed. "If we're having trouble with the damn freezer, let's get Harold's Air-Conditioning up here to fix it. It's nonsense, messing around with a key."

  Matt gave her a dark look. "Last time I looked, I was the boss_here"

  Lily muttered something under her breath. Matt ignored her. He clapped a hand on the pale young man's shoulder. "Come on, Skip," he said amiably. "Lily's upset. Now let's you and me get those chickens put to roost."

  Lily blew her nose again, made herself a cup of coffee, and then called the police station and left a message for Bubba to call her. Then we got busy on my list. At the end of a half hour I felt better, at least as far as the conference was concerned. I thanked Lily, agreed for the third or fourth time that it didn't seem possible that Rosemary was dead, and left.

  Walking across the patio to my car, I noticed the plumbing trench for the new fountain and the tidy area that had been dug for the herb garden. The setting was perfect, in a walled corner of the hotel grounds, although it certainly wasn't the best time of year for transplanting. Nursery flats of lamb's ears, santolina, yarrow, sage, thyme, and germander were sitting in the shade of the wall, along with several large balled plants, their burlap-ped roots covered with canvas. They had all been recently-watered. Among the lot I noticed several silvery Powys Castle artemisias, a half-dozen lavender plants, some tricolor sage, a Cleary sage, and one absolutely stunning

  rosemary bush, nearly four feet high, lush, green, and fragrant.

  Ah, rosemary, I thought, with a sharp sense of sadness. Ah, Rosemary. There's rue for you.

  Chapter Three

  It's hard to overestimate the passion people all over the world have for eye-watering, mouth-searing, tongue-numbing, sweat-inducing chile peppers. Revered in ancient civilizations, nearly worshiped by some chefs, eaten daily by people from Mexico to Thailand, from Indonesia to Africa, the chile pepper is, for many, the spice of life.

/>   Jim Robbins

  "Chile Peppers: The Spice of Life": Smithsonian, 1992

  To get to the house where McQuaid and Brian and I live, you drive west on Limekiln Road for just over twelve miles, until you see a sign with the fanciful name, Meadow Brook, done in fading calligraphy and decorated with bluebonnets. Turn left and follow the lane about a quarter of a mile until it ends in a gravel drive in front of the house. It's a big house, surrounded by a green lawn and separated from woods and meadow by a low stone wall, nearly obscured now by July wildflowers: lemon-mint monarda, which looks like purple pagodas and makes an effective insect repellent and a tangy tea; brown-eyed Susans, whose root juice the Cherokee used to treat earache; and buffalo gourd, its vines like hairy green snakes crawling over the rocks. A century ago, the Tonkawa and Waco tribes crushed the plant's roots to wash clothes, boiled and ate the green gourds, and painted the dried ones to use as rattles and ritual bowls. The meadow is a virtual cornucopia of useful plants, all of which thrive in the heat and less than thirty inches of rain we get each year.

  This is the Edwards Plateau, commonly called the Hill Country. The rolling hills are covered with Spanish oak, live oak, cedar, and mesquite. In the spring, the meadows are gaudy with bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, and the translucent yellow flowers of the prickly pear; in the fall, garnet red prickly pears, flaming sumac, and purple gay-feather brighten the fields. A couple of hundred feet beneath the stony surface lie the porous sandstones and cavernous limestones and dolomites of the Lower Cretaceous period: the Edwards Aquifer, an underground river that flows from northwest to southeast and emerges along the Balcones Fault as the Pecan River, the Blanco, the San Marcos, and the little creek that meanders through our meadow. It's also an endangered river, because the water demands of the residential and commercial development between Austin and San Antonio far exceed the aquifer's recharge capacity. Scientists at the Edwards Aquifer Research and Data Center at San Marcos say it will disappear in another decade or so. It's hard to imagine what this part of the country will be like when the springs have vanished, the rivers are gone, and the wells are dry. That's the trouble. Nobody wants to imagine it until they have to, and by that time it will be too late.

  All three of us — Brian, McQuaid, and I—wanted Meadow Brook. McQuaid wanted it because there's a workshop and space for his gun collection. Brian wanted it because of the creek and the frogs. I wanted it because the sunny space behind the house is perfect for a large herb garden, and the round room at the top of the turret is perfect for Khat and me. And, of course, because of the five bedrooms. If push comes to shove, I can always move into one of those extra rooms. So far, that hasn't been necessary, but that's not to say that it won't.

  It was McQuaid's night to cook and wash dishes. (It's a proven fact that if the cook has to wash, he or she goes easier on the pots and pans.) He was already in the kitchen when I got there, hacking at a charred poblano pepper. Judging from the rest of the ingredients on the table, we were having enchilada casserole. And judging from his assault on the roasted poblano, he had something other than enchiladas on his mind.

  He looked up with a fierce scowl. "Why didn't you tell me about Rosemary?" he growled. Howard Cosell lying on the floor beside McQuaid's foot, gave me a reproachful basset hound glance.

  "I did tell you," I said. I got two glasses out of the refrigerator freezer. "I left a message on your answering machine. I also said that you needed to do something about renting a car." I glanced out the window at the blue Ford in the drive. "Which I see you did, so you must have gotten the message."

  McQuaid misses being handsome by a nose (his having been broken twice, once on the football field and once in an altercation with an incensed drunk). He has black hair, slate-blue eyes in a tanned face, and a pale scar (courtesy of a druggie) that zips diagonally across his forehead. His eyes turn dark blue when he's angry. They were dark now.

  "Yeah, the answering machine. I had to hear about Rosemary Robbins getting murdered in my truck from an answering machine!" He slashed at the poblano. A hunk of it dropped beside Howard Cosell, who sniffed it and sneezed.

  I stared at him, nonplussed. Was that what he was so angry about? A simple telephone message?

  "What else was I supposed to do? I had no idea where you were. I had a thousand errands to run, and I couldn't keep calling back. I did what I thought — "

  "I was in the departmental library. You could've told the secretary. She would've come and got me."

  "I didn't think it was that important." I put the glasses on the table. "I don't mean that. Of course it was important. I just mean — "

  "Not important!" McQuaid is a powerful man, six feet, one ninety, muscular shoulders, deep voice. When he's upset, he's powerfully fierce. "You didn't think it was important that Rosemary Robbins was murdered in my truck, when Jake Jacoby is on the loose?"

  Loud voices make Howard Cosell nervous. He lumbered to his feet, walked ponderously across the floor, and pushed his head and shoulders under my Home Comfort gas range.

  "Excuse me for being dense," I said, "but I fail to see the connection."

  McQuaid put down his knife, leaned on the table, and eyed me narrowly. "You're telling me that with all your criminal experience, it hasn't occurred to you that Jake Jacoby might have killed Rosemary?"

  "Jacoby?" I rolled my eyes at this far-fetched theory. "I have to confess that the idea hadn't even crossed my mind." What had crossed my mind, tantalizingly, were twin margaritas, one for McQuaid and one for me. I opened the refrigerator crisper to look for a lime, but all I saw was a bunch of wilted cilantro, half an eggplant, a bag of carrots, and one very small, very dead fish, laid out on a saucer like a body on a slab at the morgue.

  In my former life as a single person, my refrigerator harbored no surprises. The mayo and mustard routinely lived on the door shelf, the milk was top left, and Khat's fresh chicken livers were in a green bowl with a red cover on the lower shelf. Now, the lid to the mustard was missing, there were two open cans of dog food in the middle of the top shelf where the milk was supposed to be, and a dead fish in the crisper.

  I was still staring at the fish when McQuaid came up and put both arms around me from the back and pulled me against him, my back to his front. He shoved the crisper shut with his foot and closed the refrigerator door so hard I could hear the catsup bottle fall over inside.

  "Will you listen to me, Bayles?" he said gruffly against my ear as I struggled to pull free. "Rosemary Robbins looked enough like you to be your sister. She left here last night driving a truck that you drive a couple of times a week. When she got where she was going, somebody shot her. You damn well better believe it could've been Jake. He could've thought he was killing you."

  I stopped struggling and stood very still. The room was loud with the humming of the refrigerator and the idiosyncratic tock-tick-tock of the hundred-year-old school-house clock that hangs on the wall over it.

  "Me?" I said finally. "You think Jacoby mistook Rosemary for me?"

  His arms were so tight around me I couldn't move. "It's possible."

  "It's also possible that her ex-husband killed her," I said. "In fact, it's very likely. She made a DV call last winter. He hung around the hotel where she was working. She thought he was stalking her."

  He was stubbornly silent, still holding me tight. I was suddenly conscious of the strength of his arms around me. I felt the flash of warmth that comes with desire, and relaxed a little against his hard body.

  "It happens, McQuaid," I said. "Read the papers. Spousal abuse is the leading cause of injury among women aged fifteen to forty-four. Three out of ten murdered women are killed by a spouse or a lover."

  "It's also possible," he said quietly, "that Jake Jacoby killed her because he thought she was you. Seven out of ten murdered women are killed by somebody else."

  I was leaning against him, wanting him, even in my anger —or perhaps the wanting was fueled by anger. That's the nice thing about living together. You can be an
gry and want somebody, and know they'll still be there and you'll still be wanting when the anger has passed. "But Jake's a free man," I said. "As long as he meets the terms of his release, he can go anywhere in the state. El Paso, Dallas, Lubbock — "

  He kissed the tip of my ear. "New Braunfels."

  New Braunfels was less than twenty minutes away. "Why New Braunfels?"

  "Because that's where his mother lives." He cupped my breast with his right hand. "Because that's where he's supposed to live under the terms of his release."

  I twisted in his arms until I could turn and face him. There was a deep worry furrow between his eyes, but they were light again. "We're lucky to find out where he is," he said. "Most of the time people don't get told when a criminal is back on the streets. But this is different, because — "

  "Because you're a former cop," I said. "And cops look out for their own. Excuse me. Their ex-own." If it had been a lawyer who was threatened, you can bet your sweet bippy that the cop fraternity wouldn't have phoned to tell her about it.

  "Put it that way if you want to," McQuaid said. "But you and Brian aren't safe as long as Jacoby's within spit-

  ting distance." He reached up to brush the hair off my forehead. "Rosemary's murder—it's just too coincidental, China. You've got to be careful."

  My mouth tightened. "A case of mistaken identity. Isn't that a little far-fetched?"

  McQuaid dropped his arms. "Bubba Harris thinks it's possible."

  I wasn't surprised that McQuaid had talked to Bubba about the murder, and about Jacoby. Bubba belongs to the fraternity, too. Ex or no ex, they're still blood brothers.

  "What about Curtis Robbins?" I asked dryly. "I don't suppose he's been questioned yet."

  McQuaid ignored my sarcasm. "Robbins ate at his sister's house last night, and the two of them watched the late movie. He didn't get home until nearly one." He paused. "The man is well-known around town, China. Somehow I can't quite picture him doing this."